David Roberts Profile picture
I run a newsletter/podcast called Volts about clean energy & politics. Subscribe & join the community at https://t.co/mAVggtRfoE! (@volts.wtf on bsky, ahem.)
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Mar 16 8 tweets 2 min read
I'm waiting for a frozen pizza to cook -- the traditional time to do threads -- so a few thoughts on Laken Riley & the right's latest efforts to make White Women In Peril a campaign issue. nytimes.com/2024/02/29/us/… This is, of course, an old, old tactic on the right -- making a martyr of a white woman raped or killed or hurt somehow by a member of a marginalized group. It's American as apple pie, as they say.
Mar 9 4 tweets 1 min read
Here's a media bias: If a person lied to me, again & again, day after day, for years, I would change the way I treated that person. I would greet that person's new claims with higher skepticism. I would raise the bar of proof. I would assume bad faith, pending evidence. But ... ... the right has been lying to journalists for decades, literally on a daily basis, & journalists never seem to change how they assess the right's claims. They begin with credulity; they assume good faith; they chase every new shiny bauble like children chasing a soccer ball.
Mar 4 6 tweets 2 min read
If I were in charge of a mainstream political news organization and I found out that the majority of the American public did not understand very basic facts about what Biden has done in office and what Trump would do, I would consider that a failure & try to remedy it. As far as I can tell, though, no mainstream political organization views it as a failure or is doing anything to try to address it. "Creating an informed public" does not seem to be a meaningful part of their goals.
Feb 27 5 tweets 1 min read
The political press could decide to make the fact that nazis are freely mingling with the crowd at CPAC into a thing, a narrative, by banging on it day after day & coordinating a whole slate of op-eds about it, like they did on the Harvard stuff. They just won't. This -- the agenda-setting capacity of the press -- is what they will never acknowledge or defend. They act like they're just reacting, just "covering" something that they found. But they *decide* what's news, what matters. And they make shitty decisions.
Feb 19 5 tweets 1 min read
One reason to avoid interviews & press conferences with the US political press is that they are deeply vapid. All the questions are gotcha attempts to "win the afternoon." No citizen learns anything of substance. It's an insular game by & for an insular industry. There are lots of dumb responses to this tweet floating around, so let me just clarify: I'm not saying Biden should avoid all media. He should talk to beat reporters & subject matter experts & pop-culture outlets & local journalists. Go talk to the public! Thing is ...
Feb 14 8 tweets 2 min read
Good thread, and an opportunity for me to add a few things I mean to say on this subject. The study in question (which I tweeted a few days ago) basically found that small behavior nudges have ... small behavior effects. One-time provisions of info just don't do much. However! As Kristian says, this doesn't mean it's impossible to change behaviors or that behavior change doesn't have a role to play in the climate fight. It's just that, if you want big changes, you need big interventions. In my mind it's analogous to carbon offsets ...
Feb 8 5 tweets 1 min read
Reactionary conservatism relies on lies -- couldn't survive without them. One thing that's crazy to contemplate is that US right-wing media has been spinning an elaborate web of fantasies for *30 years now*. It has gotten so elaborate, this Extended Fox Universe -- myths piled on myths, a vast make-believe universe as elaborate as any in fiction.
Feb 8 5 tweets 1 min read
This is ... hilarious? Depressing? Both? A massive study -- almost 60K participants in 63 countries -- tested the efficacy of a bunch of interventions meant to change behavior in climate-positive ways.

What works to change behavior? Pretty much nothing!
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… "we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task."

And the results? [drum roll ...]
Feb 1 9 tweets 3 min read
Let me join literally everyone else from #energytwitter in strongly encouraging you to flip through @NatBullard's latest presentation on the global state of the clean energy transition. An extraordinary amount of information in a compact form.
nathanielbullard.com/presentations I'm going to pull out a few slides and make a few points. These are not necessarily the most important slides, just my personal triggers.

First: "team transitory" turned out to be correct, yes? That's settled? Image
Jan 26 15 tweets 3 min read
Oh man. I have so many thoughts on this. Soooo many thoughts. Seems to me the obvious interpretation of this data is that it's a global version of a dynamic we can see in miniature almost everywhere we look: men losing power & privilege & reacting like petulant, aggrieved adolescents. Is there some reason NOT to conclude the obvious?
Jan 25 5 tweets 1 min read
Sometimes I think about how George W. Bush was born into wealth, went to prep school & Yale, drank & partied until he was 40, & then ... claimed to find God, bought a cowboy hat & a ranch to clear brush, & the press was all "AUTHENTIC AMERICAN MANHOOD!" 🥰😻😍🥰😻😍😻🥰 Nobody talks about this, but one of the main consequences of most members of the press being educated/urban/liberal is that they are, like all liberals, mired in neurotic self-hatred & incredibly easy to manipulate with accusations that they are fey or weak or inauthentic.
Jan 22 4 tweets 1 min read
1. Gov't proposes tightening air pollution standards to something closer to what science recommends.
2. Industry freaks out, claims it will destroy the economy & doom reelection chances.

