I’ve been reading David Roberts on energy and climate for years, first at Grist, then at Vox, now at Volts, his Substack. Now we’re in a war-generated energy crisis, with many people reconsidering the energy future, and I thought a conversation about energy policy, technology, and America as possibly the last petrostate would be very useful. Transcript follows.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with David Roberts
(recorded 3/26/26)
Paul Krugman: Hi, everyone. Paul Krugman here. It’s an interesting week for global energy stuff, and we might get into that at some point, but that’s actually where I started in economics. And, someone I’ve been reading about energy, climate, everything related for many, many years is David Roberts, formerly at Grist, then at Vox, and now on Substack, like everybody. (laughs)
I’ve been reading David for ages.
David Roberts: My Substack is called “Volts”. Everybody come subscribe. Got to do the promotion.
Krugman: That’s right. You have a second one, which is more personal stuff as well. But Volts is the one you want to go to.
Long time reader, but I’ve never talked to you before. There’s lots of stuff beyond the current moment, but let’s just get into the moment. We are in the third great global energy crisis, after the two in the 70s. This time—for a change—it’s starting with political turmoil and war in the Middle East. Well actually, as always. (laughs)
Roberts: This one is distinguished in that it was 100% spontaneously self-created. It really distinguishes it.
Krugman: It’s kind of amazing. I’m trying not to obsess about the idiocy of the whole thing. I’m not sure if this is coming out of the blue for you—probably. But, suddenly everybody’s in crisis mode and scrambling for ways to burn less oil, use less energy. Do you have any thoughts on what could be done around the world, maybe even here? Although unlikely.
Roberts: Well, it depends a lot on where you’re talking about. We in the US, as a wealthy country, have a million tools. We had a bunch of them on the books mere months ago before we destroyed those, you know what I mean? There’s a million tools that developed countries have, the crunch here’s for emerging economies who don’t have a lot of slack, who don’t have a lot of alternatives. Places like Vietnam, they’re starting to impose crude “don’t drive on Tuesday” kind of rules. We can get through a lot of this smoothly just on our buffer of wealth. But oil-importing countries in emerging nations don’t have very many tools other than suffering.
Krugman: I haven’t tracked all the conservation stuff, but is anybody doing—I’m old enough to remember—even odd license plate numbers, and that sort of thing. I guess some countries are actually turning to that already.
Roberts: I just read the other day, I think Brazil is hosting a World Cup game and telling people, “just watch from home, don’t come out, don’t drive to the World Cup,” and they’re instituting work-from-home things. It’s just they don’t have a lot of tools like we do.
Krugman: I should get on with the conversation, but I’ve been reading about airport lines—fortunately not traveling right now—and it turns out the worst place is George Bush International and apparently part of the reason for that is all of the TSA workers have to drive long distances to get to work and can’t afford to, since they’re not being paid—given the gas prices.
Roberts: I don’t know if you saw, the post office now is instituting an 8% surcharge on packages because of fuel costs. You might recall that Biden put in place an enormous, very well funded program to shift the United Postal Service vehicles to electric vehicles, and Trump killed that. So now they’re stuck on gas and diesel, and it’s crushing the post office, like everything else.
Krugman: Let’s go back to where I first started reading you, which is climate. You were writing a lot for Grist about climate and one thing that’s been really striking to me is how the whole climate science debate issue has receded from the political front burner. What happened there?
Roberts: Well, that’s….
Krugman: A long story. I know….
Roberts: But if I had to boil it down, I would say during the 2024 election, there were a lot of people in the political establishment, a lot of pundits, a lot of even Democrats who read the 2024 election as some grand historical turning point away from woke—away from racial equity, away from climate, away from all these things that the woke liberals had “forced us” all to talk about, since 2020. They just all decided at a stroke overnight, basically, “no one cares about climate anymore. Let’s stop talking about climate. Let’s talk about affordability.” So no one talks about it anymore. Honestly, in this country, it’s vanished from public debate.
Krugman: You wrote about how at one point you started writing less about climate science, talk about that because I think that’s an interesting thing, because I feel the same way.
Roberts: There are people who are interested in science qua science, “just for its own sake.” Those people can read as much about climate change as they want to. But for my part, I’m interested in the social and political and economic implications and basically, the implications are we need to decarbonize as fast as possible. That’s all I need to know from climate change science. So let’s get on with it, let’s do that, let’s decarbonize. I don’t dwell on the science itself anymore. I will say the strategy among Democrats in the left of doing this, trying to do this in a science-first way, “we’re going to make the scientific case, and then they’ll see we’re right, and then they’ll see the policy implications,” etc. clearly failed; the denialism talking points coming out of the Trump administration are substantially identical to Republican denialism talking points in 2003 or 2013, or 2023. They just don’t care about that. They don’t change anything based on that. So all the progress has come from technologies falling down the learning curve and shoving their way into markets, that’s where all the action is.
Krugman: I was fairly optimistic a few years ago because it seemed like the gods of technology were coming to our rescue, that we had all these wonderful green technologies. That’s still to some extent true, right?
Roberts: It’s absolutely true. One of the grand international stories right now—though it’s very hard when you’re in the midst of as much chaos and insanity as we are to get clear about the big narratives—is that the US is basically aligning itself as the last big petrostate. We’re going to go down with the fossil fuel ship, and China is aligning itself as the first electrostate. It is rapidly electrifying its economy, and it is dominating the technologies that enable an electrostate: batteries, EVs, etc., all that stuff. So where do you think the future lies? All these emerging nations right now are stuck on coal. The story the US is trying to tell you is “shift to LNG. It’s cleaner than coal.” You’ll get some emission reductions. And then, basically, you’ll become dependent on our LNG. And for emerging nations, that’s an enormous 50 year investment program. They’re thinking now, “well, where is the energy situation going to be in 50 years? Do we think that fossil fuels are going to win in 50 years?” By launching this war, I think we have accelerated the process of pushing emerging nations into China’s arms and faster toward clean energy. That’s going to be the big effect of all this.
Krugman: That’s interesting. And of course, the US is far less central to the global energy picture than it used to be. So even if the US is stuck in the coal age, it may not matter that much.
Roberts: We are now the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. And you might recall that Republicans told us for years and years, “we need more oil and gas production so that we can be energy independent.” So now we export more than we import, which was supposed to be the mark, the threshold, at which you have achieved energy independence. What we’re seeing now in visceral terms is that oil is a global market, and even if you’re the biggest producer on that global market, you’re still at the mercy of the global market. You still pay the high prices that everybody else pays, there is no energy independence as long as you’re stuck with fossil fuels. That’s the long and short of it.
Krugman: Just a word about it. Even aside from the future—the logistics of global reliance on U.S LNG, it can be done. It was actually amazing how it came to Europe’s rescue after Ukraine.
Roberts: Yes, when Ukraine happened, there was a crisis of gas in Germany and Germany almost overnight built three giant LNG import terminals to save themselves in an emergency situation, but what did they learn from that? What did Europe learn from that? That it’s good to be dependent on U.S LNG? Do they want to do that again? Do they want to be a vassal state to the United States, basically dependent on our energy production? No. Listen to Ed Miliband, his hair is on fire. He’s like, “we’re accelerating all this. We cannot be stuck on this fossil fuel roller coaster anymore and have the fate of our nation depend on the whims of the despotic leaders of Petrostates.” We just can’t live like this anymore. I think they’re not the only ones coming to that conclusion.
Krugman: I do not like being considered to live in a despotic Petrostate. I guess I do live in one however.
Roberts: Welcome to the club of despotic Petrostates. We’re in an interesting position because we are both a massive oil and gas producer and a massive oil and gas consumer. So we are sort of subject to both dynamics, and it makes for a very confused politics.
Krugman: A funny thought, but I remember the 70s. I’ve been around for a little too long here, and then, even though we were import dependent, we partially insulated U.S. consumers from the world market with price controls and blending and all that and all of which economists have condemned as being terrible and distorting. But on the other hand, looking at what’s happening now, you could say, maybe the previous generation wasn’t that stupid.
Roberts: Yes. There are some things you are willing to put to the mercies of a market. But having energy for your country is not one of them, right? There’s never been anything like a free market in energy anywhere in the world at any point. There’s a pretense of it that people use when they’re trying to defend their favorite energy industries. But everybody knows this is all planned. These are all centralized decisions, ultimately. We need to make their eyes open instead of stumbling backward like we’re doing now.
Krugman: Of course, there are alternatives now, maybe even dominant alternatives. I think I was first alerted to the burgeoning green technology possibilities probably from reading you circa 2010 or thereabouts. I wrote about it a bit and got slapped down by some of my seemingly energy savvy economist colleagues who said, “no, this is still pipe dreams.”
Roberts: You were right, Paul, stick to your guns! You will triumph in the end.
I sort of divide my career, I’ve been at this since the early 2000s —over 20 years now, and I divide my career in two phases: right around 2015, in the wake of Obama’s stimulus bill, Germany had done its feed in tariffs, China had done its enormous manufacturing subsidies, all of this had come together. Finally, right around 2015, instead of “let’s solve climate change” being this abstraction, where you just go carry a poster board down a street in a march or something, all of a sudden there were things to do, there were things to implement, there were tools at hand. And it’s been wildly rapid progress ever since, to the point that I really don’t think the American public has any clue how fast things have gone. One of the big problems here in the US, we need to expand and bolster our electricity system for a bunch of reasons, including data centers, but we have these interconnection queues, where a utility—if you’re a big project—they have to give you explicit permission to connect to the grid. They have to make sure the grid can handle it. These queues of people waiting to hook up to the grid are incredibly long. There is more power represented in interconnection queues now then I think the total production existing, and not all those projects are real—some of them are in 2 or 3 queues, who knows how many of them will actually pan out. But the point is all those interconnection queues are filled with clean energy. It’s 87%, or something like that. I’m pulling that a little bit off the top of my head, but something in the neighborhood of 87% of all the projects and all the QS are clean energy. That’s what’s cheap now, so that’s what people want to build.
Krugman: These are people wanting to build stuff to feed into the grid.
Roberts: You need a big utility scale solar project. You have to wait for the grid to say, “yes, we can handle this.” Our utilities are so dysfunctional that it often takes two, three, five years these days. But almost everybody who’s waiting has got a clean energy project. Those are the things people want to build. Whereas to keep a coal plant open, which Trump is also trying to do, you basically have to intervene with the police power of the executive branch and force them to do it at gunpoint, because it’s losing money every day. We just had this in Washington state, where the federal government is forcing us to keep a coal plant open, and it’s just hemorrhaging money. Nobody wants it. Nobody needs it. So, it’s clear the direction of travel. Let’s just say that.
Krugman: Just out of curiosity, who is the federal government forcing to do this? Is it forcing the utility to keep buying from a coal plant?
Roberts: Yes. You will not be shocked to hear that the rationale is “national security.” You will not be surprised to hear that if you poke at that a little bit, there’s nothing under it. There’s nothing.
Krugman: Actually just a quick question, since we talked about China. China is still burning a lot of coal. I think it’s started to decline a little bit, but are you keeping track of that?
Roberts: The China coal situation is complicated and nuanced and it’s not very intelligently discussed over here. Everybody uses it to grind their own axes. But the thing is, they don’t have a lot of natural gas there. That’s what we have. That’s why we are getting off coal. That’s why coal has been declining so rapidly in the US, because we have a bunch of cheap natural gas. They don’t have a ton of that. They’re getting into it, they’re starting to frack, they’re expanding. But their choices for electricity are basically coal or renewables. So they’ve been moving to renewables at an amazing speed. You’re familiar with the China phenomenon, which is its number one in everything. So it’s hard to get any sense of proportion: it’s number one in coal. It’s number one in oil. It’s number one in renewables, in dams. Name a thing, China’s number one in it. But the situation with coal is they’re still building coal plants because they still have a lot of coal. They’ve gotten to the point now where renewables are satisfying all the new energy demand, all the new growth in China, but they’re not quite biting into existing yet. So all of the world is on the edge of its seat watching, “can China build out renewables fast enough to really start to bite into the existing base of coal and if they can’t, what else can do that?” They’re pursuing nuclear power really quickly, too. As I said, they’re number one in that too. So they are trying actively to get off coal, but they don’t have a lot of gas. They certainly don’t want to import our gas. So they’re kind of stuck with coal until they can get renewables and nuclear to scale, which they are doing at a rapid pace.
Krugman: So do you think there’s a tipping point where it’ll change abruptly, or are we talking about 40 more years?
Roberts: Everybody wonders when the peak of Chinese emissions will be. In global energy circles, everybody wants to bet on exactly when this is going to happen. It’s been predicted in the past, the last couple of times it didn’t happen. But I will just say they’ve moved that peak up in their latest five year plan, or at least one of the previous five year plans, and they meet their targets. Unlike us, they set relatively conservative targets and then meet them. So, they are moving rapidly in that direction. They care about climate change and they will suffer from climate change more than almost any other country. But this is a lot about national security and national competitiveness. They know that 80% of the world is oil importers and 20% is oil exporters. They want the oil importers to come their way to get off oil, and come their way so they can dominate, so they have everybody now getting hooked on their supply chains, their critical minerals, their solar panels, etc.. They are positioning themselves to dominate the coming century.
The whole point of the Inflation Reduction Act was to try to catch up. It was sort of a frantic catch up effort, like, “let’s do some domestic manufacturing here, let’s open some mines and, and dig up some of our own critical minerals. Let’s stimulate the EV industry and thereby attract a battery industry because we desperately need batteries, not just for EVs, but for drones, and the military, and everything.” Everybody’s using drones these days. Everybody’s moving toward electricity. So they’re building an electrostate for national security reasons. The rest of the world is watching. “Do you want to be a Petrostate and fight off the future, or do you want to embrace the future and pursue it?” It blows my mind that we are basically the global bad guy now, trying to drag people backward into not just fossil fuels, but all the geopolitics of fossil fuels, all that. If nothing else, the Iran war is just a visceral theatrical demonstration to everyone in the world of the dangers of being hooked on fossil fuels. He couldn’t have scripted a more apt lesson for everybody.
Krugman: It is really shocking. I have to say, why wasn’t I looking at maps and saying that the Strait of Hormuz—the world should really not be depending on that.
Roberts: The military has been planning around that for literally like a century. Everybody knew that. I’m preaching to the choir here, but there’s so much of punditry now and there’s so much of official discourse which cannot accept the idea that Trump is just a declining, semi-senile old narcissist. He launched a war on Iran, basically on a whim with no idea what to do next, they can’t accept that. So everybody’s working so hard to try to impose some motivation or some plan or some idea or something, but it really does seem like he just kind of did this because Venezuela produced a lot of cool videos of “boom boom”, and he wanted more “boom boom” videos, and so he invaded Iran. That seems to be literally what happened, we’re having so much trouble accepting that.
Krugman: You’ve never actually been in the government or anything like it?
Roberts: No, no.
Krugman: I had an extremely edifying year as a sub political guy, actually, in the Reagan administration, I was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers and got to see government in action, which dispelled any faith you might have had that “the people in charge must know what they’re doing.” And this was the Reagan administration, of course, orders of magnitude more rational than these guys.
Roberts: Maybe it’s just me, but I find myself fond of—kind of missing the illusion that the people in charge knew what they were doing, right? The naked demonstration that they don’t is not better. I miss those illusions.
Krugman: Let me come back to political economy in a bit, but I wanted to talk a bit more about these issues. In the before times, before it became clear just how big this green energy revolution was technologically, conservation was a lot of the story. That has fallen, I think it’s far out of the discourse, but you actually talk quite a lot about things that could be basically reducing energy use in addition to replacing fossils with renewables. So where are you on that right now?
Roberts: It’s interesting. You have correctly noted that efficiency, i.e. doing things differently to use less energy, was dominant in energy discourse in the early 2000s and has largely fallen out. I think the reason is, a couple things have happened, the wise counsel of pundits and consultants have decided that that smacks of “using less”, Jimmy Carter wearing a sweater, etc.. On the other hand, clean energy has become so cheap that the mindset is shifting around to: why conserve if you can get solar and wind and batteries cheap enough? You can enter something like a situation of abundance, a situation where we no longer have a scarcity of energy, that is the glittering utopia at the end of all this: there is enough raw solar and wind energy around us to supply many multiples of all the energy we could possibly need. So it’s just tapping it with technology, and the technologies that tap into it have steadily gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper for decades. They’re on very predictable learning curves and all you have to do is project those same learning curves forward ten years. If the learning curve just keeps doing what it’s doing for ten more years, clean energy is going to be wildly, trivially cheap. I think we’re not that far from a situation where we’re going to have during sunny days, a surge of solar energy so big that the new policy problem is going to be, “what do we do with all this energy?”
I’ll just say, people in the history of humanity, in the history of our species, as far as we know, in the history of biological life, no creature, no biological creature has ever existed absent energy-scarcity; energy scarcity has shaped all of life, right? We could theoretically be the first species ever to be in a state of energy abundance, of having all the energy we want or need, we have no idea what that could lead to. Part of the problem with environmentalism in the US, I think in the public’s mind, is that it’s very tied to conservation. It’s very tied to this idea that industry is sort of bad. “Humanity is bad. We need to shrink. We need to dial back. We need to be more agrarian, more pastoral.” That’s an image in a lot of people’s heads. But the thing is, if you are a forward looking person and you believe in humanity and love humanity and want humanity to grow and expand and have access to more energy, if you want humanity to desalinate the oceans and transform deserts into forests and go to Mars, whatever your grand ambition is for humanity, you can’t get there with fossil fuels. You physically can’t. You will burn yourself up. So if you have grand hopes for our species, only clean energy can get you there. Only clean energy and something like a physical closed loop system can get you there. Otherwise you’re just going to drown in your own waste. So everybody who’s hopeful and pro-human and pro-science and pro-growth and pro-all-that-stuff, you got to get on the clean energy train. That’s the only way to get there. This is a long way of saying, that mentality has taken over a little bit. And the conservation and efficiency people have been drowned out and pushed to the edges. I will say substantively, we’re obviously not at an energy surplus, yet, so obviously conservation and efficiency are still important and they’re still chugging away in the background, but they definitely have lost some of their sheen.
Krugman: It’s funny because at this point, there’s still a lot of scope for relatively painlessly using a lot less energy.
Roberts: Right. So let me make this point, I think this is so important and this is something I want you to know, and I want your audience to know. It is one of the most important things about the energy transition. If you switch from fossil fuel combustion to electricity, that alone gets you like a 50 to 60% bump in efficiency. Because as I think a lot of people know, most of the energy that goes into a combustion engine is wasted as waste-heat. Most of the raw energy that enters the economy is lost as waste-heat, something like 60 to 66%. Because combustion as a way of doing things is grossly inefficient in and of itself. So if you just switch from a gasoline car to an EV, much more of the raw energy that goes in is made into motion, it’s like 80% rather than 20% or something like that. I’m making these numbers up off the top of my head, but you get the point.
One of my energy gurus, Saul Griffith, an Australian energy analyst, has done the numbers on this, and he says, if you have all the same energy services, all the same cold beer, all the same warm showers, and you switch from combustion to electric motors rather than combustion motors, at a stroke, you get like a 50% to 60% gain in energy efficiency, without anyone using less or sacrificing in any way. Just the move from fossil fuel combustion to electricity is in and of itself the biggest efficiency gain we ever have had access to.
Krugman: So interesting. One of the seemingly longstanding obsessions of yours, and also of mine, is about sort of urbanism and lifestyle and energy use. At the moment it’s still the case that a high density public transit and walkable city makes a big difference.
Roberts: More density equals fewer per capita greenhouse gas emissions: that correlation holds not only at the country level and the city level. You can even look within cities. The per capita emissions are lowest in the densest area even at the neighborhood level. That correlation holds all the way down the line.
Krugman: One of my network circles is the regional science urban planning types. I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered Carlos Moreno, the 15 Minute City guy.
Roberts: I know the name.
Krugman: It turns out I live in a 15 minute city, actually.
Roberts: So DC is, low key, one of the really best urbanist cities in the US. It’s one of the easiest to walk and bike around. I don’t know if they appreciate that. Of course, Trump is literally, as we speak, trying to rip out one of the main new bike lanes that was put in DC a few years ago.
Krugman: It’s funny because here in New York—sorry, diversion—there are a lot of bike lanes around, but they’re mostly not actually for recreational bikers. They’re for demonic food delivery guys. If I go early it’ll be because I’ve been run down by somebody delivering sushi.
Roberts: 30 miles an hour on an e-bike.
But here’s an insight into energy politics. Two correlations. One is the more density the lower the per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Another correlation that holds with spooky regularity at virtually any scale is: the more density, the more democratic it is. That’s mathematical, and that also applies all the way down to the neighborhood level. I think clean energy people would love to think, “this is nonpolitical, we should all be able to agree this is good for everybody.” You know, the typical democratic approach. But in reality, there are partisan implications to all this.
Krugman: I had in fact, reading through some of your older writings, you wrote a 2015, Grist piece called “Nothing Is Nonpartisan.” Which was about the intense opposition to even suggestions for lifestyle changes that can save you money.
Roberts: The dream of the technocrats. The climate movement in the 90s and 2000s were absolutely high on that drug. High on technocracy, the idea that if we do this in a way that economists respect, in a sensible way, it’s going to serve everybody and nobody will be able to oppose it because of all the myriad benefits. But I think we’ve all had a lesson in between then and now in the ongoing role of animal spirits in politics. People do not behave rationally, people hate change. They associate what they have with lifestyle, with identity. All these waters run deep. Energy is hearth and home, It’s like how you get around. It’s how you heat your home. It’s very personal. People do not think of it in objective and technocratic terms. They think of it in terms of identity. So you have to operate on that register. You have to be able to speak that language.
Krugman: I wrote just a few days ago about wind power and what is wild about that is—first of all, the extreme: Trump personally, but just generally: the extreme hostility, ideologically to wind power, even though it’s already big business.
Roberts: In Republican states! It’s like the majority of power in Iowa, there are Republican states that utterly depend on wind. So I think that ideological opposition is mostly about kissing Trump’s ass. I think it’s kind of inch deep. What you see now is because Trump wants to be energy dominant and he wants to be AI-dominant. Everybody is now telling him, “you’re crushing solar power, but that’s the fastest growing source of power.” It’s an interesting thing going on in DC now, trying to peel solar off from wind. Stephen Miller’s wife tweeted some love of solar power the other day. So there’s like a MAGA solar faction now that’s trying to peel off solar from wind and get, you know, some pro solar policy snuck through. Because I think everybody’s just decided that Trump’s anti-wind thing—you can’t get around it.
Krugman: I mean I’ve had some back and forth with people I respect who say, “it’s all ultimately Koch brothers propaganda.’’ My instinct, but I’m not sure I’m right, is to say it’s this visceral and at some level, psychosexual thing about Petro masculinity.
Roberts: It’s a real thing. Well, I will say you’re right. That the real action in energy right now is these local sitting meetings, in local communities, in local boards, and the right wing is very good at taking billionaire money and funding anti-renewables propaganda and then flooding those little towns with it. Sending people to those meetings. So town after town is passing these moratoria on solar and wind, which is insane. And of course, the public also doesn’t want natural gas infrastructure built near it. But no state cares about that at all. They’re just building it anyway. But any public protest on renewables halts the whole thing. So yes, there is a well funded right wing effort to push back against renewables and preserve fossil fuels.
Krugman: This is one of those places where there’s people on the left who are also part of the problem. I know big liberals who give lots of money to activists and are also absolutely crusading against wind farms off the East Coast.
