Volts

Latest Episodes:

Volts podcast: Fran Moore on how to represent social change in climate models May 04, 2022

Show notes

In this episode, UC Davis assistant professor Fran Moore discusses her research team’s effort to construct a climate model that includes (instead of ignores) effects from the interplay of social conditions and policy change.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsOne of my long-time gripes about the climate-economic models that outfits like the IPCC produce is that they ignore politics. More broadly, they ignore social change and the way it can both drive and be driven by technology and climate impacts. This isn’t difficult to explain — unlike technology costs, biophysical feedbacks, and other easily quantifiable variables, the dynamics of social change seem fuzzy and qualitative, too soft and poorly understood to include in a quantitative model. Consequently, those dynamics have been treated as “exogenous” to models. Modelers simply determine those values, feed in a set level of policy change, and the models react. Parameters internal to the model can not affect policy and be affected by it in turn; models do not capture socio-physical and socio-economic feedback loops.But we know those feedback loops exist. We know that falling costs of technology can shift public sentiment which can lead to policy which can further reduce the costs of technology. All kinds of loops like that exist, among and between climate, technology, and human social variables. Leaving them out entirely can produce misleading results. At long last, a new research paper has tackled this problem head-on. Fran Moore, an assistant professor at UC Davis working at the intersection of climate science and economics, took a stab at it in a recent Nature paper, “Determinants of emissions pathways in the coupled climate–social system.” Moore, along with several co-authors, attempted to construct a climate model that includes social feedback loops, to help determine what kinds of social conditions produce policy change and how policy change helps change social conditions.I am fascinated by this effort and by the larger questions of how to integrate social-science dynamics into climate analysis, so I was eager to talk to Moore about how she constructed her model, what kinds of data she drew on, and how she views the dangers and opportunities of quantifying social variables. Without further ado, Fran Moore, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.Fran Moore:Thanks for having me.David Roberts: In climate modeling, we put in values for what we think is going to happen to the price and then watch the model play out. I've been looking at climate modeling my whole career, and I've always thought that what's actually going to determine the outcomes are our social and political processes, which are not in the model. So really, the models amount to a wild guess, we're all wallowing in uncertainty, and we just have to live with it. You confronted the same situation, and being a much more stalwart and ambitious person than I, said, “I'm going to try to get the social and political stuff into the model to make the model better.” In conventional climate modeling, these sociopolitical variables are treated as exogenous. What does it mean for them to be exogenous to the model?Fran Moore:Exogenous means that they come in from outside, so as the researcher using the model, you have to specify that. In particular, when we're thinking about climate change, those really important exogenous variables are the ambition of climate policy, whether that be in terms of trajectories of carbon prices, or target for temperature, or target for emissions levels. Typically, those are things that you set and they appear exogenously in two ways.One is, in climate modeling, you take some radiative forcing trajectory, or some greenhouse gas concentration, and you ask, what does the climate system do in response to that? But it also comes up in other types of modeling, like energy modeling, where these policies appear exogenously as constraints on the model. So you're asking an energy model to tell you what's the least cost pathway for getting to a 2° temperature target, or to a certain carbon concentration limit in the atmosphere. Those are both versions of exogenous inputs of policy into climate-relevant modeling.David Roberts: The upshot is that the modeler is basically specifying the trajectory of policy and then asking the model: given that, what will happen? What it means to make it endogenous, then, is allowing social and political factors to be affected by other variables and to affect them in return inside the model. What does it look like for something like this to be endogenous? What does that mean to us?Fran Moore:The way it works in our model is that climate policy becomes endogenous. We don't specify what it does; it arises from modeling of more fundamental social-political processes that we think are going to drive or enable climate policy as it might play out over the future. By taking that step back we see this policy not just as something that we're going to specify and ask what happens, but actually something that emerges from the system itself, that comes out of a model’s structure and parameterization.David