Can you guess the next steps?

washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro… 3. Pollution standards are tightened, its fine, the economy goes right on growing.
4. The media dutifully forgets the entire cycle, so that when it happens again -- it always happens again -- it takes industry's claims seriously all over again.
5. Repeat.
Jan 21 8 tweets 2 min read
Everything @JerusalemDemsas writes is good & this piece -- on the war among environmentalists over Minneapolis housing policy -- is no exception. I want to add a little mini-rant tho. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… Throughout the piece you can feel Demsas bending over backward to take the opponents of zoning reform -- the NIMBYs who claim to be environmentalists -- seriously. She interviews them, lets them have their say, tries to reconstruct coherent arguments on their behalf.
Jan 19 4 tweets 2 min read
Today on Volts: when Democrats won a trifecta in Michigan in 2022, they wasted little time in passing a package of clean-energy bills, including some extremely intriguing reforms to permitting & the public utility commission. I discuss with a MI lawmaker.
volts.wtf/p/michigan-tar… One thing Michigan did is move permitting authority from local communities up to the state public service commission -- part of a trend, as identified by AP: apnews.com/article/wind-s…
Jan 18 6 tweets 1 min read
Wild. A reader sent me a passage from Jules Verne's (1875!) novel Mysterious Island in which a character proposes using ocean current/tidal energy to "decompose" water, capture the hydrogen, & use the hydrogen to power ships. Excerpt to follow. "But where will you get this water?" Cyrus Smith asked.

"The ocean is all around us," Pencroft replied. "The sea contains nine-tenths oxygen, one-tenth hydrogen. It is only a question of extracting the latter."

"And how?"
Jan 12 11 tweets 2 min read
I was at a private dinner with the CEO of one of the world's biggest energy companies recently & I was asking him about the future energy mix & he basically said solar+storage is going to eat everything -- natgas, wind, you name it -- & reach total dominance. It was all off the record so you'll just have to trust me that I'm not doing the "overheard a guy in a coffee shop reaffirming all my priors" thing. 🤷‍♂️

Point is, I really think even the biggest solar boosters are still underestimating it.
Jan 11 5 tweets 2 min read
New Nature study tallies up the amount of damage from extreme weather events that is attributable to climate change. The answer? [drum roll]

$143 billion a year.

(These are only direct effects; indirect effects are much larger, but fuzzier to measure.)

nature.com/articles/s4146… Another study uses the latest social cost of carbon (SCC) estimates to tally up the climate damages attributable to the top 25 oil & gas "majors" from 1985-2018. The total?

$20 trillion.

ca1-clm.edcdn.com/assets/Carbon-…
Jan 6 4 tweets 1 min read
The podcast @TheRestHistory is doing a special series on the rise & rule of the Nazis in Germany that I can not recommend enough. You probably suspect that there are parallels with our current situation, but lord, you have no idea. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the… One thing that is very clear from the pod is that the ignorance, cravenness, & cowardice of the center-right establishment was crucial to Hitler's success. They thought they could use the energy he stirred up to their advantage. They were scared to cross his base.
Jan 2 25 tweets 5 min read
All right, I really should be doing literally anything else with my time, but I have certain compulsions, so here's a short thread on the Harvard thing.

Or actually, not about Harvard per se, because I, like most Americans, don't really give a shit what goes on at Harvard. I just want to describe a certain pattern/dynamic that has replicated itself over & over & over again, as long as I have followed US media and politics. I have given up hope that describing such patterns will do anything to diminish their frequency, but like I said: compulsions.
Dec 31, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
One thing I've been thinking about: government, in a large, wealthy, functional modern democracy, is pretty boring. Lots of bureaucracy, lots of agencies, lots of complexity, lots of rules, mostly incremental change. It's not particularly *dramatic*. That makes it ... ... a very poor fit for the dynamics & demands of modern media, especially social media. Drama, outrage, sweeping counterintuitive generalizations -- these are the coin of the realm. No one gets clicks by celebrating the workaday operation of the gov't machine.
Dec 27, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
It was inevitable that righties would start saying "no YOU'RE the fascists." Devaluing language & meaning, reducing everything to a fact-free tit-for-tat slapfight with no higher principles, is *part of the standard playbook*. I just wish it didn't work so well. No YOU'RE banning books. No YOU'RE encouraging stochastic terrorism. No YOU'RE rigging the voting system. Etc. The point of all this is not to flag bad things that everyone should stop doing, it's to say "everyone's doing it so we don't need to stop." It's permission.