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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

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Following a stunning clean energy victory over right-wing donors on an obscure Arizona utility board, organizers are setting their sights on a much bigger prize: the state’s powerful utility commission. I chat with Charlie Fisher and Ning Mosberger-Tang about how they used disciplined messaging to overcome massive opposition spending and historically abysmal voter turnout. We discuss whether this localized ground game can scale to a massive statewide electorate and help build a durable, nationwide clean energy political machine.

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You might have noticed that it’s kind of hot out there. And it’s only going to get worse: global demand for cooling is projected to triple by 2050. Finding a way to cool spaces and people without frying the planet is a crucial climate challenge. I’m joined by RMI’s Ankit Kalanki to unpack the hidden world of AC refrigerants and testing standards, the crucial distinction between lowering temperatures and dehumidifying, new AC technologies on the horizon, and the building and urban design changes that can take some of the pressure off.

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In this episode, I talk with GM Energy executive Aseem Kapur about General Motors’ move into bidirectional EV charging and home energy management. We dig into the practicalities of turning hundreds of thousands of EVs into mobile backup generators, how to navigate a patchwork of 4,000 different utilities, and what it takes to get everyday consumers to see their cars as grid assets.