Best of October 2026

0:06Hello, hello, hello everyone. This is Volt for November 6, 2026. The best of October. I'm your host, David Roberts. It's the first week of the month, which means it's time for best of October. One clip from every conversation we had last month strung together into a highlights episode. It's a great way to get a sense of what you may have missed. As usual, this episode is for paying subscribers only, but at the same time, we are unlocking last month's best of episode. So if you think you missed anything in September, go check that one out. Looking back, October seems to have been about how to get things passed.

0:53We started with a discussion of how the Inflation Reduction Act passed, went into a long conversation about the permitting bill that Democrats are currently trying to pass, talked about how to rally local activists to get local clean energy projects passed, talked to a Dane about how Denmark got its energy policy passed, and so on. Lots and lots of practical wisdom this month. Before we get into it, a quick heads up. As you may have noticed, there was an election this week. On Monday, I'll have an episode on what the results mean for clean energy and climate policy. So keep an eye on the feed.

1:37As always, Volts is a 100 % listener-supported podcast, so I deeply appreciate all of you who pay for subscriptions. You make all of this possible. All right, let's get into it. We begin with Leah Stokes, live on stage at Town Hall Seattle, talking about her new book, The Carbon Wave, and how she fought for the Inflation Reduction Act. So Leah, I read your book, and as you know, I followed the IRA fight very closely at great cost to my mental health. So I knew all the twists and turns of the Ira fight. And yet I'm reading your book like sweating, like staying up late at night because I'm like, her kids, are the twins okay?

2:30And what's out? Is the pregnancy going to turn out? Is Adrian ever going to get home to his family? So like the personal stuff was very, very interesting to me. And I looked it up right when the bill was about to pass. We did a pod about it. You and Jesse came on and I looked it up and looked at the book Chronology. And I'm pretty sure you did the pod. So you had like had this problematic pregnancy, bed bound, early delivery. One of your kids is in the NICU for 75 days. And I looked it up. I think literally the day we recorded the pod, you had to cancel their first birthday party because you found out they had COVID.

3:12And then you found out you had COVID. Yeah. That's actually true. I knew none of that. You're just cheerful and informative and did the podcast. I was like, that was great. I had no idea. So I mean, I'm just amazed. So just tell me how you survived all that and about your decision to weave the personal stories through the book.

3:35Leah Stokes: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming, everyone. We're really excited to do this. The book, which you probably haven't had a chance to read yet because it's only been out for two weeks is a story of how the largest climate law in American history passed. And it follows a few people who happen to sort of be in the middle of their lives and having kids while they were working on this big climate fight. And so my own story follows my really high risk pregnancy. I had twins and we didn't know if they would live or not. And spoiler alert, they're alive and happy and learning four languages right now.

4:08Leah Stokes: So you don't need to stress. A lot of readers are like, are they okay? At the end of the book, they are happy and healthy, which is a real blessing and a testament to all the people in the NICU who made that happen. I think you found out that you were having twins as you were in the midst of this 10 hour a day fight for the bill itself. No. So I was a Canadian citizen at that time, which is relevant because there was literally a conversation happening about, oh, you know, should I go into the White House? Could I take a job. It's really hard for Canadian citizens to take jobs in the White House.

4:40Leah Stokes: Not impossible. But, you know, so when I got this scan, as I tell in the book, and discovered I had twins, I just thought, well, how's this going to work? Because I have all this important work to do. And the thing about a twin pregnancy, if you've experienced it or know someone who has, is that it's really difficult. And so they quickly were like, we don't know if they are what's called mono-mono or mono-di. What does this mean? It just means like, are they in one sack or not? and if they are in one inner sack, you have to go to, according to my doctor, baby jail. That was her language. I don't think that's a medical term, where they put you in the hospital, I believe, at 32 weeks, and they keep you there for as long as possible to monitor continuously three times a day, and I just was like, how am I going to do this work from baby jail?

5:26Leah Stokes: This doesn't seem really doable. I end up in baby jail in this story, but actually, I got a lot of work done in the hospital. I go on TV. I'm doing interviews. If anything, it was easier. The people bring you food. You don't have to go anywhere. There's a very vivid story where your husband wheels in one of the big hospital lights, the surgery lights, to backlight you for a TV appearance. Yeah. For Democracy Now, right? I mean, wouldn't you go on Democracy Now if you had the chance? Come on. That's badass. The thing is, Democracy Now is on the East Coast, so they want you on at 5 Pacific. And so I was like, the sun's not up then.

6:01So the nurse brought me a giant obstetrics like light, but it was broken.

6:06Leah Stokes: So we were not misusing hospital equipment. I always want to say that just for clarification. So yeah, it was like kind of crazy, but I feel like, first of all, that was this huge window of opportunity to pass a climate law. And what I write about in the book is that when people think about like baby proofing their lives, they really think very narrowly in terms of like sticking things at outlets or coffee tables and I think much more expansively like I don't know giving my children a livable planet and I encourage all of us to think in that way and that's really the point of the book so you know I just think that as much as it might seem crazy on some level to read about these choices that me and other people were making in this book it's also about making sure that like our kids have a livable and safe world to grow up in and And I want everybody to be part of that story.

