Volts

In this episode, I’m joined by Jan Sramek to discuss California Forever, the much-debated proposal to build a brand-new, sustainably designed city in Northern California. We explore the urbanist vision at the heart of the project, including a street grid inspired by Barcelona superblocks, and address the elephant in the room — the stealthy land acquisitions and the billionaire backers. Is this an urbanist utopia in the making or a grandiose con job?


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If the world takes its climate targets seriously, the coming decades will see fossil fuel systems shrinking as clean energy systems grow. In this episode, I talk with associate professor Emily Grubert about the issues that may arise during this “mid-transition” period. She has fascinating new study on the physical and financial cliffs that fossil fuel systems may go over as they decline and reach their “minimum viable scale” — and argues that public ownership of these dying industries might be the only way to gracefully phase them out.


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In this episode, I chat with Catalyst host Shayle Kann about the most pressing unresolved questions in the clean energy world today. We explore whether data center gigantism will break the grid, if the smart home revolution is destined for platform enshittification, whether billionaires should start testing solar geoengineering, and more.


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PJM is the largest wholesale power market and transmission planning region in the US. Currently, it is stuck between a rock and a hard place: on one side, rising demand from data centers; on the other, a choked and congested interconnection queue that can’t keep pace. The result: rising prices and political discontent. I talk with Clara Summers of the Citizens Utility Board about how PJM can solve this dilemma and get prices under control.


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Meat is responsible for roughly a fifth of climate change, the lion’s share of deforestation, 70% of our antibiotic use, and quite possibly the next pandemic — and consumption is going up every single year, with no end in sight. In this episode, Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute joins me to argue that the only way out of this mess is better meat: plant-based and cultivated alternatives that can compete on price and taste, the way renewables now compete with fossil fuels.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe