Fast Politics with Molly Jong-FastMSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes breaks down congressional Republicans doing the right thing in Ukraine. Bloomberg Opinion’s Jonathan Levin makes sense of what is going on with the American economy and rising insurance prices. Volt's David Roberts examines the Biden administration's progress on fighting climate change.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some.
Of today's best minds, and.
Judge Wan Marshan has told Trump's legal team that they are quote losing all credibility.
We have such a great show for you today.
Bloomberg Opinions Jonathan Levin stops by to make sense of what's going on with the American economy and insurance prices. Then we'll talk to Volts' own David Roberts about the Biden administration's progress on fighting climate change. But first you'll hear from MSNBC columnist and contributor the One, the Only, Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Charlie Sikes.
Hey, good to be back with you. Molly.
I am so glad to have you here because I wanted to talk to you first about there's bipartisan legislating happening on the Hill right now, and I was reading Punchbowl just a minute ago out how Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are both just so thrilled with this foreign aid package that they finally got through, Like we forget that this is actually the goal of government.
It is a remarkable moment. No, I don't want to downplay this. I mean, first of all, you know you had that vanishingly rare glimpse of political courage. Speaker Mike Johnson, the last person on Earth you'd expect to do it, was willing to put his speakership on the line. And yeah, you actually do have a Congress that seems to have taken a break from dysfunction. It's sort of like you look at it and go, this is the way it used to be, right, It's kind of like the before times.
I was so struck by it, and just like the fundamentals.
That Schumer and McConnell really do agree that this money spent now will save lives and money later for all of these different countries.
And also I think the margins are so revealing the fact that it was what was the vote on the Ukraine package, It was like three hundred and twelve votes in favor of it. I mean, this is overwhelming, This is not this is not a narrow margin here. It was one of those moments where Republicans behaved in a way that Ronald Reagan might have actually recognized. But also Tip O'Neil, the old days when when Democrats and Republicans sat down and actually in the end did the right thing. Now, as you know, though, I do think there is that, you know, I have to take a deep breath because we've kind of been here before, right, And I did sort of compare this to a Fada morgana a mirage that it really looks impressive. It looks like the flying Dutchman up there. But keep in mind, this is still Donald Trump's party. It's like this massive gravitational field out there, and all of these folks are going to bow the knee and they're going to kiss the ring and other things later this year and support Donald Trump for the presidency. And we know what that means for Ukraine, Russia, our place in the world, and that hasn't changed. So this is a great moment. But I kind of wonder whether it's sort of parenthesis of sanity amid all of the other everything else.
Yeah, as this is happening, right, the House is out, Republicans are campaigning against each other in primaries in like four different states, and then there's this enormous criminal trial which is happening in New York of Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels and the first witness today. This podcast drops tomorrow, so we will have had I think maybe all.
Of David Pecker's testimony.
Yeah, and it actually turned out to be pretty interesting, pretty compelling. Now you and I probably both remember, I'm having, you know, flashbacks to twenty sixteen when David Pecker and National Enquirer were flooding the zone with smears against other Republicans. And I just want to connect the dots here. So you do have this maga on maga violence going on where Republicans are attacking one another, they're posing one another, they're calling each other scumbags on national television. But back in in twenty sixteen Gimmember, when Donald Trump was smearing Ted Cruz, when he was putting bogus stories out about Marco Rubio and Ben Carson. And it's worth remembering, you know, how vicious and dishonest those attacks were, and that Donald Trump has never apologized for any of that, has never because this is again, this is the world, you know, and you know, he smears, he attacks, and yet what is the result. Everybody caves in, Everybody comes around, everybody pulls the floor, tugs on the forelock and says, you know, yes, sir, with the.
David Pecker staff. You know, he was the editor of the National Enquirer.
This is like the end of print magazines, right, National a Choirer is this is like the last gasp of print magazines.
It's the thing you read in the checkout line.
And they basically, and he basically admits during the testimony that he wanted every story about Trump to go through him. He wanted to run stories. I mean, he signed a non prosecution agreement, so the prosecution knew that everything he was going to say he had to sign this so he didn't go to jail.
Right. But everything he said.
I was struck by was like absolutely, now you're supposed to do at all, Like journalism is not at all supposed to Like you know, I was reading in real time and I was like kind of mouth agape and horror.
Well, it is the National Inquirer.
I mean, I don't know how shagrin.
Should be about all of this, but the degree to which they hoard themselves out for Donald Trump's campaign, and I thought that was the interesting thing is that he made it very very clear that this was to support the campaign, which is really central to this entire case. And I keep coming back, and you know, I.
Said this yesterday.
I just remember so distinctly how Trump's entire life and campaign was on a knife's edge after the excess Hollywood video came out. I mean, things could have gone either way. I was texting back and forth with mine's previous the chairman of the National Republican you know, the RNC, and he was telling me Charlie, I'm in tears about all of this. We now know that he told Donald Trump, you know, that he should drop out of the race. If more shoes would have dropped in those few days afterwards, the history of the last decade would have been profoundly different. Perhaps we will never actually know, but I think that that's important to sort of keep the context. Why Donald Trump was so anxious to cover this story up, to make these payoffs, why it was so super confidential, and why ultimately this case, even though it's the most I suppose trivial of the cases, why it still matters in this whole story of our weird, crazy and same times.
Yeah, it's such an interesting question.
I often think about this because I think about, like Nicki Haley, there was so much anxiety on the Democratic side that Nicki Haley.
Might be the nominee.
And you know, in my mind, I was like, you, guys, Nicki Haley is the nominee. I sleep well at night, you know, because I know that American democracy does not and if she wins, correct, you know, And so I mean do I love her?
No?
Personally as an opinion columnist, it's my opinion that I don't agree with a lot of her ideas. But you know, the dream is that the Republican Party will someday go back to running people like Nikki Haley.
And they had this moment.
I mean, had Mitch McDonald voted to convict, I mean, none of us would be here right now.
None of us would be here right now. I mean there's so many you know, would it could have here? Would it could as you know, as a as a og never Trumper, I keep thinking of all of the various soft ramps that were there and how it was all so predictable. It was like, this is Donald Trump. You know what this is going to do? And I think this whole, this whole saga, though, is just is a reminder that Donald Trump is Donald Trump. He was who we thought he was. What has been remarkable has been the way he's transformed the party, how the party has changed, not just its ideological position, not just its position on you know, free trade and things like that, but but the in the character of the party. I mean, the fact that one Republican after another is coming out saying, yeah, we don't care if he's a convicted felon. We talk about being numbed and normalized too much, but you know, up until five minutes ago, nobody would have supported a literally convicted felon for the presidency. And now that's become Republican orthodoxy. And that's, you know, part of this whole process of watching the Republicans look at Donald Trump and going okay, we'll accept that. Okay, we'll accept that. I suppose we'll accept that too. And the price TAK keeps going up and up and up, and they keep paying it.
Yeah, I mean, I know, it's not chocking.
The thing that I always found chocking was that people kept thinking like, at some point Trump might do the right thing. You know. I remember the first time someone said to be like, Trump will get in the White House, he'll see how small and it is, and then you'll leave.
And I'm like, no, we won't I'm like, this is the best thing that ever happened.
M Okay.
So there is a strain of wish casting I think among the observers that I try to push back on because people always have this, well this will happen, and then it'll be okay, well this will happen. I mean, at this point, and you know, as we're getting to the end of April twenty twenty four, we had to realize there are no Donald Unicorns that are gonna come and save us from this. Donald Trump is not going to wake up and go you know what I would rather you know, have you know, stan Mario Lago, I don't want to be president anymore. I'm going to give it up. But I will say this is not just Democrats who believe this. There were a lot of Republicans, you know, going back to twenty sixteen. I think the Paul Ryan slash Mike Pence wing of the party honestly believed that Donald Trump would be more interested in you know, putting in the you know, the golden toilets in the White House, and that he would leave policy to them, that they would basically be running the country while Donald Trump would be doing his bullshit thing they you know, engage in some wish casting. And obviously I think even people like Welln de Santis engaged in wish casting when he assumed that, you know, Donald Trump is actually indicted on a whole bunch of felonies, or if he's convicted of a whole bunch of villonies, I mean, surely Republicans will break away from him, right, I mean they're not going to do that, right, And it's like, damn, man, no, you misread that one too.
I shouldn't laugh because it's so horrendous, and like, I'm not laughing. It's funny because it is American democracy. But I do think that there were so many times when we really did and that's the thing, even like I think people who voted for him were wishcasting, you know, they were saying, well, he used to be a Democrat, he comes from New York, he's probably paid for, you know.
I mean, people didn't know what he was.
They just knew he was famous, so they could really put their own desires and fantasies on the kind of president he would be.
And they're still doing that. I mean, if you listen to people like Christan who who you know, in the back of his head, whatever's going on there is the Okay, he's going to go in there and we will be able to somehow manipulate him. We will be able to contain him and control him. And I think that, you know, the in the annals of wish casting, this may be one of the most naive forms because you know, Donald Trump has shown us over and over and over again who he is and what he is prepared to do, and that Donald Trump in the White House is going to be very angry. He's not only going to be angry, he's going to know how to do things in a way that he did not know the first time around. And I think people really need to think that one through.
Yeah, that is I think a really good point too.
You know, if you go to true social right now, like where he's gone is very dark, and it's a lot of stuff about the judge, which you were, a normal criminal defendant in a normal criminal case would never ever, i mean, you know, tweet about the judge. I mean, it's just he is sort of untethered by the laws of physics that ground the rest of us.
Well, that's right, and he's getting away with things that no other criminal defendant would get away with. And I do think that that's important to keep underlining that point, especially when he talks about the two tier justice system. But I also think that people need to understand that there is a there is a method to this madness. And I've always reluctant to say that about Donald Trump. But it's not just that he is trying to, you know, politically, spin these cases in a way that's advantageous for him politically, but it's also part of this longer term project that he has to discredit the entire criminal justice system. I mean, if you are a sociopath, if you are breaking the laws, you basically need to destroy the entire moral framework that might hold you accountable, the legal framework. So he does want to discredit not just Judge Marshawn in New York, he wants to discredit the entire system of justice that at some point will say no, you're not above the law. Now, if he succeeds in doing that, if he succeeds in persuading tens of millions of Americans that you know, there's no legitimacy to the courts, the juries, the prosecutions, the judges, then even if he loses the presidency, the damage to our constitutional order is going to be profound and long lasting.
And that I think really is such an important point and it's something I think a lot about. And it's what happened with the election right in twenty twenty. You know, he said it was reg and then now he has a good portion of Republicans following along with that, so we have like, he'll have damage first, you know, the elections, the election integrity, democratic values. Now he's going for law and order in the courts. I mean, you know, and remember me, we had the pandemic, right and well, the media, though, I feel like was a longer term project, but the pandemic was such an interesting one too, because Trump even you know, he said you should get vaccines, and then he realized his people didn't like it, so he went along with them.
Yeah, you start lining up all of these things that he has managed to delegitimize, you know, and again you're right about the media being a longer term process. But he's created this alternative reality in which he can push these lines. And then you know, it's hard to imagine Trump being the successful unless he had these alternative reality silos that would amplify his points and then cover other things up his success and delegitimize or his attempt to delegitimize elections science the courts. Again, this is not just I'm trying to say, not normal, but is more than the normal political give and take. And that's what makes what's happening in Congress sort of nostalgic. It's like, this is what politics used to be like at least this moment, this mirage of give and take and debate and amendments and then you have votes and things like that. Donald Trump is functioning in a completely different moral political universe. He is trying to tear down all of these institutions. Now it's not because he has some great ideological agenda. It's all in service of his incredibly damaged, narcissistic personality. But the damage is still very, very real. And how then the question is, ten twenty years from now, what are the consequences of that going to be? I mean, if Americans think the criminal justice system is bogus, if they think Congress is bogus, if they think elections are bogus, I think the courts are bogus, what's left? What goes into that vacuum, and it's not going to be something pretty, it's not going to be something that we want, right.
I think what's so dangerous about this whole thing is he got here by accident. Right, He ran for president again because he knew it was going to get indicted. I mean that's what Will Hurd said, right. So, I mean he did these things, like and the pandemic was not you know, just happened. But the combination of all three of them is this perfect storm of undermining basically all we have.
Well, that's right, And this takes place at a time when you know, the entire way that we get information is changing. I mean, this is this is something I'm thinking about a lot, Molley. Is the way in which the rules have completely changed. I think that a lot of the reasons we continue to be shocked and surprised by things that happen is that we're continuing to apply the rules of say, the nineteen nineties to this era of the thunderdome. Is it newspaper editorials mattered and things like that, that the facts and logic actually mattered. Think about the pandemic though we had more than a million Americans die, and it's like it's dropped into the memory hole. This isn't happened twenty years ago, This isn't happened three years ago. This we all remember it, and yet Donald Trump has managed to do this weird mind trick, like now it did not happen. You don't remember when I was talking about injecting bleach into your body. This is something different, and the degree to which he's successful is amazing until we realize that something else has happened to the American mind and the way that we process information. And I don't know that that gets fixed after the election either.
Yeah.
I think that's totally right, and I think really important.
I want to read the book you write about this.
But one other thing which I think as you're talking about this and made me think of it, is that it is about Trump, but it's also about this weird shift in American media and sort of connecting with people. But my one question for you, and again tell me this might be wish casting, is that maybe MAGA voters like he killed he didn't kill.
That's not fair.
He spread disinformation, right, and misinformation. Let's give him credit, misinformation that caused the death of a million people. So there is I just wonder how much voters like you know, that's a sort of unpollable statistic. But you know, if your grandfather died of COVID, you know, and you never because you didn't believe it was airborne, and you didn't believe it was airborne because you listen to a conservative media outlet. I wonder if ultimately that makes you a lower propensity voter not.
To mention the number of supporters who were dead and not able to know you would think so, But I don't know. So this may seem a little bit off. But and bear with me here, because yes, in a rational universe that would happen, people would remember that, they would be upset about it. He would pay a very significant price for all of that, right, because if you've lost a loved one, that's something that you can't spin away.
Right.
There's no true social post or ad that's going to make you forget about that or not care about that. And yet you know, on Earth Date earlier this week, I think you know, President Biden put out something about climate change. Scott Walker, who I know knew at one time pretty well, former Republican governor of Wisconsin, puts out a tweet saying, yeah, these are the same experts that told us to take vaccines during the pandemic, and they said that you wouldn't get sick if you had if you took the vaccine, which was bullshit piled on bullshit. But also it's like, what is your go to thing about the pandemic? It's to attack the effectiveness of vaccines. That's really where your brain is at. So the way in which they have turned this on its head is amazing, And the degree to which Republicans have dumbed themselves down on all of this, it's just now, maybe Scott Walker in retrospect did not have a long way to go to dumb himself down, but it was still like, Scott, what the fuck are you talking about me? So I don't know, Republicans have talked themselves into thinking that, yeah, you know, the real lesson of the pandemic is you scientists didn't know what you were talking about. Those vaccines didn't really protect this, and wow, how is that going to play out the next time we have a pandemic? Just leaving aside the politics for a minute, unbelievable.
Charlie Sikes, thank you so much for joining us. I went long because it's so much fun to talk to you.
It's always fun.
Mollie, thank you.
Spring us here, and I bet you are trying to look fashionable, So why not pick up some fashionable all new Fast Politics merchandise. We just opened a news store with all new designs just for you. Get t shirts, hoodies, hats, and top bags. To grab some, head to fastpolitics dot com. Jonathan Levin is a columnist focused on US markets at Economics for Bloomberg Opinion.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
John, Thank you for having me.
Mollie, very excited to have you so explain it is, what the hell.
Is going on here?
Because the economy is waring bad, but it's also has some problems.
Right, Yeah, Well, you know there's this thing in economics, like if you take an economics one O one class in undergrad there's this idea that you want the economy to be good, but not too good because if it's too good, then you have inflation. Right, So that's where some of the critics of this economy are coming from. And so basically people are obsessed about inflation again. Inflation shot up in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two. It's one of these things that takes a long time to get the genie back in the bottle once it's out.
And twenty twenty three was kind of great.
It was like what they like to call the Goldilocks period on Wall Street. We had sort of great growth, unemployment was low, and inflation was coming down anyway, defying all of the doomsayers. We had an absolutely awesome run at the end of twenty twenty three, like six or seven months of fan pastic inflation reports.
Inflation going down, but economy growing, jobs numbers, really solid, just everything you want.
One percent, one hundred percent.
And then here we are in the beginning of twenty twenty four and we get a series of three inflation reports that economists on Wall Street don't love, and the Fed doesn't exactly love either, and so this narrative has come back. That's like, see, we told you the economy is too good. We're not doing the responsible thing to put the genie back in the bottle. And my sort of message is like, hold your horses, We absolutely don't know that inflation in March came in at three point five percent year on year. What the quote unquote experts and the folks at the Fed one is something on the order of two percent, so we're not super far. We come in at three point five percent. This report in March that caused everybody to absolutely freak out.
What constitutes a.
Really bad report in the world of like finance journalism. We missed the mark by one tenth of a percentage point.
That's really what it boils down.
To, and that has created, you know, this snowball effect, the deleterious economy is too hot narrative is back Wall Street has gotten a little bit rocky recently. Everybody's saying, you know, interest rates are going to stay high forever again, and.
I totally think it's an oval reaction, is the bottom.
Line, right, Because what happened with this little bit of hotness, this inflationary hotness, which was pretty minor, as you're saying, it was a sign that the Fed wasn't going to cut interest rates, And all anyone wants is for the Fed to cut interest rates because it will then justice the economy more.
Right, Yeah, I mean, and to be.
Sure, there are certain parts of the economy that have really been suffering right right. Home sales exactly, potential new home home buyers who have been on the sidelines for a long time. We all know that there is this massive cohort of millennials that are trying to get their foot in the door, and they absolutely can because the numbers don't make any sense. Mortgage rates in many cases are over seven percent, and with home prices high, they just can't make the numbers work. So that's extremely frustrating for a lot of Americans, and some folks are saying, like, let's get on with it.
And frankly, you know, the Fed's position.
Which I don't think is an entirely unreasonable one, is like, look, we're not among the doomers. This is I'm paraphrasing Jerome pal here.
Yeah, I was going to say the doomers, I feel like, is not a Jerome pal Yes, paraphrasing Loose.
I like it.
Yes, continue J.
Powell is definitely not among the doomers. But he has said we're sort of a conservative technocratic institution. We want to see the evidence in the numbers before we start cutting rates. And so what I think that translates into is like, give me another three good inflation reports and you'll start to see your cuts.
Right.
So, best case scenario, that means we're going nowhere fast before like July. There's no meeting in August, so it's either July or you're looking at late September, right before the election.
Which will make Trump furious because it will juice the economy. And then he'll say, even though he put Jerome Powell in the job.
He absolutely did, he absolutely did. I mean, I think Jerome poll is a good guy first off.
And he's done a great job. I mean, relatively speaking.
He's done a great job. I think he's a straight shooter. He's extremely transparent with the American people. If you were motivated to get on the Trump conspiracy theory, you will say, well, look how bad Trump was to Jerome Pwll during his presidency. Jerome power al must want revenge. And that is certainly true in the sense that Trump was very, very bad to Jerome Palell. But I think that Jerome Palll is such a good guy that he still just wants to do the right thing.
Yeah, I mean, who even knows what lurks in his heart.
But the point is if he does raise I mean, I think the central tension that we need to talk about is that if he cuts rates too fast, he's worried that inflation will boomerang back. Right.
That's the general idea here.
But the key point that I also sort of want to drive home is when you talk to the inflation eistess or when you listen to somebody like Larry Summers talk about this, the reason that they think we might have a durable inflation problem is because they're trying to make this link between excess demand and inflation. And I have not seen evidence in the numbers like over the last nine months that are telling me that this really is primarily a demand problem. It's still these funky supply shan problems that are working themselves out right. So in the beginning, for instance, it was like the used cars and the car parts that started causing everything, and people say, okay, well that was an idiosyncratic thing and it's been worked out, So why isn't the inflation better right now? So the number one reason why inflation was too hot versus expectations in March was because of auto insurance. That's still the lagged effect of the weird stuff that happened in the pandemic. Right, auto prices shot up, and now auto insurers who are ensuring a price you're underlying good. They want to jack up your rates. You know, it stinks for all of us, but that's the way it works. And that process has a lot of latency because the auto insurers have to go to the state regulators and they have to say, please, may we raise auto insurance rates, and initially some states like California and New Jersey say no, and so like, even though the underlying inflation really happened in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, we're still feeling the effects and seeing them in the consumer price index reports. But that to me, like, that's an issue with regulatory latency. That's not a problem with supply and demand. That is telling me like, oh my god, we can't cut interest rates later in the year.
And now I want to talk to you about insurance. Okay, let's do it. You got me excited about insurance.
You know, I'm not not allowed, but I don't spend that much time talking about the economy, and I'm so interested in it, and then when I get someone in.
Here to talk about it, I'm so excited.
But you happen to also live in Miami and Florida is having an insurance inflationary shit show.
So explain to us.
And I feel like, if we're going to talk about inflation and we're going to talk about out the causes of it, insurance is a big one, and it dovetails with climate change and also my incredible dislike of DeSantis, so it's a sweet spot for me, So talk to us, Okay.
Yeah.
So there are a number of dynamics going on across the insurance landscape, and the very first issue is the most obvious one. The underlying price of stuff went up, right, So, like you buy an insurance policy, you're basically buying a promise to fix your stuff if it gets broken. And the cost of stuff and the cost of fixing.
Have all gone up over the past two years.
That's like the most near term and sort of principal reason why stuff has gone up in many homeowners' markets. That's compounded, of course by the fact that we have climate change, which introduces long term uncertainty. It's bringing more storms through places like South Florida. That is further compounded by the fact that we have an out of control litigation scene here in South Florida.
Like you drive up and down ninety.
Five and all you see is are these billboards for the plaintiff's attorneys saying like, we can get you three million dollars, and it turns out that that can be kind of problematic for a healthy and predictable insurance market as well. Obviously, the biggest long term issue is climate change. It's challenging because the insurance landscape is very kind of like old school and old economy, and they need to do a lot to reform their sort of models and understand the new risks that we're facing so that they can effectively price that risk. Otherwise you end up with these showdowns in places like Florida where insurance companies say we want to jack up insurance prices a lot, and then the regulators say, well, no, you can't jack up the prices that much, and then the insurance companies say, aha, we will just leave Florida then, and that becomes an even bigger problem.
Right.
So it takes some maturity and some understanding of basic economics, both on the side of the regulators and on the side of the insurance companies. But the bottom line is, if you want to live in a place like coastal Florida, you're going to have to pay for the risk that's not going away.
Part of what's happened is there is a certain kind of regulatory problem in Florida.
Right.
It's almost like there's really only sort of one insurer. The capitalism hasn't had the regulations that would make it, right. I mean, people just have left, and then you have this sort of the FEMA insurance, right, I mean, can you explain to us sort of how it works. The pricing isn't competitive anymore because there's only like one insurer in the state.
Right.
There are still some private insurers, like the big guy is the big national players. A lot of them haven't been here, and a lot of them haven't been here for a long long time. There was a big exodus of insurers after Hurricane Andrew way back in the nineties, and some of them just never came back. And because Florida is this sort of weird economic thing that depends so much on the real estate industry, they created effectively, they call it an insurer of last resort, but sadly it's become an insurer first resort for many many homeowners here. You know, they operate independently, but they're implicitly backed by the state of Florida and it's exactly as you say, Molly. You know, they're in there basically offering insurance for lower than what the true market price of that risk should cost in some cases, and they need to get away from that. They need to wean themselves off of that, because that is not a liability that is sustainable for the state government of Florida, right. You know, there's there's some concern, frankly, on a federal level that if things were to get terrible enough that Florida couldn't bear to deal with it, that it would ultimately become a federal liability. That's a problem too. But the bottom line is, like we're living in this age of climate change and we need to start to tell people if you want to live like on a Barrier Island community next to the beach, I one hundred percent, you know, respect everybody is lifestyle choices. I love living in South Florida. I do not live on the beach by the way. I try and seek out the high ground. But if people want to make those lifestyle choices, they're welcome to do it, but they need to assume the true cost of that risk. Government should not be subsidizing, you know, people's five million dollar lifestyles or whatever.
Yeah, it is kind of incredible that government is subsidizing wealthy people's speech ases. And it does speak to the it does speak to the craziness of all of this, right, yeah.
One hundred percent.
I mean, you know, look, I'm a Bloomberg guy. I've been at Bloomberg News forever, so like I tend to buy into this argument that.
Market I'm not saying that you should be a socialist here, but this does seem like not a place the federal government needs to be involved.
No, one hundred percent.
I mean basically what I was getting at was market forces. I think eventually are going to work this out. But it can happen in sort of like an orderly fashion, or it can happen the hard way, right, But one way or another, market forces are going to come in and set this right.
Yeah, I mean that is such an important point. Let me just ask you right now, what are you watching for and sort if you are in the Biden administration, what do you hope happens now?
Inflation really is the key thing, right, Maybe it's too much to ask for, but if you do get and I think it's totally possible given the idiosyncratic nature of some of the stuff that's going on under the hood of these inflation reports. If you get three or four better inflation reports, I think it's totally possible that the FED is looking to cut in September. And the way markets work, you know, if the FED is starting to plan for a September cut, then they're going to start signaling that much earlier, and bond yields are going to start coming down, and mortgage rates are going to start coming down, and that is going to make Americans.
Feel a lot better.
Another thing that I think could potentially make Americans feel a lot better is just an improvement in the news cycle on inflation. Right, So, like you sort of get stuck in this inflation news doom cycle. The cover story doesn't really care that much about what the underlying forces are behind the number. The headline says inflation came in hotter than expected, and that ultimately drives inflation expectations. It can become a self fulfilling prophecy, and that's just not a place that the Biden administration wants to be heading into November.
Yeah, And it is really I think quite a good point that it's something we haven't dealt with in such a long time.
We're just not used to it.
Yeah, forty years forty year is basically living without serious inflation. So it has been a shock to the system. It's been unsettling. It has absolutely affected real wage growth in terms of people's actual purchasing power. That wages have gone up, but after adjusting for inflation, they have not gone up very much.
That's frustrating.
I get it.
Yeah, thank you so much, thank you, thank you.
Thank you so much for having me on, Molly.
David Roberts is the editor of the newsletter of Volts Welcome Back, Too Fast Politics, Doctor Volts.
I know your real name is David Roberts, but I like doctor Voltz.
Hi there, y'all.
We're so happy to have you. And Monday was Earth Day?
Oh was it?
I think it was Jesse was Monday?
We need a fact check here, I'm kidding. I have an inbox and I'm an environmental reporter. It's been a hell week.
I mean, is Earth Day your election day?
No?
No, it's just it's more like, you know how everybody else on the internet feels about April Fools. They're just like, oh god, here it comes like Domy pitches bad jokes. We can we can get through this. That's how we all feel about Earth Day. It's just like the brands. They come out of the woodwork and say dumb things.
Right, the brands have terrible ideas on how to capitalize on climate change, but one of the good things. And again, I feel like people find this annoying about me, but I actually think that this administration has done incredible things on climate and maybe not. I mean, they're still not going to hit what they're supposed to, but they have a lot of Earth Day initiatives, and the Inflation Reduction Act has been I think great.
Am I wrong?
It is simply a fact that this administration has done extraordinary things on climate change. How you feel about that relative to what's needed is always up to you. But it is absolutely true that they have done extraordinary things. And it is also absolutely true that the vast bulk of Americans do not seem aware of that fact.
So talk us through some of them.
IRA's the big one, And the problem is it's like discussing IRA as one thing is a little bit deceptive, since, yeah, it was a basket of a bunch of stuff which has been rolled out piece by piece by piece, you know. So it's just a couple of weeks ago. They spent seven billion dollars on industrial decarbonization. That is the biggest thing. Like I had some guests on my podcast to talk about it, and the very first thing they said was, this is the biggest thing that has ever happened in industrial decarbonization, which is, these are the parts of the economy that were that not long ago everybody was calling difficult to decarbonize, Like this is the dilemma. Even if we decarbonize electricity and transportation, we still have you know, steel and concrete. These are the problem areas. And here's along comes. The administration has been seven billion dollars on like first of a kind project's demonstration projects, R and D. All this stuff is in and of itself a huge development, and it just sort of whisked by last week. And I won't even notice.
For those of us who are not environmental reporters, what does decarbonization mean and what is that life like?
Sure? So right now, I mean just thinking about industry right now, the way we make stuff generally and factories, and this is mostly about steel and concrete. Those are the two big ones, but also just every factory, potato chip factory, whatever, they all almost all use combustion of fossil fuels to get the heat they need. Almost all industrial processes do that, and we can't do that anymore. We can't burn fossil fuels anymore. So we've got to figure out how to make all those things without fossil fuels. And this is something that's kind of been hasn't gotten as much attention as some of the other high profile items like electricity, clean electricity. You know, everybody knows about clean cars, evs, everybody's up on that, but industry is just not something a lot of people think about. So it's been a little bit neglected. And the administration has smart people in it and they realized this and they said about doing something about it. So now we have this huge rocket boost for industrial decarbonization in the US, which is going to involve new factories open being the first new aluminum smelter in the US in decades.
I need you to explain what smelting aluminium is for the people on this podcast who are not my dad, who actually does know about smelting aluminum.
All you need to know about smelting aluminum is that it requires extremely high temperatures.
What are you smelting it for?
It gets using all sorts of things. You have to make a purified form of it. I mean, you're a.
Little defensive when we're talking about the aluminum smelting.
But again I continue, yes, yes, I love aluminum smelting. I mean aluminum too. Aluminum is very difficult to decarbonate because you know, the dilemma has always been how do you get these high heats out of renewable energy? And this is a problem that is being solved by engineers as we speak. And then this week or was it last week, they're all running together. It was twenty billion out the door in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. So that's a that's a fund created by the ERA that the EPA is sending out to disadvantaged communities directly funding clean energy and decarbonization projects in the communities that need it most. That's twenty billion dollars, a very big deal. And then yesterday seven billion dollars went out the door as what's called the Solar for All Program, also created by IRA. That's seven billion dollars specifically for disadvantaged communities, specifically to create rooftop solar and community solar in the communities where energy costs are the biggest burden, and that also is a big deal. Like if any one of these things had been passed individually, they would be seen as a big deal. And instead there's like two dozen of them shoved under the rubric of the Inflation Reduction Act, which no one understands that name, no one understands what it is. So so I understand why maybe people don't get the scale of what's happening here. And then on Thursday, the EPA is announcing new rules pollution rules for power plants, which are also going to be a very big deal. So there's just like big deals on climate policy happening right and left, and they're not getting the press they deserve. But I do feel like democrats at least should know about them. I do feel like at least climate activists ought to know about them. I feel like and even they don't seem to get it. So it's a little bit maddening. But yes, there's lots happening.
I'm laughing to keep from crying.
I'm not laughing because I don't think this is a big deal, Because I do think it's a big deal. Now, one of the things I was hoping we could do a few minutes talking about was the electric car chargers. Right.
Part of the problem is you buy an electric car.
And you might not be able to charge it anywhere, right, I mean it's not like gas stations.
So can you talk about that.
Well, that's one of the problems that's currently being solved being work talking. I mean, there's a lot of money being plowed into chargers. I think the last report I saw there's now one public charger for every fifteen gas stations, which is one way of marketing progress. Like, as a matter of fact, on my pod next week, I'm talking to a guy who's leading a team in Department of Energy who's doing nothing but thinking about how can people who don't have home chargers write a garage or something to charge in. How can people who live in apartments or you know, multi family residences or whatever, how can they charge? Like there's literally a team in Dewey that's doing nothing but beavering in on that. So there's going to be community chargers, there's going to be curbside charging. There's all sorts of solutions for this, and it's just This is one of those things. Is just a matter of time. We're just going to have to build a bunch of them, and in the next few years a lot of people are going to complain about the lack of them, and that problem is going to solve itself. This is just not something I feel like people need to worry about.
I mean, all I like to do is worry. But yes, I know there.
Are so many legitimate things to worry. I think you can strike this one from your list. Like it's going to take a while to build as many as we need, but we'll get there.
I Mean.
The thing that sort of saves us, not to get put too fine a point on it here, is that the solar just is still so cheap, and that everything's becoming so cheap that it's.
All going to sort of save us from dying in a heat inferno. Or am I overly optimistic here?
Things are getting cheap, Yes, solars getting cheaper and cheaper, cheaper than anybody thought it would get, and it's still got tons of runway. And the even sort of better news is that batteries now alongside solar are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and we're hitting milestones on there. Even wind, even though it's got to have a lot of bad headlines lately, are getting cheaper. Even evs, which also have got a lot of bad headlines lately, are getting cheaper. It's all just about timing, right, I mean, the consensus target of the UN, of the countries involved in the UN process was two degrees with you know, with efforts to limited to one point five degrees above pre industrial temperatures. We've already blown one point five. We're headed to two. So that's already bad news. It's already bad, like it's already happening and bad. This is all of climate change is just about how bad does it get? How much do you limit it? And so I you know, so there's these two contrasting forces. On the one side, you have politics, which are slow and frustrating and incumbents have a ton of power to slow things down and muddy the waters. And on the other hand you have technology. Technology is like unstoppably moving forward at this point. So it's just how those two balance out, and it's you know, it's hard to predict.
But I also do think, like what you were saying just now is that we are in a moment where there's a lot of exciting stuff happening. This summer is going to be another really hot summer. I mean, like the effects of climate change are happening now.
I mean, are we at a place where it can't be reversed? And can you just talk about it?
Sort of looks like in the day to day this is sort of the aspect of things that climate people don't really enjoy talking about because it's not it's not great, But like the next call it ten to twenty thirty years of warming are more or less built in. Like, there are some things we can do to affect warming in the short term, mainly methane. This is something that should stick in people's minds. Methane. It's a greenhouse gas. It is more potent at trapping heat than CO two, but stays in the atmosphere much less time. It falls out on its own relatively quickly.
But it makes it hot fast.
Yes, so if we can cut methane emissions substantially quickly, then you can have a relatively quick effect on temperatures. But I don't mean bring temperatures down. I just mean have them go up more slowly.
It's so bad.
Temperatures are not going to stabilize. I mean, this is the basic math of climate change that everybody but they need to understand. Temperatures are not going to stabilize until we hit net zero, until we stop sending greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So until that happens, temperatures are going to grow and grow, and effects are going to get worse and worse. And some of that is built in already, Like I don't think we're not going to see like these wildfires. We're not going to see that trend reversed in our lifetime, especially us olds best case scenario, best case scenario that's a century or two away, after we've you know, stabilized, stopped emitting greenhouse gases, then started sequestering a bunch of them, so we're actually lowering the amount of CO two in the atmosphere, and then scientists think maybe over decades temperatures might come might start coming back down again. But like that's our kids kids, maybe best case scenario that are going to experience that For us in our lifetimes, temperatures are just going to go up and the effects are just going to get worse. That's just the rude truth of it.
One other thing that we don't really know too much about, but they're certainly hints is cancer and chemicals and environmental contaminating.
Like, I mean, is.
There more of a suggestion that these two things are, you know, the environmental the pollution and the chemicals and carcinogens and cancer rates rising?
Can you talk about that?
There are connections, and some of them are a little bit counterintuitive. Like the obvious connection is plastics, So like, plastics are awful, They cause all sorts of awful health problems, they cause all sorts of awful environmental problems, and they use tons of fossil fuels, and we don't have good ways of decarbonizing them, Like we do not yet have good scalable alternatives to fossil fuel based plastics. Like if you want to really get depressed, read up about plastics and plastic policy. Like that's like it's just all all grim. Another and more counterintuitive connection is the kind of particulate air pollution that is worst for us, worst for our health, is in part created by burning fossil fuels. But it also that very same pollution shields us from the sun a little bit like shields us from some of the effects of climate change. So as we start cleaning up and burning fewer fossil fuels, there's going to be less of that particulate pollution, and so temperatures are actually gonna counterintuitively spike a little bit when we clean up that air pollution. So that means we have to reduce sort of twice as fast as we think we do to get the beneficial effects. This is what you know. When people talk about geoengineering, they talk about spraying particles up into the atmosphere to shield us from the sun. That's basically what we're doing by burning fossil fuels, only we're doing it in an extremely unhealthy way. And that's what geoengineering is talking about, just doing that in a less unhealthy way. But you clean up pollution, in some sense, you make climate change worse, at least in the short term.
The polling on climate change depending on how you ask and talk about that.
The way I'd summarize it is, I think most people, average people, normies, people on the street just don't have deep opinions about climate change at all, or deep feelings or really deep beliefs about it. They're very shallow, you know. They have a couple of things that have lodged in their minds, which means you can get them to say almost anything on a pole. You can get them to say yes it's important. You can get them to say no it's not important, just depending on how you word the question. They're just very shallow and can be easily pushed this way and that generally what you find though, is people will say, yes, I think climate change is the problem. Yes, we should do something about it. No, I do not want to personally pay much more to help. That's what people will say on polls. But I don't know if that's a very good guide to the politics. I just don't think issue polls are worth the paper they're printed on, obviously. And what's frustrating to me that I'd like to get out while we're talking here is this is frustrating me forever, the conflation of sort of climate change, the damage of climate change, all that stuff with the clean energy transition. The clean energy transition is going to help with climate change, for sure, but it's also going to be awesome for a bunch of other reasons. It's going to create jobs, it's going to clean up our air and improve our health almost immediately, it's going to create energy security. These are the industries that are going to dominate the twenty first century. So it's you know, it's economic competitiveness. Like there are a million reasons to do the clean energy transition that have nothing to do with climate change, and so I would love it if we could like start talking about that as a separate thing and polling it separately and not conflating those things because climate change has become kind of a culture war thing. It's been coded with all this weird culture war baggage. But if you just talk with people about, like would you like a car that goes way faster and does not poison you when you're driving it, Like, you know, there are lots of reasons to go for that new car that just have nothing to do with climate change. So I would just love to get people excited about the clean energy transition in and of itself.
Yeah me too, man, meat too. I mean, just so insane. Doctor Voltz, thank you so much. I know your name is really David Roberts, but I really appreciate you.
And that was great.
Thank you, awesome, happy to be here, No moment full.
Jesse Cannon, Molly Jong Fast Marjorie Taylor Green is having fantasies and delusions yet again. This time it's about Trump being in prison, which I thought was saved for the left.
Here's the quote. They want to lock him up in jail for the rest of his life, so he dies in jail. She told Jones, a conspiracy theorist who owes the victims of Sandy Hook one point five billion dollars.
I mean, I don't know.
Is there a more cursed paragraph and American political discourse than that?
And that curse paragraph is our moment of fuck Ray.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.
