20 Comments

Roberts is also an editor at Canary Media, a renewable energy news group that's a must subscribe for anyone interested in renewable energy!

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Apr 8, 2022·edited Apr 9, 2022

Noah, Volts and Dave Roberts are awesome, but also checkout https://xenetwork.org/ets/ - Chris Nelder brings in a fair number more scientists, modelers, and policy people that overlap with the ones Roberts' interviews, but also typically goes into significantly more depth.

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Also, if you want an Australian who is extremely anti-sacrifice, go read Saul Griffiths' book: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/electrify-the-book

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Anti-sacrifice. Great way to put it.

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One day late, the Washington Post validates David's assertion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/04/10/job-market-unemployment-good-news-media-fail/

David is right that if the media message is relentlessly downbeat on economics in general, people will actually believe that unemployment is up when it is down.

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Could someone please link that 'learning curves' Oxford study mentioned in the video (30:12)?

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Wow your summary looks really great, at a glance; I've put it into my monthly reading list. I love the image to text ratio, those graphs look really nice.

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Thanks for the kind words Stephen. Not heard feedback specifically about the image to text ratio before. Appreciate that.

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My (physics) advisor once told me that most readers would only skim my work, and that they should be able to figure out the gist based solely on the plots, graphs, and images.

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Very good advice. It's also a great forcing function to distill the key ideas.

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A wonderful interview. You are both keen to point out friction along the path. I fear that we all underestimate the human condition and the unwillingness to change our positions long after it is obvious we would benefit from adjusting.

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What companies are making advances in electrolysis engineering?

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Oddly enough, these guys are so claiming just last month:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/03/16/australian-electrolyzer-invention-enables-green-hydrogen-under-us2-kg-by-mid-2020s/

...they're fairly responsible-looking sources, too, having done 3 years of University/corporate R&D with a basic discovery peer-reviewed in Nature, itself.

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I think Dave probably could have simplified his defense of the intent behind the bad tweet by saying "how upset people are about inflation is influenced not just by their the prices they see around them, but also by the media," which is not to minimize the impact of inflation or to suggest people need to suck it up. I think Noah is right to say people are justified to be upset about getting poorer, but it's also true that most people are not using precise accounting to understand how much poorer they are becoming and responding to that as much as they are to imprecise price signals and narratives from media and social circles.

As an example of this, on NextDoor recently, someone was freaking out about their utility bill jumping up by $100 from February to March in South Florida (read: hot), which to me screams "your AC might be on its last legs," but to just about everyone else was a reason to spout off about inflation and Russian oil. This is just one case from a uniquely toxic social network, but it's not hard to imagine a lot of ordinary people falling into this trap.

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Great interview. Regarding the political point about building coalitions; I'm not sure that's Davids position, but rather it's Sunrises position. Davids point seems to be that people like Sunrise get disproportionate coverage by the center left.

That Sunrise isn't emblematic of the left, but is made out to be. This creates a feedback loop where the outrage of the center-left actually amplifies the message; ironically giving more power to what they oppose.

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It would be so fantastic if fusion reactors were available, and if they were cheap and quick to build, it would be a huge help in combating climate change.

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Thank you for this interview, I learned so much!

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It’s interesting to learn about the theory of change that predicts the Sunrise movements actions. Unfortunately, the question of base load energy is still not answered and we also have no idea how CDR or CCS will work.

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Noah, this is where you might’ve seen projections in the 2-3C range https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1511398799293366280

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