Roberts:On one hand, that seems like exactly what we want: let’s specify some initial conditions, then ask the model what people will do on policy later. On the other hand, intuitively, it sounds impossible, like trying to predict the future. When I think about social and political forces and variables, there are an infinite number of ways to conceive of them. Of all the social and political forces you could imagine, how do you narrow down to something manageable? Which variables are you choosing?Fran Moore:Let me take a minute to say that it's actually not obvious that this is what you want to do. A lot of climate modeling has taken the view that the goal of this is to inform policy, and the goal of the modeling is to say to policymakers “if you do X then Y will happen and if you do Z then W will happen.” If that is the goal of your modeling exercise, then you don't want policy to emerge endogenously; you want to be able to specify some possible counterfactuals so you can take the results of your model and tell policymakers about just how bad climate change will be under these different cases. I see two main reasons why that is unsatisfactory as the only approach. One, scientifically, it seems unsatisfying, in that human decisions are the single most important determinant of how the climate system is going to evolve and if we just exclude them from our modeling, we don't really understand the system as a whole. But there's also a practical application, in that we're not just here trying to inform mitigation decisions. Increasingly, we're trying to help adaptation. And not being able to tell adaptation decision-makers about the probabilities of different emission trajectories when your single largest uncertainty is between different emissions pathways – that's really unsatisfying and not what we need for adaptation. We want to be able to put probability bounds over there in order to support much better adaptation decision-making. That was part of the motivation.David Roberts: When you're choosing these variables, these feedback loops that you're trying to include in the model, where do you start? Where do you look? Is there existing literature or existing loops you can adapt and put in, or are you just starting with a blank piece of paper?Fran Moore:It was definitely a process. One of the starting points was the observation that we do want to be focused on feedback loops. This is a certain style of modeling, sometimes called system dynamics modeling, where you're focused on the coupling between different feedback loops because they tend to be really important in driving the dynamics of the system over long time periods. If you have reinforcing feedbacks, particularly if they're coupled to each other, you can get very complex, nonlinear behavior emerging from the model. We wanted to make sure that we were allowing for that, so we did have a focus on trying to identify the feedback loops. Essentially, an interdisciplinary team of people started brainstorming, based on our knowledge, what theories around psychology, social psychology, sociology, and political science might be relevant here. Then we did a literature review across different potential feedback loops, looking for evidence within a really diverse range of literatures about dynamics that might be relevant to the system, that we could take and incorporate into this model.David Roberts: Give us an example of how a change in one thing might trigger a change in another thing that might trigger a change in policy.Fran Moore:One that we incorporate into our emissions or energy component is learning-by-doing feedback; it’s represented in a lot of energy-system models these days. This is a phenomenon where new technologies tend to be really expensive, but you tend to get cost reductions with increased deployment, so your technology gets cheaper, so it gets deployed more, so it gets cheaper, so it gets deployed more. That's a reinforcing feedback where there's quite a lot of evidence across different energy technologies about how large that effect tends to be. Some of the ones where the evidence is more qualitative or perhaps more debatable would be things like, we have a feedback from policy change to public opinion. This is the idea of the normative force of law or expressive force of law, which is described in some legal literature. It's the idea that policy change itself can signal to people what is desirable behavior or desirable outcomes, so you can get this reinforcing feedback where you get some change in the law that later drives public opinion in that direction because it's signaling something. That's the kind of feedback that we allow for in the model.David Roberts: The learning curves are a socioeconomic process, but there's tons of data on them; they’re very well-understood and well-modeled and quantified. I can imagine getting those in the model relatively smoothly. But something like the extent to which passing a policy serves as a social proof that then shifts public opinion, which then makes the next policy slightly more likely – I can conceptualize that loop easily, I understand what it means on a qualitative level, but how do you begin to quantify that? What are the data sources that would even feed into that?Fran Moore:This