Volts

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America once led the world in building transit and now leads the world in what transit costs, roughly three times the international average per mile, measured not against authoritarian megaprojects but against Italy, Spain, and Japan. On this episode of Volts, David Roberts talks with Will Poff-Webster of the Institute for Progress, who put together the new Transit Abundance Playbook, and Stephanie Pollack, former head of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and former acting administrator of the Federal Highway Administration. Their argument is that the costs are a policy choice: federal funding rules teach transit agencies to plan on a napkin and do the real work years later, to hire the lowest bidder over the one they know will deliver, and to defer to anyone holding a veto, while highways operate under looser versions of the same rules. As Pollack puts it, "if you hate transit, you should spend less on it." A surface transportation reauthorization bill is coming, and two of the playbook's proposals have already reached the House version.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction: why cars work against cities
03:25 Agency culture or federal law: where does the fix come from
11:31 Planning: how federal funding enforces bad habits
20:10 Overdesign: the Green Line stations and the frequency-first test
23:40 Buses: why every agency orders a custom fleet
26:53 Procurement: lowest bid versus best value
32:56 Veto points and Italy’s conference of services
39:56 Permitting: environmental review as a NIMBY tool
45:28 State capacity: why consultant brain took over
51:46 Labor costs, automation, and Section 13(c)
56:19 Is any of this politically achievable?
1:03:28 Final question: one reform each

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Data center opposition has gone from nonexistent to organized in about two years, roughly 120 moratoriums across 38 states, and it does not track proximity: Gallup finds 70% of Americans oppose a data center near them, while only 8% of opponents live near one. On this episode of Volts, David Roberts joins Energy Empire hosts Jigar Shah and Jamie Nolan, along with Arnab Pal of Deploy Action, for a crossover conversation, and his argument is that everyone is solving the wrong problem. The hyperscalers could buy their way to consent for a rounding error, batteries in basements, solar on roofs, funded schools, lower bills, and they refuse, which David reads as a symptom of low social trust that no amount of better modeling touches. “This is not a technocratic problem that you can just solve with a few switches,” he says. Thirty-six governors go to the ballot this fall having to answer for it.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro: a Volts and Energy Empire crossover
01:25 Has the AI case been made? Energy vs. AI as the real revolution
04:23 The backlash by the numbers, and hyperscalers' botched PR
08:20 Animal spirits, low social trust, and the information environment
12:46 Enshittification, lost jobs, and why governors still want data centers
15:50 The local playbook: schools, bioswales, batteries in basements
17:18 Bespoke industrial rates without setting a bad precedent
22:33 How utilities earn: spend-to-earn, the distribution black box, efficiency
30:11 Gendering the grid: gas as firm, renewables as soft
37:57 NERC's level-three alert and the case for more batteries
39:29 Both/and: distributed capacity as serious supply
45:33 Abundance's missing half: state capacity, staffing, NEPA
48:55 The midterms: 36 governors and the politics of affordability
53:33 Hope vs. fear: the Mamdani lesson and the information environment

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Most of the energy decisions that touch daily life in America get made in state legislatures, and the people making them are increasingly new to the job. In smaller states, a freshly elected lawmaker gets a pad of paper, no staff, and about 150 lobbyists at the door, then votes on billion-dollar energy budgets in a landscape where the technology changes faster than anyone can track. On this episode of Volts, David Roberts talks with Hawaii state Senator Chris Lee, co-founder of the Electric Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan network betting that education moves electrification faster than mandates: put lawmakers in front of working technology, connect them across state lines, and let affordability carry the argument where climate framing will not. As Lee puts it, "nine times out of ten, people just don't know what they don't know."
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
03:39 How electrification clicked: the 2008 iPhone moment
06:10 The education gap: why the initiative exists
11:35 Proxy staff and cross-state validation
15:44 What lands on the tours: eVTOL to the data-center win-win
20:51 Plain 'electrification': the bipartisan framing bet
26:28 Climate hushing and Hawaii's two-track proof
30:17 Policy that spreads: e-buses, heat pumps, RFPs
37:37 Utility business-model reform: Hawaii's PBR law
42:03 Affordability after the federal subsidies
45:22 Hawaii under pressure: LNG and the Lahaina grid
51:53 State power against federal hostility
55:19 The ten-year vision and the closing advice

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Property taxes are two taxes stapled together: one on the land, one on whatever gets built on it. Put up an apartment building and the bill goes up. Pave the lot for parking and it stays low. It discourages building and rewards land speculation. The answer? Tax the buildings less and the land more. The idea of a “land value tax” goes back 150 years, but implementing it today involves navigating tricky constitutional issues. In this episode, I talk with Greg Miller of the Center for Land economics about the rationale for such taxes, and with Kitty Klitzke, a Spokane, Washington council member, about the difficulties of putting it in practice in a real city.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
03:22 Henry George and the case for taxing land
08:12 How property taxes work now, and what a split rate changes
11:26 Land value taxes and upzoning as complements
15:18 The Pennsylvania record and the reassessment problem
18:51 Vancouver, and why homeowners outlast the policy
24:03 Estonia, Singapore, and the Scottish Islands
26:53 Washington's uniformity clause and the building exemption
33:18 Kitty Klitzke on twenty years of Spokane infill
43:27 What Spokane needs from the state legislature
45:25 Single family homeowners and the Division corridor
48:34 The assessor objection
52:45 What the Spokane modeling shows
59:31 The plan for next session
1:01:44 Virginia, Kentucky, and cross-partisan momentum

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Minnesota regulators Sydnie Lieb and Pete Wyckoff on why utility distribution spending — now a third of capital budgets and the biggest driver of rising bills — escapes the scrutiny the rest of the grid faces, and how to fix that.
00:00 - Introduction
04:23 - How distribution is regulated differently than generation and transmission
09:25 - Why distribution matters now: an aging system and the build-more incentive
14:00 - Contestable “mandatory” spending: undergrounding, DERMS software, capitalization
22:19 - Reliability standards and the cost of chasing 100 percent
28:42 - The MISO comparison: valuing a lost hour, and the scale of the numbers
35:12 - Non-wires alternatives: batteries, the Xcel project, and modeling gaps
40:31 - What regulators should require: AMI forecasts and beyond the prudence test
47:22 - The speed objection: does more analysis slow things down?
50:10 - Why spending caps and rate freezes are the wrong fix
52:40 - Spending more anyway, and recent Minnesota PUC disappointments
55:09 - Restructured markets: does the same logic apply?
58:38 - The vision of a well-functioning process and scaling it nationally