Boy this was a bracing, high-velocity and fun discussion with longtime renewable-energy analyst and evangelist Joe Romm. If you missed it live, now’s your chance to listen or skim the transcript and post questions or reactions.

We explored a heap of issues related to climate, energy and online communication. We went back in time to our Dot Earth and Climate Progress tussles and moments of agreement but mostly focused on current and future events.

One thing we absolutely agreed on was that our disputes back in the Bush and Obama days over the mix of clean-energy policies aimed at mass deployment or research and development were microscopic in the context of the reversals engineered by the Heritage Foundation and industry and initiated under Trump 2.0.

We went through Romm’s recent mythbusting aroun carbon offsets and “green” hydrogen. I recommnd that you follow him on LinkedIn, where he does a good job highlighting relevant output from others as well as his own (the mark of a good blogger). Here’s an example - pointing to Stephen Lacey’s Open Circuit podcast:

Here’s a highlight from our Sustain What conversation in which Romm explains what’s behind rising electricity bills and offers a suggested message to anyone wanting to return the U.S. to rational climate and energy policy:

People’s electricity bills are going up and they are pissed and they don’t understand their bills….

First of all, we haven’t invested in the grid for 10, 20 years, and we’re blocking transmission lines, and we’re making it hard to actually deploy renewables as fast as we could. And Trump has come in and has gutted the credits for renewables. And we’re still going to build renewables and batteries because they’re still going to be the cheapest and fastest to deploy.

They’re just going to be more expensive. So we have [also been] exporting our cheap natural gas in the form of liquefied natural gas - a bad idea that Biden at least put a pause on.

The fossil fuel industry loves it.

But guess why? This is arbitrage. Natural gas is expensive in places like Europe. It’s cheap here. What they want to do and what they are doing is taking our cheap gas, liquefying it, shipping it overseas, making a lot of money and therefore reducing our amount of gas, setting our gas prices up. It is very basic supply and demand.

I do not know why our side does not message on [this].

We’re exporting our cheap gas to other nations and it’s costing us problems.

There is much much more, so dig in and weigh in with questions (I’ll forward to Romm) and do SHARE this post with others.

And do consider chipping in to help me justify the time it takes to develop the podcasts and post here.

I’m close to an exciting threshold for paying supporters. I’d love to meet via video chat privately with the next four folks who can afford to chip in $50 to keep Sustain What going,

Thank you Dann, Peter van Soest, and others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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