is an issue that we ran into in designing the model, is that a lot of the evidence here is coming from more qualitative disciplines like legal literature and political science literature. That doesn't mean it's not evidence; in some cases, we have quite rich case studies showing some of these feedbacks in operation. But it does make it challenging when you're trying to take that and put an equation on it.One thing is that we allowed for a lot of uncertainty. In our final set of runs, we sample over a lot of uncertain parameters in the model and we try and say, given the fact that we don't know a lot about this particular parameter that describes the strength of the feedback, or even the existence of this feedback, what can we say probabilistically about where emissions might go?The other thing that we do is a hind-cost exercise to jointly constrain these parameters. Even though we don't have data that is allowing us to say “this feedback in particular,” we can take a subset of the model – in this case, I think it was our opinion, policy, adoption, and cognition modules – and we can start it in the past. I think 2010 was when we first had data for distribution of public opinion as well as carbon pricing. Then we can run the model forward using, again, sampling over a very large set of the parameter space, and look at how well that evolution of opinion and that evolution of policy actually matched what happened over 10 years. Based on the match under different parameter combinations, we can probabilistically say “this set of parameter combinations is more likely true than this set of parameter combinations” just because it seems like it generates a better match in the model over the last 10 years. We do two versions of that for different parts of the model, these hind-cost parameter-constraint exercises, and that's primarily how our empirical evidence comes into the model. It would be great if we could use other data from other fields to constrain some of these parameters more precisely, but for some of these ideas, that doesn't exist at the moment.David Roberts: One of the things that's done with climate physical models to test them out is, as you say, backcast – meaning if we went back in time and used this model, would it accurately predict what actually happened? Do you think a model like this, with social features, some of which are fuzzier than others, could ever accurately backcast? What did you find when you backcasted? Are you comfortable that you have a set of feedback loops now that at least accurately captured the last 10 years?Fran Moore:It is tricky in that some of the feedback loops play out. Ideally, we would have much better historical data on some of these social measures that allow us to go back much further. Because we only have data over about 10 years, and it might even be less than that, we're able to say that over this relatively short time period, the model seems like it’s not going completely crazy. But part of the goal of incorporating feedback is so that you have the potential for things like tipping points and things like that, so you don't want to over-constrain.Sometimes you see critiques of energy models that they over-constrain in order to precisely match historically what's happened; but if some of those constraints can change in the future, and we're projecting out a long way here, then you want to allow for that to happen too. So it's a balance between those: what do we have evidence for, in a broad sense of the word, in terms of the structure of the feedback; as well as, can we use the evidence as we have it to constrain it? There's uncertainty, and we can get a wide range of behavior, but more or less it can track this gradual expansion of support for climate policy in OECD countries, which is our focus, as well as relatively slow increase in average carbon price, which is our measure of policy. Between those two things, they can constrain some of the parameters in the model, but not all of them.David Roberts: When it comes to social and political stuff regarding climate change, by definition, there aren’t data sets going back a long way, because the issue itself is relatively new to society and politics – a couple of decades, which in modeling terms is a relatively short period of time. So what data do we have? Of all the kajillions of social and political factors you might imagine trying to get in here, do some have data available and some don't? Do you end up biasing yourself toward factors where there is data available just because there is data, and overlooking things that might be important because there is no data? Fran Moore:On that latter question, because we built into the model the potential for the feedback loops where we don't necessarily have strong quantitative data, we're deliberately trying to avoid that problem. We're allowing those feedback loops to operate in probabilistically. We can't constrain them directly with data, we recognize that; there are only limited model outputs and parameters that we can actually match to stuff that’s measurable in a defensible way. But that doesn't mean that we don't include them in our model. We still allow for those effects to operate, because they're potentially really important in driving the dyna…

Full show notes at the publisher

Volts podcast: Nan Ransohoff on how (and why) Stripe is kick-starting the carbon-removal market Apr 29, 2022

Show notes

In this episode, Nan Ransohoff, head of carbon at Stripe, discusses the company's new spinoff, Frontier, which will pool money from partners and make it available to early contenders in the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) market. We chat about that market, the technologies that show promise in it, in the role of private industry in accelerating it.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Volts podcast: Michael Terrell on Google's pursuit of 24/7 clean energy Apr 27, 2022

Show notes

In this episode, Google’s director of energy, Michael Terrell, explains the company's new goal of supplying all of its facilities with clean energy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We discuss how its going, what kinds of new technologies will be needed, and what new policies could help move things along.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Volts podcast: Horace Luke on decarbonizing the world's two-wheelers Apr 22, 2022

Show notes

In this episode, I discussed swappable, rechargeable batteries in two-wheeled electric scooters with Horace Luke, the CEO of Gogoro. Luke’s company is selling subscriptions to batteries in bustling emerging-market cities like Taiwan. We talked about consumer requirements for swappable batteries, the other kinds of technologies that might use them, and his plans for expansion.Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Horace Luke, April 22, 2022(PDF version)David Roberts:Electric vehicles are all the rage these days, but at least here in the western world, most of the attention has focused on four-wheeled passenger vehicles, first Tesla and then all the companies trying to catch up with Tesla. However, across the globe, more than 50 percent of commute miles are undertaken on two-wheelers — scooters, mopeds, and the like. China, India, and Indonesia alone contain more than 500 million two-wheelers; anyone who has visited big cities in those countries has seen the vehicles swarming the streets.And they are dirty as hell. Their two-stroke motors emit as much as five times the pollutants of the average new car in the US. Millions of people have died from two-wheeler pollution, to say nothing of the climate impacts.But two-wheelers are difficult to electrify. Their owners tend not to have extra cash; theft is a constant danger; and urban density makes plugging in, especially in a place sheltered from the elements, difficult.Today’s guest, Horace Luke, set out to solve this problem with his company Gogoro, founded in 2011. The idea was simple: consumers would own the scooters, but Gogoro would own the batteries, which would be made available in stations across the urban fabric, such that riders could easily find one to swap. Consumers would subscribe to the service, effectively ensuring that they would always have a charged battery available. The company took a different course than he expected — Gogoro ended up building its own scooters, stations, and batteries, doing far more hardware than the software-minded Luke had originally envisioned — but his persistence won out and the model is taking off, preparing to expand from Taiwan (where it started) to a range of other burgeoning megacities in emerging economies. It’s a clever model, a mental shift that opens up all kinds of new possibilities, so I was excited to chat with Luke about the problem of two-wheelers, the consumer experience of subscribing to Gogoro, and the other kinds of things, outside of transportation, that cities might be able to do with thousands of distributed, swappable batteries. So without further ado, welcome, Horace Luke, to Volts. Thanks for coming. Horace Luke:Thanks, David. David Roberts:I'm so taken by this whole idea. Tell us a little bit about the problem of two-wheelers: where they are, how dirty they are, and how big a part of the climate problem they are.Horace Luke: Most of the people in the audience probably don't realize that more than 50 percent of all commute miles done globally every day are done on two-wheelers.While we in the United States look at it as more of a recreational or very short-distance commute, in the East – Vietnam, Thailand, China, India, Indonesia – you can't cross the street without being hit by one if you’re not careful. They're just everywhere. In China, India, and Indonesia alone, there are more than 500 million two-wheelers roaming around every day – taking people to school, to work, to the market. They are the absolute utility dependency vehicle that people look for when they're moving around town, and people on average ride somewhere between 300-700 miles a month. Unfortunately, because of the economics of it, the chance of them being clean is not very high. When compared to a gasoline vehicle in, let’s say, California, there are five times more pollutants coming out of the tailpipe per kilometer, easily. On top of that, you have people not using premium fuel and other carelessness that makes owning a two-wheel vehicle extremely polluting. On top of that, they're usually being used in densely populated cities where thousands of people are living on top of each other. If you're walking down the street, you can definitely smell them, you can feel the heat from them. It is a central problem that we need to solve.I grew up on the west coast of the United States. I worked for Microsoft, where I was one of the original founders of Xbox, then eventually was fortunate enough to lead the Windows XP user experience and product experience side of the business. Eventually I moved to Taiwan, where I worked for a company called High Tech Computer (now HTC). I created some of the world’s first Android phones – the T-Mobile myTouch, the Verizon Droid – and was pretty successful there. At age 40 I was traveling around Asia, thinking, “I made that company number one in the world, shipping 43 million phones a year – now what? As the world is moving to 5G and then to 6G and beyond, is that really the end game? Is human computing to make humans more efficient and more productive really the way of the future, or is sustainability?” So I picked sustainability. I think that this is the decade of sustainability. Mobility plays a huge role within that, and trying to figure out how to get the eastern hemisphere to adopt electric was the essential problem that we needed to solve. With Gogoro, we did that. David Roberts: So cities are choked with these two-wheelers, which have some of the dirtiest engines possible, and you're trying to think about how to solve this problem. One way would just be to go electric, the same thing we've been doing with cars. Why isn't that the intuitive solution, to make electric versions of these scooters?Horace Luke: In most areas of the world where two-wheelers are massively adopted, people live in stacked apartment buildings. Thousands and thousands of people live on top of each other, and these vehicles are being parked on the side of the road in a very ad hoc kind of way. You've got nowhere to park, so you really don't have a solution for nighttime charging. During the daytime commute, some technologies are emerging for fast charging – something like 10-15 minutes for about a 50 percent charge. Maybe that's doable, but in a two-wheeler, you don't have the comfort of a sofa, you don't have a stereo system, you don't have an environment where you're protected against the natural elements. If you're in line in front of me and somebody else is in front of you, we're talking 30-45 minutes exposed to rain, to heat, to sun. That just makes it almost impossible. Plus there’s the economics of it. You've got batteries, you've got a fast charger – now you're trying to figure out how much the vehicle actually costs. By removing the battery from that purchase equation, we help the user adopt the electric solution much quicker. Instead of buying the battery and charging it yourself, you stop by one of our GoStation battery swapping stations and just swap out the battery.David Roberts: Back in 2011 when you first started Gogoro, did this vision – that you take the battery out of the scooter and make the batteries interchangeable, a quick swap rather than having the consumer own the battery – just come to you in a flash? Is that what the company has always been about? Horace Luke: The company has always been about that. We started the company with 27 desks; we were thinking that we were a software company helping to create the algorithm and efficiency of swapping and managing these batteries. One thing we knew was that how and when you charge the batteries is very important to managing their lifespan. If you're starting a company thinking about sustainability, it's not about greenwashing or riding the electric hype – it’s about how you take the resources and minerals that are out of the ground today and extend the lifetime of use for as long as possible. That's the thesis from which we started. Then we were looking for people to build the vehicle, build the motor, build the station, etc. To be honest, it sounds like a broken record – a lot of companies start very small and eventually find out “hey, that's something nobody can do, so let's go do that.”Now we're fully stacked, we build our own smart batteries. We took the technology that we did with smartphones and we turned it upside down. Think of our battery as a smartphone that doesn't have a big screen on it. We took the ability to update and wirelessly connect and created perhaps the world's most powerful little battery that can power two- and three-wheelers.David Roberts: So you eventually got into making the scooters, the batteries, and the battery banks that the batteries are stored in, just because you couldn't find anybody else to do it any better.Horace Luke: Absolutely. I have this policy in our company where you ask twice, and if you ask three times, that means that you should have done it yourself. The first time you ask somebody “hey, can you help me with this?” and they're like “no, that's kind of impossible,” then you go to the second guy. And if they say, “you’re crazy, you can’t make that happen, that energy density is not something we can do” – if our science and our math work out that you could, we try and do it ourselves. So we built the world's most powerful and dense small, compact motor for mobility today, a tiny little motor that powers about 7 kilowatts, about 10 horsepower. It's a replacement of the popular 125cc or so. We've got our own batteries, we've got our own station, we even design our own charger. We subcontract out the bidirectional inverter that's in our station today. We even geek out on tires; a lot of energy is lost on tires. I sit down with the team to look at the compound of the tread pattern, the profile of the tire, so that we can save energy on tires to go as far as we can go. We're a curious bunch that just want to make electric mobility a possibility in these big cities.David Roberts: If I'm a citizen of Taiwan and I need a scooter for my business or my personal life, what is the consumer experience