Roberts: Well, wealthy people, they love to drive and they don’t want to see infrastructure and their public policy principles tend to end at their neighborhood gate. I’ve been trying for years to say, “look, you can’t get away with this anymore. You cannot be a NIMBY and call yourself a liberal anymore.” We need to have some social sanction on this. We need people’s reputation to be hurt if they try to do that. Building electricity infrastructure and building housing, those are the two most important things in climate right now, not just economically, but in climate and in energy and economics. You got to get on board actually.
Krugman: There’s this bizarre debate now which is kind of within the Left over: does building more housing actually reduce housing prices?
Roberts: Are you baffled by this? I had thought that supply and demand were well-established concepts in the field of economics. But there are so many people on our side who don’t think they apply in this arena. I don’t totally get it.
Krugman: I mean, for what it’s worth, there’s a slide. If you look only at the local level, it’s possible that building more housing makes a neighborhood more attractive and actually leads to a rise in the price of the existing housing. But it can’t be a global phenomenon.
Roberts: I feel like if you find yourself in the position where you are saying, “don’t make the place I live nicer.” Someone’s gone off track somewhere, right? Like that can’t be right. That can’t be where we end up. So it’s just I think part of it is we’re just so far behind that, obviously, the next apartment building is not going to turn the tide, you know what I mean? We’re so far behind that we’ve got a long way to go just to catch up on housing stock.
One of the most remarkable things, I would say, in Left politics that I’ve seen in the last ten years is the absolute explosion of the YIMBY movement. And not just in its size, but it’s winning. Which is not something you can say of a lot of other Left movements of the moment. It’s winning victories and it’s changing minds. I really think the Democratic caucus is moving on this issue, which is heartening to see that anything can succeed, that anyone’s mind can change about anything.
Krugman: For listeners, YIMBY is “yes, in my backyard”. NIMBY is “not in my backyard.”
Roberts: Pro-building, pro-density, all the message-people tell us we’re not supposed to say “anti-car,” you definitely don’t want to put “anti-car” on your flier or on your website, but “just between you and me, anti-car as well.”
Krugman: One question. A little bit of a diversion here but, the rise of EV and autonomous vehicles especially: that might actually work to de-densify our lives.
Roberts: This is an interesting gathering—mostly nascent at the moment—but a growing fight on the Left. Autonomous vehicles are going to bring some obvious advantages. The safety advantages, I think there are a lot of people on the Left who are a little bit in denial about this, but the safety boost is real. I think it’s already measurable. That’s a big deal. Cars kill a lot of people, it’s like the second or third cause of death in the United States. It’s not a small thing to be safer, but as an economist you know, if you make a good substantially cheaper, people will consume more of it. So if you make getting around in a car cheaper and easier and more pleasant, people are going to do it more. So there’s just going to be more cars. Ultimately this is a geometry problem. It’s not morals, or whatever. It’s just geometry. If you want the goods and benefits that come along with agglomeration, that come along with cities, you need a certain level of density to achieve those benefits, and you cannot achieve those levels of density if everyone owns a car. That’s just geometry.
I would like for us to be thoughtful and strategic in our autonomous vehicle policy. I would like us to implement those policies with an eye toward reducing total vehicle miles traveled with an eye toward moving people out of private vehicles generally like more fleet vehicles, more shared vehicles. We need to just be thoughtful about how we do this. That’s not typically what we do, but it would be nice in this case if we didn’t just blunder into this, because there’s all kinds of second and third order effects that we just have no idea about yet with this shift.
Krugman: Autonomous vehicles would presumably be fleet vehicles, but they would make it a lot easier to live in a sprawling neighborhood in Jersey.
Roberts: I think your average wealthy suburban Republican politician would love privately owned autonomous vehicles. I bet they would love that. I bet that’s what’s going to happen unless we explicitly act to prevent it. And then if you have your own autonomous vehicle, you can just tell the vehicle, “go pick up Timmy and then come back and park in the lot and then go do this.” Or just like “drive around while I’m here,” it becomes trivially easy to deploy a vehicle, right? If you own one and you don’t even have to be in it, or if you’re in it, you can be on your phone or whatever, it just becomes trivially easy. So of course, people are going to use it more, and of course people are going to start living farther from job centers if commuting becomes easier and more pleasant. That’s not what we want. We want the opposite of that. So I am just nervous about the whole thing. I mean, you can think of ways we could do this that would serve everyone. But that’s not typically how we do things.
Krugman: Not going to happen.
Coming back to where sort of where we started. I think you believe the power of technology and the fact that America is not the center of the world anymore means that electrotech is where we’re going to go?
Roberts: I think at this point it’s more or less inevitable, yes. It’s in the logic of the physics. Ultimately, physics wins out in the end. Timing, of course, is what’s hard to predict, and timing is everything. How fast? I don’t know.
Krugman: Because we’re in a race against climate change, it’s still happening.
Roberts: We’re in several races and now we’re in a sort of geopolitical race with China. We’re in all kinds of races and this is another crucial point that I feel the Trump people don’t get and that everybody needs to get: if you don’t care about climate at all, even if you don’t care about pollution at all, even if you just want to win the AI race, if you just want to win the AI race, you need the full AI stack. What we’re trying to do is dominate AI purely through the prompts. We’ve decided, “oh, we don’t need the physical substrate,” but we do. There’s a reason China has grabbed and dominated the physical substrate of the electrotech economy. The minerals, the batteries, the magnets, all that stuff. We’re trying to dominate AI with just the top froth and they are trying to dominate AI by owning the whole stack all the way down to the electrons, you need clean electrons to run your AI. So they are building with that in mind.
One of the things I’m fond of saying is the shift to clean energy is overdetermined in terms of justification. You can justify it on a climate basis, but you can also take climate out of it entirely and still justify it easily. You can justify it purely on the basis of reductions in particulate pollution. The research on particulate pollution, it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse. We’re expanding our notion of how much damage it does. So just the public health benefits of reduced particulate pollution alone could pay for the transition. Or you can take pollution out of it. Just focus on AI, just focus on competitiveness with China. Take any one of these reasons. They all point the same direction. They all point: shift to clean renewable energy as fast as possible. It is justified by any one of those. That’s why I think another reason that climate has a little bit fallen out of things is that the whole, almost everything you need is justified by a bunch of other reasons, so if climate is controversial, it if it drags in a lot of unwelcome associations, drop it, justify it based on other reasons, like there’s a million reasons to do this. It’s very obvious.
Krugman: Okay. So to summarize, you think that the world will probably save itself.
Roberts: Well…
Krugman: On that front anyway, but the US course is really stupid and unjustifiable, and therefore we’re going to do it. (laughs)
Roberts: I have not predicted anything accurately in ten years. So don’t come to me for predictions. But I’m at least curious what will happen if we genuinely stick with this, if we genuinely try to be the last Petrostate standing, if we’re trying to be the last one selling the last barrel of oil to the last buyer, what does that do to our geopolitics? You can imagine us becoming a genuine pariah, a genuine international pariah with no friends but North Korea and Russia. That’s kind of where we’re heading. I don’t know if the American people really get that. That’s where we’re heading or would want to go there if they were aware of the choice. So I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I feel quite certain that there’s no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.
Krugman: Okay. I think we should probably end with that hopeful diagnosis.
Roberts: I would just say, as a final thing, everybody’s talking about how all the smart young people are going into dumb AI stuff or dumb finance stuff. I would just say that this area of clean energy technology is an area where there’s enormous things happening. There are discoveries waiting to be made. We’ve been doing things one way for over a century, and now we’re really rapidly trying to do it in a different way, which means there’s all kinds of discoveries to be made. There’s glory to be had here. This is a mission. This is something to be part of, that matters, that’s important. Don’t go into finance. Don’t try to get a burrito to someone in their home five seconds faster, do something that matters and that is important. There are so many ways to get involved in this fight.
That’s my inspirational message to end with.
Krugman: Uplift. Thank you so much.
Roberts: Thanks Paul.
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