6:53Leah Stokes: You know, I want everybody. They don't have to make the same life choices I make, but, you know, pushing for that livable future. It really demonstrated to me that it's good I'm a journalist working alone at home. Because, like, I barely survived the IRA fight and I wasn't even part of it. And I didn't have any kids. Well, you were writing stories and that is very true. The journalists who shine a light on these issues, including David Roberts, who's been at it for 25 plus years. Amazing. and is now running his own independent outlet to keep this attention, that was so important to having an opportunity to pass this law.

7:26Leah Stokes: And that's not just lip service. If we don't talk about climate change, if we don't have media attention and conversations, it makes it way harder. Like this particular moment, per se, it's a lot harder to make progress because we don't have that air game in terms of conversation. So journalists, including David Roberts, writing about it and talking about it is actually a critical part of the story in terms of how we get this bill to become a law. Next up, permitting geek Daniel Palkin walking me through the new bipartisan permitting reform bill in Congress, starting with how big interstate power lines get built today or don't.

8:06How does a big interstate power line get permitted today? What does this bill change about it? The short answer is it often doesn't. Yeah, I guess that's the right answer.

8:17Daniel Palken: So in reality, right, I kind of say that tongue in cheek. But before you even get permitted, transmission has a more fundamental problem, which is that because it is centrally planned infrastructure, it's good dating back to the kind of origin of the utility regulatory compact. It is kind of one of the things that is most like shared infrastructure, power flows over it between territories. It's hard to have a model where it's like privatized in a way where anybody can just build a line anywhere without having like a million lines running down Manhattan, as you kind of see these pictures of in like the 1800s.

8:48Daniel Palken: So transmission at some level usually be planned or go through some centralized vetting process. And what that looks like today. Yes, you've got the three Ps, the background here, permitting, planning and paying. We're going to touch on all those. Planning is, in my mind, kind of the most fundamental of the Ps, because if you don't have transmission that gets planned, there usually isn't another mechanism to bring it forward. And so in the U.S. today, we do a decent job, maybe a too good job, at building transmission within utility service territories. But we do a bad job building it between utility service territories, and we do an even worse job building it between what are called regions, these kind of RTOs or ISOs, and then equivalent regions that live in the parts of the country where they don't have those organized wholesale markets.

9:33Daniel Palken: And so what happens today, as an example of this that really like crystallizes how bad the situation is, interregional transmission. There's 11 of these transmission planning regions that were instantiated after a 2011 rule called Order 1000. Those 11 regions, there are 15 region to region borders where they touch each other. And that rule, that 2011 rule, has been on the books for 15 years. So some quick back of the envelope math, region pairs times 15 years is 225 region pair years, where every year since that order was passed, we have had an opportunity to do what the order lays out as interregional coordination, where the regions are meant to coordinate their needs with each other and find transmission solutions that meet them.

10:16Daniel Palken: Do you want to guess how many interregional transmission lines have been planned and built as a result in those 225 region per years. Is it meaningfully larger than zero? It is actually identically zero. We've built zero transmission lines as a result of that process that FERC tried to set up to do interregional coordination. It's not hard to understand why when you look at the process, it's incredibly toothless. What this bill does as a remedy to that is it writes a actually quite, I guess, toothsome would be like a version with teeth of an interregional planning rule that requires all these regions to get together with their neighbors on a periodic basis and go through a planning exercise subject to a bunch of known best practices, which have kind of been emblematic of the regional planning processes in regions where that has worked in the last several years, and identify needs that can be met with transmission, identify transmission solutions to meet them, and then select those solutions if they're meeting a set of affordability and reliability metrics that are essentially set forth in the bill, which there's very good reason to believe there's so much pent up need on the grid that we would have a lot of lines be able to meet.

11:22Daniel Palken: So that is one of the kind of central reforms in this bill. And then, by the way, it does the same thing at the regional level. But what if they don't? You know what I mean? What if they don't? Is there a forcing mechanism? There is. And this is the part that carries over from the EPR bill is kind of the one-two punch of these two priorities. The first is this. I'm not going to call it top down because it's really middle out. It's driven by the regions, but this middle out policy of having the regions get together and plan themselves. But then the failure mode of planning that we have observed time and again in this country is there are certain stakeholders that sometimes have a strong financial interest married with a capability to delay, delay, delay planning until it essentially becomes a paper exercise.

12:07Daniel Palken: To say it plainly, sometimes certain utilities are the entities that have the incentive to do that. This is probably unintuitive for people, right? Utility is the first thing you learn in utility school about them and that they want to build more infrastructure to deploy capital to make a regulated return. So why do they not want to deploy the biggest kind of capital of all, which is a large hulking transmission line between territories? And it's that last part. It's when you build transmission between territories, there's two things that are wrong with it from a utility's perspective oftentimes.

12:37One is that by virtue of going out of the territory, there's no obvious God-given reason why the utility that's only in one of the territories that the line is touching should have the right to build it. And so there's no reason that they can articulate to their regulator why we have to build this. And indeed, that's been reflected in regulation for years where regulators have said, yeah, like economically significant transmission that's built to solve problems like this, you've got to bid that out competitively to make sure people are getting a lowest cost. That ensures that utilities don't like it.

13:03The second thing, which is even worse for them, is that you often don't get to build the generation on the other side of it. The generation is being supplied from another RTO or another utility or developer somewhere else. It eases congestion in your area, thereby lowering prices in your area, which in a sane world would be a good thing, but not always from the utility's perspective.

13:43And that's the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more, become a paid subscriber at volts.wtf. Thank you.

14:10Thank you.