like? What do I do, where do I go, what do I sign up for, what do I buy?Horace Luke: By the way, in Taiwan, there are 14 million two-wheelers on the ground for a population of slightly more than 22 million people. If you don't count old and young people, you literally have a vehicle per person.Before 2015, when we launched our first vehicle, electric solutions were less than 1 percent of the overall sold in Taiwan. (In comparison, Tesla in the United States is about 3-4 percent.) We ended last year with about 26 percent in Taipei; in the overall market, we're somewhere between 12-13 percent. What's amazing is that our battery-swapping system accounts for 90-95 percent of all the electric vehicles. So we not only grew the market ten times, but at the same time we became the de facto standard when it comes to people adopting electric. That’s because we partner people not only with our own brand vehicle, but also with Yamaha, Suzuki Taiwan, Aeon, and PGO.David Roberts: So if I'm going to replace my vehicle with an electric and I want to use the Gogoro battery system, I have different brands of scooters to choose from that can all accommodate your battery.Horace Luke: Yeah, not only brand but design and functionality. Think of us as the Android of EV, or the Windows and Intel of computing. We're 47 different models across 10 different brands, so lots of shops around town.You choose the horsepower and design you like, you choose the form factor, you choose the brand, because at the end of the day each has different performance and different affinity to the brand. You buy the vehicle, and then you subscribe to our battery swapping system. The subscription is kind of like a mobile operator plan, for those of us who are old enough to remember those. You used to have fixed minutes and fixed messaging; you buy the bundle pack up front and the more you buy, the less you pay for overage per minute or per message. Same thing with us. We have plans ranging from all-you-can-ride, where you pay and you can go crazy and ride all you want. Or you can buy a little bit, start with something like $10 and about 60 miles, and then anything more than that you pay per kilometer on overage. The more you pay up front per month, the more you get. We even have carryover miles, just like you had carryover minutes. We apply the mobile operator model to battery swapping usability.David Roberts: If you translate it into American dollars, what is an average monthly fee?Horace Luke: The average monthly fee starts from about $10. You get about 60 miles, or 100 kilometers, and for every kilometer (or 0.6 mile) overage, you pay about three pennies or so. Then you find yourself snapping to the next plan, which is about $16-$17, and for that, you get a little more kilometers on a pre-bundle. And you just keep going up on the mileage.David Roberts: So I've got the subscription, I'm riding around with one of your batteries, I'm getting low, I look for a battery bank – what do these things look like? What's the user experience of swapping a battery? How long does it take? And how common are these battery banks, how easy are they to find?Horace Luke: In Taiwan, we've been going at this for almost seven years, and we are now at about 2,200 locations. In the metropolitan area, we're more dense than gas stations. By the end of this year, we will definitely have more locations than there are gas stations across the island. We have slightly more than 11,000 cabinets. Think of them as ATM machines or vending machines. We put them in places like convenience stores, cafes, universities, train stations, bus stations, supermarkets. Instead of gas stations, where you need a huge plot of land with a safe circumference around it, we can place them underneath your apartment building, wherever is most convenient for people.David Roberts: They're common enough that if I'm running low, there's probably one close by.Horace Luke: Literally, you're within a quarter mile from each one. The average distance that our consumer rides is about 40-50 miles, so they swap maybe every 3.5 days or so. Range-wise, we’re about 60-70 percent of gasoline vehicles, but with a lot more convenience than the gasoline vehicle. We can swap out batteries in less than a couple of seconds. But when we do that, people think our system is broken, that we didn't do the bill right or we spit out the wrong battery.David Roberts: So I lift up the seat, I pull out the battery, and I put it in one of the empty holes in the bank. When I put it in, does the system know it's me somehow? How is it tied to my account?Horace Luke: We wanted to make that user experience as seamless as possible. One of the things that we absolutely needed to do is to make it so much better than gasoline from a user experience perspective, so that people would want to switch over. So no credit card, no phone, nothing needed. You put your battery in, and because our battery has NFC on it, it carries your credentials – who you are, how many kilometers you’ve ridden. You put your battery in and it calculates whether you paid your bill, how much is needed for this time, how you rode and how much energy you used, then picks the right battery and spits a new one out for you that is fully charged. That battery is then programmed for you. So if I stole your battery from your vehicle and I put it in my vehicle, it won't work. The security system is tied to you. Essentially, you can feel confident having these expensive batteries in your vehicle; it won't be stolen because it just simply doesn't work. A stolen good is no good if you can’t…

Full show notes at the publisher

At long last, I have an EV Apr 18, 2022

Show notes

For years now, I’ve been dithering about getting an electric vehicle (EV). Much of that dithering has been done in public, on Twitter and for various sites I’ve worked for — just a few weeks ago I subjected you to my handwringing about an EV test drive — so I figured I might as well document how the journey finally ended.

Long story short, we bought a used 2017 Chevy Bolt. That is about the least sexy sentence one can write about EVs in the year of our lord 2022, but there you have it.

We thought about leasing or buying one of the fancy new EVs, the Kia EV6 or the Ford Mustang or a Tesla. But we’re pretty cheap and didn’t want to pay that much. And we felt slightly guilty about buying a new car. And those cars feel like statements. As Mrs. Volts put it, “I just don’t want to say that much with my car.”

The Bolt (along with the Nissan Leaf) is the closest thing to an econo-box option in the EV market, and that’s more our speed. We paid $25K — considerably more than we would have paid for the same car 12 months ago, thanks to lingering supply issues, but less than half of a tricked-out, new version of any of the fancier models.

In terms of value, though, there’s a twist — the “cheat code” of the current EV market. As you probably know, there has been a massive recall of Bolt batteries. Every battery in every Bolt from 2017 to 2022 will be replaced, at no charge, by Chevrolet.

That means, at some point in the next year (my local Chevy dealer estimates seven months from now), they’ll call me, I’ll drop the car off at the dealership, they’ll put in a brand new, 260-mile-range battery, and I’ll get it back the next day. Given that the rest of the car is in good shape (~57K miles on the odometer), this will effectively be like getting a new EV for the cost of a used one. Score.

The econo-box of EVs

The car itself is somewhat spartan, if comfortable. It has the “premier” trim, so I got my beloved heated steering wheel, Mrs. Volts her beloved heated seats. It has one-pedal driving and lane assist and parking assist and all-around cameras and Android Auto. The only fancy-pants feature I notice missing is wireless phone charging (which I got used to real quick in the Mustang).

As for acceleration, even if it isn’t the insane road-rocket the Mustang was, it is considerably zippier than either of our aged current vehicles, more than zippy enough to make it fun getting around the city. (It has a “sport” mode, with higher torque and lower range, but I haven’t had occasion to use it yet.)

The interface is lower end, which means it involves more physical buttons and knobs and less screen real estate than newer EVs, but to be honest I like that much better. There’s less occasion and temptation to look at the screen. I can find most stuff I really need with my fingers.

There’s not enough console space and the Bluetooth interface with phones is somewhat janky — listening to music on my phone involves a lot more button-poking than I’d like — but it’s tolerable.

As for accessories, I bought a back-seat cover (for the dogs) and a level-two charger (we had a 220-volt outlet already installed). I can’t think of much else we need. We are now driving (semi-)guilt-free.

Getting an EV is easier than ever

One final note: early in this process I was contacted by a company called Link that is devoted to making it easy for people to get EVs. You can use their site to shop for the EV you want — they offer an advisory service — and then they’ll arrange the lease or purchase for you.

After wasting way too much time shopping around, I told Link I wanted a used Bolt. For a few weeks, they sent me notices of Bolts (that had been inspected) as they came on the market. When we saw one we liked, they did all the purchasing and transferring of titles. They mailed me the paperwork (including detailed inspection reports), I signed and mailed it back, and then the car was dropped off in my driveway. I never had to haggle or talk to a salesperson. All I had to do is register it at the DMV and let the Chevy dealership know I had it. It could not have been easier.

Link is mostly operating on the West Coast for now, but if you have been dithering about an EV like I was, I can’t recommend it enough. (I know other services like this are springing up — it’s a big and eager market, I would think.)

Anyway, that’s the story of how I finally got an EV. You’ll hear no more dithering from me. Instead I’ll to go back to daydreaming about living somewhere where I don’t need a car at all.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Volts podcast: Elizabeth Popp Berman on the "economic style of thinking" that consumed US policy Apr 15, 2022

Show notes

In this episode, sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman discusses her new book, Thinking Like an Economist, about the “economic style of thinking” and how it took over in US policy circles in the post-war period. It remains embedded there to this day, but alternatives are beginning to emerge.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Volts podcast: Paulina Jaramillo on the IPCC's new climate-solutions report Apr 13, 2022

Show notes

In this episode, Carnegie Mellon professor Paulina Jaramillo discusses the IPCC's working group 3 report, “mitigation of climate change,” of which she was a co-author. It's the most comprehensive look to date at the economic sectors that emit greenhouse gases, the strategies and technologies that can reduce emissions, and the state of play in climate policy around the world.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Me, on the Some More News podcast Apr 11, 2022

Show notes

Earlier this year, I stumbled on the news videos from the team at Some More News. They are like The Daily Show, but longer, smarter, more in-depth, more profane, and free of Jon Stewart’s unfortunate navel-gazing centrism. But still funny as hell!

In other words: they might as well be targeted directly at me. I’ve been gorging on them for months. (You could start with this one on critical race theory.)

Anyway, imagine my delight when I discovered that Some More News also has a podcast, Even More News, and they wanted me to come on it!

So that’s what today’s episode of Volts is: an episode of Even More News that the team has graciously allowed me to send to you on the Volts channel. We talk about IPCC stuff briefly, but I also got to let loose on Joe Manchin, lament Dems’ general media fecklessness, and heap scorn on Elon Musk’s Twitter moves. It was fun to get away from the wonky stuff for a while and just riff. It’s a different side of Dr. Volts! You can decide for yourself whether it’s better or worse.

You should definitely subscribe to Some More News and support the team via Patreon. The left needs much more of this kind of thing — new ways of reaching people where they are.

Also! Last week I was on PBS Newshour to discuss the new IPCC report and the state of clean-energy technology. You can watch here:

I always underestimate the reach of PBS — it’s wild how many people saw this and contacted me! And how many saw it and contacted my parents. Love you, PBS.

Back later this week with some nerdy pods of my own!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Me, interviewed by Noah Smith Apr 08, 2022

Show notes

Economist Noah Smith runs the excellent substack Noahpinion, where he writes and podcasts about … pretty much everything. Economics. Politics. The war. Housing. Technology. On and on. The guy is ludicrously productive.

This week, he interviewed me! We talked about the new IPCC reports, the state of technology, some dumb tweets of mine, and NIMBYs, among other things. It was a fun and wide-ranging conversation. Check it out! (And subscribe to Noahpinion.)

The video is below. The audio is posted as a podcast above.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Volts podcast: Matthew Metz & Janelle London on gasoline superusers & smarter EV subsidies Apr 04, 2022

Show notes

In this episode, activists Matthew Metz and Janelle London discuss their new report on gasoline “superusers” — the subset of drivers who drive long distances each year — and the policy recommendations around EV subsidies that it contains. It's a clever idea I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected