Central Air - Central Heat (w/ Robinson Meyer)

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

On this week's show: Robinson Meyer, executive editor of the excellent Heatmap News, talks with us about why oil has not gotten even more expensive, if there is hope for permitting reform, why Republicans hate windmills so much, and if there ever been a greater environmental advocate than ‘Degrowth Donald.' And where can we put data centers so they won’t bother anyone?Also this week: Josh's despair at the continued unwinding of the social contract, and Democrats’ despair over the Virginia Supreme Court.Plus, exciting news: we’ll be having a listener gathering in Washington, D.C., the evening of Tuesday, June 2. More details on that soon. Sign up for updates from Central Air at www.centralairpodcast.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down. And Megan McArdle is also here. She's a columnist for the Washington Post. Megan, we have an update on our brownies discussion from a few weeks ago. Yeah, there are more wrong people in the world. It's my great sadness. Yes, yeah. Kristen Sultes Anderson, who's the business partner of Patrick Rafini, the pollster we had on a few weeks ago, took our assignments regarding the brownies. and whether they should be made with vegetable oil or butter

and took the Girideli brownie mix that we talked some about and how it's mysteriously inexpensive and made it with butter instead of the usual vegetable oil. And her verdict was that vegetable oil is better because it produces a better texture. So first of all, I want to thank Kristen Sultes-Sanderson for agreeing with me. It's always nice when someone writes in to say that I was correct about something. But Megan is like vicariously disgusted.

To each his own, to gustavus non-estis bitandum. but I don't like the taste of vegetable oil. And I think I must be tasting something that other people are not, because it really bothers me and it does not appear to bother most people. Well, so I will note that I sometimes see discussions of like which vegetable oils have off flavors. And I have never noticed a vegetable oil tasting fishy. But the whole point of these things when America's Test Kitchen will write about which vegetable oils have off flavors is that some of them don't have off flavors. I have tried many a vegetable oil. They all taste like vegetable oil to me.

Have you tried making like brownies with grape seed oil? No, because having cycled through like four other oils, I gave up. Okay. And concluded that I was not going to enjoy baking with vegetable oil. Okay. Can I point out that this was also the discussion where I recommended Tillamook ice cream and people wrote in to complain about... Tillamook.

It's apparently, it's apparently the town is called Tillamuck. But I would just like to point out that this. This ice cream company uses cow puns in the naming of their ice cream flavors, which is why moot makes more sense, because you're mooing like a cow. Tillamook. Wow. Ice cream. Look, I would also just like to register a complaint about the great vowel shift that has

left us with this conundrum sense in old, in like middle English and like early modern in English. This would have been Tillamoke. Tillamoke. Let's send a letter. I think maybe we can fix this with the folks at the dairy. We have a guest with us this week. Robinson Meyer is

executive editor of the Climate and Energy News site HeapMap News. Robinson, what do you put in brownies? I think vegetable oil, but I am a co-partisan of that Gear Deli browning mix. It is so good. You can stockpile it.

describe myself as first time, long time, but I've missed this particular brownie discussion. But I would have agreed that it is actually kind of incredible and affordable for what you get. Yeah, so, by the way, we partly solve the mystery of how a box of it costs, what, $3 and change or something. It's like, it's not an expensive item. Yeah, it's like $3.50, yeah. But so part of it is that it makes an 8 by 8 pan of brownies. And I'm normally making a 9 by 13 pan of brownies when I make them from scratch. So that's all part of the mystery. I would need two boxes of the mix. But that's still, you know, at six or seven dollars worth of mix still looks like a pretty good value. That's a great deal. While we're on this topic, you know, the Tillamook dairy is a

fantastic roadside attraction in Oregon if you ever go. I've heard this. Yeah, that it's actually fun to go to the dairy. Yeah, it's like very good. If you're driving down, I think it's the 101, right? if you're driving down the Pacific Coast Highway, it's like the only thing kind of in 20 miles on each direction other than beautiful Oregon Coast. And I went there a few years ago. It was great. Well, that's a great tip for our listeners. So the brownie mix, not too expensive, very expensive these days, petroleum products. So that is a little bit of an issue for your road trip there down the Oregon coast. Do not try to use the brownie mix in your car. Well, excellent at his a pointed purpose, it will not make a good fuel substitute. And don't use crude oil to make the

brownies. Yes, exactly. No, nor that kind of vegetable oil in your car. Grape seed or algae or whatever. Right. So Matt Iglesias sort of has this running joke that Donald Trump is the president who finally had the boldness to implement the plans of anti-fossil activists and really force a genuine reduction in the volume of crude oil consumption, forcing people to keep it in the ground in the Middle East by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. And Robinson, I just wanted to ask you about this in the sense that, you know, we've had this whiplash in the U.S. in terms of our climate policies, and you had big subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act under Biden and really this big push toward a green transition in electric fecal and that sort of thing. And there's been a big swing

back both a policy swing and to some extent a non-policy swing where there was a sense that we over-indexed on electric vehicles and maxed out what consumer demand was there. Is there now a sense that the disruption that we're seeing here in the crude oil trade, not only pushing up prices, but also making it less secure, less certain that you can rely on stable crude oil prices? Is this creating at all any resurgence in energy or hope around the clean energy people that this creates longstanding private sector demand for what they're offering? I mean, our in-house name for this is degrowth Donald, is this kind of repeated, like, tendency among in Trump policy to favor policies that would like, if they were passed, you know,

are kind of along the lines of what Green Party's want. And so the key one last year was he wanted to tax. And this is not the first time he's done it because it really started with Liberation Day when he wanted to tax Canadian oil. of which the U.S. was the only market and we get at a very, you know, cheap, cheap cost. I think it is, but I don't know that it's creating that kind of, I mean, I think, look, anytime that oil prices get high, there is a resurgence of interest in fuel-saving technology. And I think, and, you know, if you look at the past 30 years, you know, the only time that

Americans have not generally opted to buy larger cars or, you know, switch to SUV. and have kind of made a concerted, like, choice for small, more fuel-efficient vehicles was in the 2007-2009 period, which was the recession, but was also when there was this huge run-up in oil prices in the mid-aughts. And so I think, like, there is some sense now that maybe, especially domestic automakers, kind of over-indexed on SUVs and, you know, we don't really, gas guzzlers would be a strong term because the, you know, cafe standards and the, you know, you know, GHC standards mean that SUVs are more efficient than they were 20 years ago, but like, that they over-indexed on big cars and that there might be this kind of resurgence of interest

in hybrids. I think where the real excitement is, if that's a fair description, is not in the United States. It's that where the oil crisis is really hitting right now and the energy crisis is in Southeast Asia and South Asia and, you know, Indonesia. Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam. These are countries that got like 70 to 100 percent of their oil from the Strait of Hormuz, right? The producers there are directly supplying them. In some cases, they were also reliant on natural gas from Qatar. They're the places that have seen these very, very high prices for like physically purchased oil, you know, north of $150 a barrel. And they're also the ones that have like implemented the most stringent.

policy that have switched to civil servants not going in every day, that have kind of, I was talking to a friend in Singapore and he was saying, you know, the school bus just announced that they're going to have to do a fuel surcharge for everyone, for every student who takes the bus. Those are the places where the energy crisis is hitting now. And that's also the places where there's like already cheap Chinese electric vehicles available and where there's cheap Chinese grid scale batteries available. And so I think that's where the third. thought is there will be more long-lasting kind of consequences from this crisis, at least assuming that the crisis doesn't get worse and kind of plasticize around the world.

Are you perplexed in the same way that I am around that oil prices haven't gotten higher than they have so far? I mean, you mentioned, like, in some cases, $150 a barrel for physical delivery. Brent Crude is at $107 a barrel as we tape today. Back in 2022, we had a global oil supply disruption that was much smaller than the one we're experiencing now, and it caused prices to go up a lot more than they have this time. And so I've, you know, I've been sort of wondering if I'm going to wake up in the morning next week and find that they've gone to 1.30 or something. Is this really sustainable for the prices

to have only moved this much? No. But, you know, what's kind of mysterious about this whole thing is that prices should have already moved far more than they were. And I think 2022 is like the key example in that I was talking to someone who worked in Democratic foreign policy recently. He was like, In 2022, there was no supply shortage. Supply was never affected in the liquid fuels market. And prices are much higher than than they are now when we have the biggest supply shortage in history. And some of this seems to be that in the traded market, right, in which case, you know, basically every barrel of oil is kind of speculated on 83 times before it's roughly 83 times before the actual physical barrel is sold. And in the speculative market, traders are very

scared of a taco. They're very scared that Trump could just end this crisis over any time, and they're more worried about losing money from that than they are eager to make money on high oil prices. I do think that this is like, I mean, it's puzzled everyone. It's like completely befuddling why prices aren't higher. And when you talk to the barrel counting people who are kind of the source of ground truth for this stuff, they can kind of make the math work, but they are as puzzled as anyone. And I think when the straight was first closed, the sense was we had about four weeks of kind of air in the system that we could let out, of supplies in the system in inventories that could keep prices down. It's not been eight weeks, and we're like four weeks

past this moment when, you know, the shortage is really supposed to hit. And obviously, it's like oil is higher. It's gone from 70 to kind of 105, 110. But, but, you know, the shortage is really supposed to hit. But, you know, the shortage is But it's not at the absolutely apocalyptic levels that back, say, in mid-March, people were telling me it would be at by now if the straight was still closed. Part of this is because, you know, when you talk to people, they can kind of come up with reasons why the math has worked out. They can say, okay, well, there was a lot of what's called floating storage was just tankers on the water from Russia and Iran. And we basically lifted all the sanctions on that crude. and so it can trade freely on the global market. They say the U.S. had big inventories.

You know, kind of going into this year, we thought there was going to be an oil glut. And so a lot of countries had big inventories, and they're all being drawn down. And so maybe that's bought us a few more weeks. And then the big X factor is that China has spent the past few years building up a pretty large strategic reserve, like both through the government and through private inventories. And I think it was assumed when this was happening that China was kind of, building up domestic stocks. So it had geopolitical flexibility in case I wanted to do something kind of big and it was a little worrying. Now this looks like a relatively prudent move that has

insulated China's oil market from the global prices and also China's basically allowed China to basically stop buying oil for the past six to eight weeks. And so part of why prices generally have stayed low is that China has kind of dropped off the global market as a global purchaser. and this has like helped allowed supply and demand to equilibrate for the time being. Do we have a sense of how long they can keep doing that? Because the coverage I've read of that has said people are, it's a little bit of a black box and people don't know about the extent to which China can sustainably stop buying like that or if eventually they're going to run out of this buffer.

And that's when the shit hits the fan. No, I think we don't have a great sense. When China was building up strategic inventories, it was doing so in a way where it wasn't Those purchases, like, weren't showing up in its ledger. You could kind of know the oil was going there, but it wasn't reporting them in the same way that it was reporting other purchases. And so we don't really have a fantastic sense of how big that buffer is. I think the other place where the shit's going to hit the fan is, like, the U.S. had relatively big inventories under private ownership. I mean, this is not the St. Petroleum Reserve. This is just like oil companies have

their own buffer. And we have been really drawing those down over the past few weeks. and when those get low, that's when I think we'll really start to feel it in gas stations here in the U.S. Megan, how does this have you feeling? I'm really interested in the China factor. I'm really interested in whether Donald Trump has bailed out Elon Musk. I have seen people talking about, well, I was watching some social media exchange with the progressive. He was like, look, I really hate Elon Musk, but I have to replace my car. And maybe now has time to buy an electric.

And all of the other electrics are bad. And Rivian is, like, having trouble. So I wonder if this is an elaborate plot. Finally, like, we're bringing in the characters from last season as we trend towards the finale. And I'm also interested in this question of how fungible is the oil market right now? Right? Like, normally it's pretty smoothly. Like, you can just move.

stuff anywhere, but with the Strait of Hormuz closed or semi-closed, is that still true? Or is that breaking down because there are just places you can get the oil and places you can't? I mean, they've, like, maximized the fungibility to the degree they can. So both Saudi and the UAE are, like, exporting. They have these pipelines that go to the Red Sea, and they're maxing out those pipelines at the moment. And you did see things like in April as Asian prices really started to run up. you'd see like American tankers on the way to Europe turn around so they could go to Asia.

Like basically there was this, you know, Asia was kind of this, Southeast Asia was this like black hole in the oil market. And it started to just suck all the oil from the rest of the world into it. And that's like how this will ultimately drive up prices around the world, right? Is that ultimately there will be some quantum of demand there that just sucks, you know, spare capacity in from the rest of the world. But like, you know, I assume that eventually it equilibrates. But is there a moment? where it just doesn't, where, like, oil can be cheap in one place and not cheap in another, or relatively. It's all expensive everywhere, but Asia seems to be suffering a lot more than we are.

Where you would see it is in the refineries, because the refineries are built to handle certain types of crude as an input. Right. And so eventually, I guess you could get to a point where, you know, refineries are operating below capacity because they can't get the kind of crude that works for their own, especially engineered mix. I do think that there is, like, I'm kind of giving the house answer about why oil prices aren't higher, but I don't want to, like, overlook how weird this all is.

And that we are supposed to be four weeks into a crisis. And the crisis, the, like, really, really serious part of the crisis has not yet materialized. And people who do physical oil forecasting can tell you why, they think this is, but they are themselves completely befuddled and perplexed about why prices aren't higher. And like, there is to some degree we have, we're missing 15 million barrels on the global market. And like, it's not creating the catastrophe that it should. So there is, I mean, there is this weird way in which Trump breaks markets, right? This is long than the mystery of why the

stock market has not reacted more to, like, his tariffs, why it took so long, why people didn't believe In the first term, I answered many questions about, like, why is the stock market so sanguine? And part of that, I think, was that they figured, well, he's going to be deregulatory and that's ultimately good for companies. But the markets have weirdly struggled for 10 years now to price in Trumpian chaos. They don't know what to do with it. He's so abnormal that they just don't know how to process it. And I think we've seen these weird things over and over where you expect the market to do one thing. And it just fails.

It just refuses. I disagree with that. You know, the economy did well through 2017, 2018, 2019, and I think the sort of orthodox story of why it didn't react more was correct, which is that most of the economy is services rather than goods. There was real economic drag from the tariffs, but it was, you know, both focused on just one part of the economy and it was offset by other growth-inducing policies, deregulation and tax cuts and various things. And then in the, you know, in the recent period, it's just been this whole AI thing that the, idea is that there's so much upside coming from all of this AI investment. And I'm not saying that the markets are right about that. I'm just saying that they're coherent about it. They have,

you know, there's this idea that this, you know, this upside surprise has happened, that it turns out we're going to have all of this economically productive innovation that we hadn't expected before, and that's pushing the markets up. And it could be wrong, but it's not, you know, it's not a, it's not a crazy read of the situation. It's not that it's not that the market prices don't reflect the information that market participants are out there ingesting. But the oil thing is genuinely weird. I'm in Washington, and so there is a general, like, the markets did not seem to believe the tariffs were going to happen. And everyone in Washington was like, the tariffs are definitely happening, and they're going to be bad.

And, I mean, they did when he finally put them in, but then he kept tacoing and changing them. And markets didn't know how to predict it because he was unpredictable. But even where he is predictable, the market just seems to struggle to believe that, like, no, this thing is going to happen. I mean, that may be, I would talk to people on Wall Street and they would be like, well, our political intelligence people don't think he's going to do it. And I was like, fire them. What are you talking about? And there's been a kind of consistent thing where Washington is really puzzled by Wall Street. Robinson, I was going to ask, so you mentioned the refinery mixtures, right?

They all have to have bespoke mixtures. We have those ones in the Gulf that, like, they made in the Outs that are designed to have, like, way heavy crude. you know, or like more heavy than, and that was what they were, the Venezuelan oil that was like on some ships that we had that they took in. Did that ever, did they, whatever happened with that when Trump was making, you know, extorted them into giving it to us or whatever it was. Is that in the refinery? Did that enter the system? Where that entered the system, I don't know. I think it was sold into the general market, but I don't know exactly at what point. I think it was handled. Like I, it was, I don't think those

tankers are still sitting around, and I think the Navy is some way of dealing with it. But it was a little surprising what happened, but then I didn't follow up the back end. Let's take a quick break, and we'll be back with more central air with Robinson Meyer. One other funny thing about this global energy disruption that the president has set off is that it should, in theory, light a political fire under what was already one of the few bipartisan priorities in Washington in the last couple of years, which is permitting reform. And so we have this whole series of energy shortages. some of which matter more to liberals and some of which matter more to conservatives.

But the idea has always been that you can tie this up in a bow and you make it easier to do solar and wind rollout and to do electrical transmission and liberals like that and you make it easier to permit fossil fuel projects and that makes conservatives happy and everyone kind of likes nuclear and geothermal now. And where this had been stumbling as of last year was that really it looked like a lot of liberals care more about stopping pipelines than they care about getting electrical transmission built. And a lot of conservatives have emotional feelings about windmills. And that's the main thing driving them here. And they figure that they can get enough fossil fuel stuff permitted under their own authorities. And so those talks have not been getting that far. Now that the energy shortage is

more acute, partly because of the war and partly because we're seeing, you know, this ever-increasing demand for compute capacity that we need data centers for, that that's, that is becoming increasingly difficult, that maybe we're getting toward a point where you can actually do a bipartisan deal on that. Where is that sitting in Congress right now, Robinson? Are they having productive conversations? So I think they are having conversations. There's reportedly built, I mean, we've seen text of a few different provisions that would ultimately go into a permitting reform bill. So one of the big ones is this bill called the Freedom Act, which is about permitting certainty, is basically making sure agencies can't reject energy projects that had already been approved

or can't fail to give an energy project and authorization that would be very routine. There's language about transmission. Republicans seem quite eager to get this done. Democrats are suggesting that they want to get it done. I think there's a sense that this would be the year to do it and that the timeline would be something like in the next few months, probably before the August recess, you'd want to get text done, and then you'd ultimately pass during the lame duck. Congress blast passed a big energy bill that wasn't partisan, the Energy Act of 2020, I believe, during the lame duck. And so it's like, that is a very natural period. to do these kind of bipartisan compromises where no one quite loves every element,

but it's good for the country. I think the biggest question now, honestly, is like, you know, this is our third attempt at permitting reform, I believe. There was the first one. I mean, there have been iterative attempts over the years, but in the current cycle, you know, Senator Joe Manchin wanted permitting reform as part of the deal to get what became the Inflation Reduction Act done, ultimately Democrats. in the Senate didn't want to cooperate on that. There was then in the following Congress,

Democrats maybe were interested in doing something and Republicans put something together, but they weren't able to make it happen in the run up to the presidential election. I think partially because Republicans knew they were about to have Congress and knew they were about to have more leverage in these negotiations. This time, Democrats are basically see the case for permitting reform much clearer because Donald Trump has used a lot of tools that they first developed to block pipelines of fossil fuel projects during the Biden administration now to block renewable projects. And he's invented a lot of new tools as well. And so Democrats are like more on board. And I think some parts of the party, some members of the party basically believe it has to happen now

because if there is a Democratic president in 2029 who wants to build stuff, you'll need permitting reform on the books. And if you want to build, say, a lot of renewable projects or nuclear projects or transmission lines or whatever it is, you actually need permitting reform to happen now. I do think there is still kind of a rump part of the party that is skeptical of giving the fossil fuel industry kind of anything, anything, and is very skeptical that these tools, once they're created in law, won't be used disproportionately to allow a lot more natural gas and pipelines and oil than they'll allow renewables or transmission projects or whatever. And I think, you know, this faction you'll, like, hear about in negotiations, it hasn't completely identified itself publicly. Like, everyone is saying, oh, we want permitting reform to happen. But, like, whether, I think this is the big question about whether we actually get a deal this

year. I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't thrill me that it's Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse are the two key Democratic senators on this. It just so happens that two point people are, like, very left-wing people within the caucus. Yeah, Heinrich's good on transmission lines. He like sees the, he fought for a long time to get this big line built across New Mexico called San Zia that took 20 years to build. And so I think he sees the rationale on transmission lines. And I thought a good sign the other day was that Democrats in the New Mexico State House wrote a letter that was like, we love that Martin Heinrich is doing this permitting reform.

Like, we really want him to do it more. Yeah, Senator White House, interesting question there. And the degree to which House Democrats are involved in this, I think. think is also you wouldn't need them theoretically to get a majority, but as often happens, the House Democratic caucus is like to the left of the Senate Democratic caucus. And so their willingness to go along with this is also, I don't fully understand. Yeah. Megan, have you been following the latest wind stuff? No, no. Please tell me, Josh. So when you build wind electrical generation projects, sometimes, you know, you're offshore and you need a lease from the government and there's been

shenanigans with the administration trying to block those and then buying people out of the leases when it failed in court to block them. Onshore, you know, sometimes they're on private land, and it seems like you ought to be able to just build a windmill if you want, but you have to go through a process with the FAA to make sure that doesn't cause problems with radar. And this is a real thing. Sometimes there are real radar problems, but you can fix them. But so what has apparently been happening starting last year, but intensifying in the last few weeks, is that one of the agencies the FAA has to ask is the Department of Defense about do you have any radar problems? with this. And the Department of Defense has just been bottling all of these up and apparently

making it impossible to get any new wind projects approved, even when they're on private property. The president made comments back in January that he would just like to prevent any further windmills from getting built. And so, Robinson, I get, when I look at this, the first question I have is like, can they do this? Because some of the stuff they did with the offshore stuff, it turned out they couldn't do. They ended up in federal court and the courts ruled, no, you have to let this project go forward. Can they actually use this authority? Because this, I think, worries me about building a permitting reform framework because, again, it's not like the authority here is nonsense. Like you actually do need to do these reviews about radar impacts. You probably do

need to get these government agencies to weigh in. But if they act in bad faith, at least under the current rules, they can bottle the things up. I don't know whether and how you can fix that. Yes, you're right. I mean, I think you're not, this is not supposed to work, right? And I think one thing that has made the Trump administration's efforts to bottle up wind, effective, even though they keep being ruled illegally, is that they just keep coming up with something new. And so first, it was, the Department of Interior was refusing to review, you know, kind of its permits that it had to review. Then it was kind of anything related to water suddenly had a federal nexus. And so the Trump administration has just kept coming up with different reasons why it can't approve projects. And like, those reasons then all get thrown out by courts. But because it has done it in this iterative way where it just keeps finding another federal

permit to block, like it's succeeding in significantly raising the costs of these projects and significantly, you know, discouraging any kind of private wind development. I think the term that my colleague J.O. Holtzman used was like an extradition judicial killing of an industry because you're not supposed to be doing it this way, but if you keep coming up with these reasons, you can do it. So in the permitting reform package, there's this bill called the Freedom Act, which is meant to address situations like this. And so if you don't get what's called like a routine authorization, which I think one of these FAA permits would be for a wind turbine, within 90 days, you can go to a court and the court will force the agency to do it. And that is a little bit different from the

current law where there's not a statutory deadline and the court wouldn't have as clear a case to be like, okay, you just need to issue this, like either say yes or no. That piece of legislation also like has an insurance mechanism in it and also kind of a fine mechanism in it. So if the DOD or the DOW, as some now call it, was refusing to issue these permits, then it would face like a daily fine. I do think there's up to like a thousand or a hundred thousand dollars a day. You do start to wonder a little bit about this mechanism. Like would the Trump administration just be willing to pay like $100,000 a day to not develop win projects? it would eventually get expensive.

Who does the fine get paid to? It gets paid to the developer by the agency, and it has to come out of the authorizing agency. So you couldn't just pay it out of, there's this DOJ fund that's supposed to be like that they've been using to pay off the offshore wind leases where basically if the government loses a lawsuit, it's supposed to pay out.

Yes, exactly. They've been using the judgment fund to pay out the leases. Yeah, we cover this a lot on serious trouble. The judgment fund contains a literally unlimited amount. amount. So, like, what is it with the Trump administration and windmills? Like, did a windmill kill his mother? Or is he actually pandering to a sizable NIMBY base that hates windmills? I mean, I see people complaining about them. They look fine to me. But there are people who really hate them. But is that what's driving this? Or is this just, like, Trumpy and whimsy?

There are wind nimbies, and it's kind of about their effect on the landscape. And allegedly, you know, if you're driving on a rural road at night and there's lots of wind turbines around you, it can be like it's just kind of disorienting. This is what the, this is like the steel man version of the anti-wind case. I mean, I think the wind thing to me is like the ultimate realization or the kind of Republican side of all energy politics, ultimately partially being culture war politics, where like this is, the thing that Trump has demarcated as like, this is not my type of energy. I hate this. And when you talk to Republicans about why this is, they do actually think it goes back to this Scottish golf course and the offshore wind development there. And he hated the offshore wind in Scotland. And this, like, radicalized him against wind. Like, it's not like when you talk to the actual practitioners of the

policy or the implementers, they don't have a better idea about why this particular directive is coming from the White House as opposed to say anti-solar or anti-batteries or whatever. But at this point, I think Trump has also communicated that, like, to be pro-Trump is to be anti-wind, and that has given the policy kind of its own momentum. At the same time that there are these difficulties rolling out new production capacity, there is a lot of concern about rising electricity prices. And it's becoming a dominant issue in state politics around much of the country. And we're starting to see proposals to freeze electrical rates. Mikey Sherrill ran on this when she ran for governor of New Jersey. Graham Platner, the likely Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, is now out

with an energy plan that includes an effort at a national electricity price freeze. And so I sort of assume, you know, like you need the market to clear. You need to bring supply in line with demand. If you don't let prices go up and there isn't a sufficient amount of electricity being produced, that should lead to shortages, which should mean rolling blackouts. And, you know, we've, I mean, this is what happened under Great Davis in California in 2002. And when that happens, it's an absolute political disaster for the party that presides over it. Like, if you think people are mad about high electricity prices, what really makes them mad is when there's no electricity coming to their house. And so far, we've avoided that.

I assume because it's such a political disaster. Because, I mean, there is supposed to be some sort of rate freeze in New Jersey, as I understand it. How are they responding on, you know, I want the price control on my electricity without causing the demand to outsource? strip the supply. I mean, I think you're generally right. Like, you can't just freeze electricity prices and then not suffer some kind of supply shortfall. I think there is more, you know, politicians or policymakers have more freedom to interfere with market function, in part because the markets are so often convoluted in electricity. Like they don't, it's, in some ways, the whole electricity market is itself a little bit of a fiction because really electrons travel where they are on the grid,

and you have to have the infrastructure to send those electrons around. And then we've put a market on top of it to rationalize the proceedings. But the electrons just, you know, if you buy an electron, you are not actually buying access to that physical electron. You're kind of rationalizing the function of the grid as it already exists, if that makes sense. There's better and there's worse ways to freeze electricity prices. And I would put the Platner proposal at the big end of worse,

because also the same Plattenor policy also, wants to end the federal gas tax, but somehow support clean energy and all of this. So the Sherrill policy, I think, is closer to better ways to make a rate freeze work if you feel like you want to do a, if you feel like the politics are such that it would make sense to propose a rate freeze. I believe New Jersey is in this rate freeze right now. She promised it during her campaign. And there were a number of circumstances.

that like made it made that policy like make a little bit more sense. So first of all, New Jersey just, a number of the New Jersey utilities, I think there's three, just hiked their rates last year. And so there had just been a big price adjustment in the New Jersey, you know, for New Jersey utilities. The second thing is I think she said the rate freeze would only last one year. So it was just going to be a one year rate freeze. And then the third thing is she said how she was going to pay for it. So New Jersey's, where she basically hinted how she was going to pay for it. So New Jersey is part of the northeastern greenhouse gas market, this thing called the Reggie.

And she basically has said, I mean, I think the state is in the process of using funds from Reggie to cover any gap between what rates need to cover and the utility costs. And so it's like more of a stop gap there. So the idea there is the rate payers are paying something and then the state pays something to utility costs. on top of that, and that encourages the utilities to go out and find ways to generate more electricity or acquire more electricity? Yes, although I think really the dynamic here is that she only has to make this, she only has to make the math work for like another six months or something. Part of the dynamic in New Jersey is that what has really driven up electricity rates in New Jersey is not actually like the day-to-day cost of electricity. It's this mechanism

in the the country's largest electricity market, which covers New Jersey and the whole mid-Atlantic, Pennsylvania, Maryland, kind of out to Ohio and Chicago, which is this, it's called the capacity market. And it's meant to be like an auction-based mechanism.

It happens a few times a year to bring on new power plants onto the market and to encourage basically developers to go out and build new power plants. And the run-up in data centers in the Mid-Atlantic, the data center boom, has driven, this capacity price auction up a lot and has and that those higher capacity prices were actually

driving a lot of the rate increases in New Jersey. Kind of what's interesting is there's another rate freeze happening here, which is that Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania had basically forced the PJM or asked the PJM capacity market to cap its own rates because these capacity markets were like not actually bringing up new demand. So they were anticipating future demand on the market, but not actually succeeding in bringing on new capacity. And they were just going, the sense was that the revenue from the capacity market was just going to existing power producers. And so it's a complicated dynamic because to some degree, the rate increases that New Jersey

has already seen are from this market mechanism, which is already currently being reformed by a set of regional governors because it wasn't seen to be working. But so are we going to end up with shortages? I see all this news about, you know, all these local fights over data centers. And some of this looks overheated and stupid to me. And like, you know, the, as someone from the eastern United States, I could look outside. I see that there's plenty of water. It is very wet here in New York. You know, I mean, in general, you know, agriculture uses way more water than anything else, including, you know, whatever is evaporating from data centers. So it seems like there's a little bit of just like a dumb panic here. But it, you know, I mean, in general, you know, agriculture uses way more water than anything else, including, including, you know, it seems to be genuinely true that these things use a lot of electricity, you plug them into a grid that already has a lot of demand on it. And so when people say, you know, I don't want a bunch of these things going up around me because that's going to push up electricity rates because it's competing with me to buy electricity in an environment where it's hard to add a production capacity. That makes a certain amount of sense to me. I assume that, you know, around the country we're going to see more of this political opposition because of exactly that. Is there a plan to deliver the additional computing capacity that, you know, key industries in the U.S. need without making electricity more expensive for everyone? No, there's no plan. And in fact, it's a total speculative bonanza right now.

And one thing that's made this whole data center, like Maras, such a, so chaotic, is that historically data center development happened with like what we now call the hyperscaly. The big tech companies went out. They developed data centers through a few third-party data center developers. But these data centers were like developed in ways that were very rational. They went and found towns and cities that wanted a data center in them. The growth wasn't that explosive. Part of what happened since 2022 is that there's been a boom in basically wildcat or data center developers who are like in some cases like three or four guys in a truck or like an

EPC company with no experience in data centers that's now going out and building one. And those have both told the utilities that they're going to build. to data center. And so kind of said, yes, we're going to add, you know, 300 megawatts or 500 megawatts of demand here. Sometimes they've told multiple utilities this, which like really messes with their forward planning scenarios. And then kind of there's a sense that like not all of these projects are going to pan out, but if you do get one of your 10 data centers to pan out, then they're enormously profitable. And so it makes sense for there to be the speculative behavior. But what it has done is inserted chaos into the electricity market. I guess the other thing it says, like, to some

degree, we already do have shortages of electricity, and data centers are dealing with it by generating electricity on site and what are called, like, these behind-the-meter facilities. They're getting diesel generators or natural gas generators and some cases batteries and just generating their own power, sometimes entirely off-grid or sometimes, you know, the data center will need, you know, 500 megawatts and it can get 100 megawatts from the grid and then it's going to develop and it's going to produce the other 400 megawatts that it needs on site. And so that's the other way that like to some agree we already are seeing shortages that are appearing on the grid, they're just being dealt with privately. My understanding is that like if you're using these diesel generators, it can be

noisy for nearby residents and it doesn't pass the like the actual standard for noise. pollution, which I think is 93 decibels, 95, somewhere around there. That's really loud, 95. But it is extremely annoying and people kind of get mad about it. Yeah. So we at HeMap, we have a market intelligence thing called HeapPro. And we track basically data center projects that are opposed across the country and then data center projects that are canceled after local opposition.

And first of all, these numbers are surging right now. It's like all of 50 data center projects were canceled after local opposition in all of 2025, and at this point, more than 50 have been canceled in 2026, or it's very, very close to more than 50. What we see is that, like, the number one reason people oppose data centers is because this electricity and water concern and kind of their general environmental footprint. The number one reason that data center projects actually get canceled after local opposition is noise. Like noise is far in a way the reason these things get canceled. And we kind of think it's a proxy for like someone was trying to build them too close to a residential area because it's fine if it's in an industrial area or kind of fine if it's just out along a road somewhere.

But that someone was trying to do a project like it was basically next to a housing development. And then they stacked on coolers and generators and by the end it was going to be too noisy. Why don't they just go find like a lot of farmland in Iowa? where there are nothing but cows. Why are these things being built close to people? It depends. I mean, there's a historic, huge data center cluster in Northern Virginia. And that's there because the Tier 1 Internet connections there.

There's like a backbone fiber optic internet plugin is there. And so that's historically been where all the cloud-based data centers are. And I think one- It's where America Online was headquartered. Like Northern Virginia. Exactly. Yeah. It's part of our internet history.

And like a lot of early tech companies were there and still a lot of the kind of backbone, you know, infrastructure of the internet companies are actually in Northern Virginia. You know, there's worth kind of drawing a distinction between the cloud data centers, which are what we had historically called data centers. Like every type of data center up until 2022 was basically a cloud data center. And these are relatively efficient, relatively quiet warehouse style facilities that, that did not put a lot of demands on local infrastructure. And in fact, that towns and cities and counties were welcomed as a form of economic development because they paid a lot of property taxes and they weren't very disruptive. The AI data centers that are actually doing the training or the inference on site are extremely

power intensive. That is where this, I think, a lot of the local opposition and kind of this bonanza of opposition and development has come from. I mean, they do build in rural areas. It's just the rural areas don't like them either now. I mean, the training ones are so interesting because, like, one of the biggest ones is in northern Nevada, the worst place on Earth. Like, there's no, no one wants to live in northern Nevada. But it has a lot of geothermal energy, right?

And it also has this, like, massive Google data center thing, like outside Reno. And I was just reading that they also have, like, they're building some over in the other worst place on Earth, which is North Dakota by the fracking fields there. But they only work for the training ones because, like, I guess, and I don't know how real this is. But the thing that they always say is that, like, they need to have one near D.C. and near New York and near all that because of latency for stuff like that. And so those training ones, though, they should be able to put in the middle of nowhere where no one cares. So it is a little confusing why they want to put those in suburbia. So I'd never thought about this distinction. So it's basically, is it like, you know, a typical cloud data center is mostly for storing information.

And so you need to be able to get it quickly. But the new data centers are, because they're doing a lot of computing, they use more energy but don't need to communicate as directly with users. Okay. Exactly. So, and it's hard to understate how much electricity the actual training requires. So you're talking, I mean, people are not wrong when they're talking about the unprecedented. I did scale of electricity demand from data centers. And when you look at a single facility using 500 megawatts or one gigawatt, that is like a

city's worth of electricity. And in terms of what has that footprint and what uses that much electricity, the only precedent is like an aluminum smelter. And so there was like some talk of should we be trying to, you know, if there were back when I think people were thinking about a data center bust and what would happen if. the AI bubble or AI boom kind of popped before the point that it's reached now, there was some question of like, should the government be trying to buy up these utility connections and then use them for another, you know, for something else?

Should it say, okay, well, we know there was going to be a 500 megawatts or 300 megawatts of demand here. Should we save that and then put a factory there or like kind of encourage other forms of economic development? And I, you know, my, I was talking to Princeton engineering professor, and he was like, what are you going to put there that uses that much electricity? Like, we could have a virgin aluminum industry in the U.S. Like, that is the scale of electricity demand we're talking about. We're going to take it back from Iceland. Yeah, exactly.

They've sat on that cheap geothermal power for so long, for too long, and we're taking it back. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break. And then Ben has a question for Robinson about a key film of the 1990s. This is Central Air. Hey, I'm noticing you've listened pretty far into this episode. You must really love this show. And we really appreciate all of you who have been joining us every week for Central Air

or maybe because you love our talk about permitting reform and oil markets or Ben's deep dives into early environmental policy inspired by films of the 1990s. If you're loving this, I really encourage you to become a supporter of Central Air. Go to Centralair Podcast.com, sign up and become a paying subscriber to this show. it's actually a really good time to do that because very soon we're going to start giving our paying subscribers more of what they're loving, which is to say that there will be a paywall break in these shows. There will be some show for everyone, but there will be a part of the show that is only for the supporters who are making it possible for us to make this show. We also have other offerings. We're doing those periodic substock live conversations, which are available as replays for our paying subscribers. We're going to have that in-person gathering on June 2nd for those of you in Washington, D.C., and we're hoping to do some. something coming up in New York as well. So I encourage you, go to centralairpodcast.com,

sign up now. You'll get your own personal private podcast feed, so you'll get every full episode, and you'll be the first to know when we announce something new. We'd really love to have you. Again, that's centralairpodcast.com. So, Robinson, there's a number of reasons that we wanted you here this week, but one actually has to do with a series of newsletter issues that Ben wrote about the American president, which is Aaron Sorkin's mid-1990s love letter to Bill Clinton. This is a movie about a widowed president who falls in love with an environmental lobbyist, and he brushes aside advice from his aides to moderate ahead of the election with this crime bill

and instead presses for her legislative priority, which is a climate bill, to require at first a 10% reduction, but then he says, no, let's do a 20% reduction in carbon emissions. And we're also going to ban handguns to boot. So this movie is obviously, you know, a Democrats' fantasy of public opinion. But Ben has a different objection to the movie, which is that he says that if you'd actually gone ahead with that sort of fossil fuel clap at that point in 1990s, we would have been on a completely different and much worse history track with no fracking. And so, Ben, can you describe for us? First of all, like, if you say, okay, we're going to pass a law, we're going to have a 20% reduction in emissions, was this like a carbon tax? What was going to happen in this movie and why would it have foreclosed the fracking boom before it ever started?

So this is actually what got me on this was that the movie doesn't give you much, much details about this at all. They just say 20%, 10%. Shockingly. They variously do talk about how Michigan hates it. So you know Cafe standards are in it. Like that's one thing that's definitely in there. That's fuel efficiency standards for cars. Right.

And so basically I went down this rabbit hole trying to find out what the early bills were in the 90s that would have inspired Sorkin to do. because Sorkin, everything he does is based on something someone once sold him in a DC cocktail party. And so basically what you find out is that 20% comes specifically from this Toronto target number when all these scientists got together in Toronto in 1988 and just said like, well, 20% fossil fuel emissions would be great to cut. And that then inspires this first round of very early bills from Democrats that go essentially nowhere. And those bills all use the 20% number, but because they also don't really know what to do, do, most of the bill is, we'd like the EPA to look into this and get back to us. You know, like come up with a plan.

They have some things where it's like invest in hydrogen or it's like least cost planning, but they basically don't know what they're doing. And then, so that goes on for a while. But then in 1990, they do the Clean Air Act amendments to deal with the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain. And the acid rain thing involves stopping these coal plants from doing all these awful pollutions that they were doing. And that used a cap and trade mechanism, which then ends up sort of like part of the international framework for Kyoto seven years, seven years later.

Should note that the cap and trade mechanism in those amendments was a wild success. It actually fixed the acid rain problem, got rid of the sulfur dioxide emissions. Yeah. And it somewhat created, like, I think a lot of people at that in that moment were like, this was such a success and there was like so little blowback to it that we can maybe reutilize this. But then, like, the most direct thing that I could find is that when Clinton first became president in January of 1993, his first budget had this BTU tax, which was something like a carbon tax, but it's not exactly a carbon tax, you know? It's charging you for every bit of energy burned. And it's not exactly just environmental. Like it also attacked, it also applied to like water, like dams, you know, hydroelectric stuff, which doesn't make any sense.

because it was mainly about like raising money to close the budget gaps, because that's what everyone cared about. But then that gets killed and you get the first gas tax, which was the like thing he got out of it. Well, it wasn't the first gas. It was the last time we raised the federal gasoline tax was in the 1993 budget. Right. Sorry, sorry.

Then he loses the house. They lose the house by a zillion points to Newt Gingrich. And when they can no longer do that, he then comes up with this new thing, which is like some voluntary efficiency programs, like Energy Star, which is the most famous. But there's actually a bunch of them that he came up with. And so when you're going back through this bill,

what would this bill look like if it was a liberal fantasy? You know, you can basically take all of those efficiency programs and mandate them and throw money at them. You can come up with really aggressive cafe standards. And that gets you, I spitball, guesstimated, about 10% cut. You know, that's before doing anything. But also, I mean, that's a total. somewhat shot in the dark. It might be less than that. It might be a little more. But after that,

you then have to start going to coal plants and shutting them down. And you have to, like, hurry up a transition from coal to natural gas, which is what all those bills that I mentioned before did anticipate because natural gas is cleaner than coal. I mean, it has more methane, which they couldn't really check very well back then. But regardless of that, they all envision the U.S. grid moving from coal to natural gas. Like, that was the, the position. So basically, what's in this bill, it would have to be those efficiency standards, CAFE, and then some mechanism to force an early transition from coal to natural gas. And the problem with this is that efficient fracking methods haven't been invented yet.

Right. So the problem is that 1995 is such a bad year for this, because one, you're going to devastate the exact same areas that are about to get devastated by NAFTA. Like those people are, it's, you know, this is the double tap going into shooting them in the head. But that also, natural gas at that moment was only a little bit more expensive than coal. And when you add in all the costs of building a coal plant and, you know, putting the scrubbers on to make sure it doesn't cause acid rain, natural gas sort of became cheaper at that moment. So there was already a little bit of a tiny movement towards it just because of Oregon.

business stuff. But if you forced this, at that moment, coal was 50% of the energy in America. So if you forced it, those costs of natural gas would skyrocket because we were not in an abundant world of natural gas yet. It was still a gas scarcity. I mean, it wasn't necessarily scarcity, but it was like not, we didn't have, they only had traditional wells and they had these very expensive fracking things. On Earth one, what happens is that exactly two years later, this guy named Nick Steinsberger at this company called Mitchell invents this cheaper thing to do. Normally they used these expensive gels to frack

and he was like, what if we just did water? And they all thought he was crazy and he did it. And it worked wonders. And then they were bought by another company that innovated horizontal drilling and all of these things happened so that around 2008 you get the shale boom which unlocks all of this natural gas.

and importantly, it unlocks more natural gas than like the natural gas market even really needs because it becomes a light crude boom, which releases associated gas. So like oil drillers in Texas get all of this associated gas. They have nothing, they don't even really want. But then it enters the market because the natural gas market, because it's there and there's regulations about it. So there's the market for natural gas in America has this huge, like, free incidental gas that leads to accidental abundance that keeps it all cheaper. And if you did all of this, if you tried to do this transition in 1995, you wouldn't have any of that. So everyone's gas prices would rise so much that a Democrat would never win ever again.

He would be, Michael Douglas would be impeached. They would have riots. Well, he's already losing because of the handgun ban. But, yeah, the handgun, the handgun ban is my dad plays the villain in this movie. And my dad and I used to joke that the sequel to the American president was my dad as president because of the handgun ban. He's a Republican senator from Kansas in the movie. But so, I mean, the thing, Robinson, when I read Ben's take on this, is that, you know, if you had this policy that created all of this new demand for natural gas. And this is back at the time when natural gas was the good guy.

And like people understood natural gas as like a lower carbon, lower pollution, alternative. narrative to coal. Like, doesn't that create a lot of market demand for new gas extraction technologies? It seems like it would be more attractive to invest in finding cheaper ways to get natural gas out of the earth rather than less if Michael Douglas comes in and imposes this mandate that effectively requires people to use a lot more natural gas. I think we might get the fracking boom even sooner. I think I agree with you. I mean, I love this counterfactual, and I also love that both of the issues in the movie are things that Democrats are now furiously modelled. on or have spent the past, you know, seven years furiously moderating on, you know, guns and

climate. I think so the two big innovations, I mean, to fully run the counterfactual, the two big innovations that got us fracking, in addition to scaling and learning by doing and all the stuff, once we kind of had figured out the technique, we're using water instead of these fracking jills, but the second was applying horizontal drilling to fracking. And so we had kind of used horizontal drilling in other formations, but fully industrializing its rollout and combining it with fracking, with hydrofracturing is like what produced the boom of the lay odds. I think the third, and so both of those things we like knew how to do in 1995. And so the only thing keeping us from doing them was discovery.

And to some degree, I think you're right, like the demand for gas would have driven that discovery probably sooner. The interesting dynamic here is that the kind of X factor in all of this, which I don't think we've covered in the counterfactual so far, is that what helped bring fracking innovation to market in the odds was the run-up and gas prices because we thought the U.S. was running out of natural gas. And it was this huge concern of the mid-aughts energy security community is that the U.S. had been a domestic net exporter of natural gas or net producer of natural gas basically

since the beginning of the natural gas industry that we had never needed to import natural gas. And then in 2005, 2006, there was this fear that we were running out of it through our conventional reservoirs. And developers actually began building liquefied natural gas import terminals along the Gulf coast. And that is part of what elicited this drive to then search for natural gas by any means possible and made fracking pencil out. I think if we had been using more gas early, in the aughts, we would have experienced that same shortage through our conventional reservoirs earlier as well. Maybe, you know, you never know, maybe we would have found other reservoirs that we were willing to exploit in Canada or something because it made sense to do so,

given the politics. But I think we would have experienced that, like, secular shortage of natural gas from conventional reservoirs earlier and then developed fracking earlier. we would have then gotten all that free oil, too. And who knows, I mean, to really run the counterfactual, then the question is, you know, what does this Republican mega administration do with the oil boom that it's sitting on? And how much do we export and how binding is the climate legislation? I guess we just become a net oil exporter earlier.

But like, I think ultimately what would happen is we would just realize this actual shortage, which truly occurred in the, you know, 2005, 2006, and 2007, earlier in time, earlier in that decade, and the same innovations would have happened anyway. I guess my thing is that if that happens, right, if the cost of natural gas goes up so much that it's, you know, it's efficient, it makes business sense to go after all this oil up there. And all this gas they already knew was there, right?

But it just hadn't been economical to do before. Then what you get are people drilling just as much as they can? while it's economical. You know, they're not going to do it so much that the price drops. And what happened when in Earth One is that we kept, we got more gas than they wanted. You know, there's more gas than the gas companies and the gas drillers in Appalachia want because of all of these other things. And so it allowed it to be cheaper. Whereas if I feel like you're right in that they would match, they would drill enough to get the supply to meet the demand.

but they wouldn't drill more than that, which would keep it lower. But that's always what the market participants want, is like not to cause the price to go down. They fail to coordinate. They end up driving the price down. They can't do it. They can't do it now because of everything else. I mean, you could argue that, like, the regulation become, regulation is one of the few ways that players can coordinate, right? Is you get your regulator gets captured by the industry.

And then you've got a mechanism that keeps... prices higher than they otherwise should be, right? Possible? Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess I think the other thing is that I think you're underestimating the exuberance of the American oil and gas industry in that I totally agree that we got all this basically free gas in the mid-teens because we were producing all this oil and the gas just comes out of the well too and either you pump it somewhere or you burn it as you're

out of the year you've already described. But in oil, we were producing, like the ecosystem of American exploration and production companies were producing way more oil than the market could support anyway. And so, you know, the American, like the Permian Basin and the American oil companies were constantly driving themselves out of business because they would produce so much oil that they could not, that their own production wasn't economical. And then they'd be sitting on wells and you got this wave of bankruptcies. And so I guess my feeling is that you would, as soon as the technology was available, and as soon as there was demand, I don't know why you wouldn't see that in gas instead of oil. And maybe it's that the gas market, because it's basically domestic is smaller than the global oil market. But I think they're a very exuberant bunch, and I think they would have responded to the new technology in the same kind of crazed way that they did on Earth One.

Well, Ben, you'll have to write that screenplay for a, the Senator Rumson presidency. I think, you know, after listening to Ben's various obsessions, I just think more screenplays and movie releases need to be accompanied by the white paper that explains the underlying policy. It's true. It's true. I think Ben should have that job. Yeah. He should be the highly paid white paper guy for American movies. Yeah. Yeah.

Very highly paid. But not so highly paid that he knew. longer needs to do this podcast. Right. I think we can leave that there. Robinson, this was really interesting. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. This was great. Thank you. Thanks, Robson. Thank you. So one thing we touched on briefly there, in addition to those efforts to freeze electrical rates, is we're seeing proposals to suspend, or in the case of Grand Platinum, to repeal the federal gasoline tax. And I understand this as a political reaction. Gasoline's very expensive. It's a burden on people. And at least

It's a bad policy, but it doesn't drive me as crazy as certain other policies because at least it is very broadly spread. Almost everyone uses gasoline directly. Everyone pays for gasoline indirectly. That's, you know, in the price of goods and services that they produce. It's not a good impulse in part because when you have relatively constrained supply and you remove the tax and the market still has to clear, a lot of that just means a higher pre-tax price for gasoline. And that's just a windfall for producers. So I hope that. There will be some restraint in terms of following mass demand for that gasoline tax suspension. But it's also related to this broader trend that we're seeing where everyone thinks that they shouldn't have to pay taxes anymore. And I wrote a newsletter issue about this, that it started with no tax on tips, but then you have no tax for teachers, for no property tax for seniors, no tax for cops, no tax for veterans. it's all, you know, everyone else should pay taxes because I still need government services, but I personally should not have to pay because I'm special. And it's annoying, but it's, I want to be a little scoldy about this. It's also immoral to have this idea that, you know, we have, you know, broadly shared social obligations

and other people with similar amounts of income to me should pay for the government so that I can have the benefit of the government, but I personally shouldn't have to pay. It's not that different from Giotolentino going and stealing lemons from Whole Foods. because, you know, she relies on other people paying for their lemons so that Whole Foods will continue to supply lemons so she can steal them. Similarly, if you want to say, you know, well, I'm, you know, I'm a teacher, I shouldn't have to pay income tax. You're still relying on other middle income people to pay their taxes so the government can provide services to you. And people should just feel a little bit of shame about expecting, you know, society to work for them, but wanting a special deal where they personally do not have to pay in. So I think this is complicated.

I mean, first of all, what I think is that people don't, they don't morally understand that a tax subsidy is the same thing as handing out cash. But it is. That, like, if you, like, yes, I get it. All of the nerds on this podcast and many of the nerds listening to this podcast understand that if you don't pay taxes, someone else has to, given a fixed amount of spending, someone else has to pay that money. and you were basically taking money from them to give tea. I have tried to explain this to normies, and it just does not land. I mean, like, it lands with liberal normies who like taxes, or at least in the abstract. It does not at all land with normie normies or conservative normies.

And that's part of it. But the other thing is, like, we do have all sorts of deductions, et cetera. We can argue that we should just have a broad-based tax code, no-ded whatsoever. I would actually agree with that. I think if we're going to subsidize stuff, we should just subsidize it. But given that we do, I think, I think in fact the fact that our tax code is so complex, the fact that Congress likes to hand things out in terms of tax subsidies, because people process them differently, has kind of conditioned people to think that that's a normal way for the government to do business. And so I think the immorality of what Tolentino and

Hassan Piker are saying is twofold. Number one, they know better. I'm sorry. No one's parents raised them to think that, I mean, like the most fatuous thing about that Tolentino remark is that she wasn't even arguing like, I stole lemons because I couldn't afford them. Or I stole lemons because, like, I don't like whole foods and I want them to go out of business in my neighborhood. She was literally like, I forgot the lemons. So I just went back and got them because she was too damn lazy to stand in line again. Right. She knows that's not. right. She knows that in no way does anyone think this is okay. No one's parents raised them to think that was okay. But the other thing is, it's illegal. There is a law against it,

and you should have a presumption in favor of following the law. In fact, especially in this case, it's illegal for a good reason. And I think for the people who are trying to weasel out of paying taxes or think it's great, no taxes on tips, no taxes on retirement. hires, et cetera. I get it because they don't, they don't understand the underlying problem. And it's also, we're just jockeying over what the law should be. And that is fundamentally different from being like, I don't think I should pay taxes on tips. And therefore, I have not declared them to the federal government, right? Those are two different kinds of immorality. And so I don't think it's exactly the same thing. I agree it's bad. It's a huge public policy problem.

And people need to understand that no, it cannot be. There's the famous Russell Long, he was a senator. There's a Senate office building named after him. Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree. That does not work. And in fact, everyone should pay taxes to support the society they've chosen to live in. But I don't think that it, I don't think emotionally or politically I can see those two things as the same. Ben, what do you think?

The thing about the lemon thief and the entire phenomenon of this that made me laugh so hard with Gia Tolentino is that you know how there's been this. All supermarkets now have the self-checkout places. Yep. Which normally you go to because it's quicker, like the line is shorter. I have recently been observing like a phenomenon where the line for self-checkout will be really long. And then there will be just a cashier line empty that you could immediately go to. Now, there's no reason on earth to bag your own groceries and do all of that and not have a catcher to it unless you're a thief. Unless you're planning on, you know, maybe throwing one of the things into the bag while not doing it.

And so whenever I see that, which is now constantly all the time, I think, God, there's more Gia's out there than we want to admit, you know? Well, I mean, the funny thing with when Gia Tolantino and Hassan Piper had their conversation with, with New York Times opinion about stealing from Whole Foods. The inspiration for that was an article that ran in New York magazine in March about people who steal from Whole Foods. And it was these sort of insufferable artsy types in New York. And maybe that's just because the author is an artist who knows other artists or maybe artists are more likely to steal. Because, I mean, they sort of had this justification that was basically, I'm, you know, contributing to society through my art and I'm underpaid for it. And I deserve this sushi from Whole Foods. Yeah. Yeah. But one of the funny things

that came out of that article that I actually, I think it was, Whole Foods didn't cooperate with the article, but it was actually great for Whole Foods because the message from it was Whole Foods is watching. And they have this like undercover team of people looking for theft who will then stop these people and take them to Whole Foods and then ban them from Whole Foods. And in certain cases, if they stole enough, we'll actually like call in the police and get them charged with shoplifting. So one of the the messages from that was that if you're going through that self-checkout line to like not check things out and put them in your bag, that Whole Foods might actually notice that. And that's part of why they allow so much self-checkout that there is enforcement around this.

So I thought that was a pro-social message there, that there are consequences for stealing from Whole Foods, or at least that there can be. But there was another news story that made me, you know, continue to despair for our society that happened the last week, which I don't know if you saw there was this Frontier Airlines plane that some idiot trespassed onto the airport campus in Denver ran into middle of the runway and got run over by a frontier airlines plane. And so they had to evacuate the frontier airlines plane, you know, down the shoots. And they keep making this announcement that's like, leave your luggage. No, please seriously, leave your luggage.

Do not take your luggage down the emergency exit with you. And all these people disobeying that. And that delays the evacuation. In theory, they're concerned that like a fire will break out on the plane or something and they need people off the plane quickly. and you have these people deciding that they're not all in this together, and I'm going to prioritize having my laptop with me when I get off the plane over the possibility that someone behind me on the plane might die if I slow down the evacuation. And that just again, like,

indicates to me a society where people don't believe that they're subject to the social contract anymore. Maybe it's always been like this. I have not seen prior coverage of plane evacuations where there was so much emphasis on the fact that everyone was breaking the rule about leaving the luggage behind. But that just seems to me like a very basic test of do you care about the well-being of your neighbors? Are you willing to inconvenience yourself through the, you know, the potential loss of certain belongings that you had on the plane in exchange for a stranger maybe not dying? And people increasingly are saying no. Imagine that delete is seen in Sully, you know, where they're like all jumping off and someone just carrying. They need that they need that laptop case.

So I will say that I do think part of this is that 25 years ago, people were not carrying around expensive electronics that they really need to have with them, right? Where, like, most people were not carrying a safe full of their banking records and their kids' photos and all of those other things. And people are going to want to grab that. No, it's the other way around. In a way that they were not going to want to grab the paperback they had. 20 years ago, if you lost your laptop, you lost everything that was on the laptop. Now everything is in the cloud.

But almost no one had a laptop 20 years ago. Right. But, like, if you lose your phone, like, it's all, it's all, it's all. in the, it's in the ether. You get a new phone, you download the files to the phone, you do not lose those photos. It's, it's, it's just inconvenient for people if they don't. And your phone is in your bucket. Right. But like, the, the, it's, I, I, I, I don't buy the idea that our, like, our personal belongings have become more essential that they, than they were 20 years ago. And that that's why I don't really understand why you can't bring a laptop bag on the shoot. Is it the danger to the shoot? No, no, no, no. Is it, no, no, I, like, I'm just asking. Like, I, I, I genuinely

I think if you get your carry-on out, you should be shot. No, you should not be shot. But you should be yelled at sternly by the stewardess. But like, what is the downside to having people grab their bag that's under their seat? They disembark more slowly because they're stopping to get stuff. And I realize it's a bigger problem if they're getting it out of the overhead bin. But the idea is that even if you are moving through the aisle with something that you're pulling out from the seat in front of you, it's a combination of you take longer to get out because you're getting the thing out and then you move through the aisle more slowly. And also, I think it would be complicated to communicate to people a rule like, well, you were allowed to take it if it's under the seat in front of you and it's reasonably small, but not the, like, I understand why they just generally say don't.

And also in this case, the plane was probably not going to blow up. So you're still going to get your laptop. It's just going to take a while to get it back from Frontier Airlines. It wasn't even going to disappear. They do worry some about damage to the slides because one of the things in that seatback card is if you're wearing stiletto heels, you're supposed to take them off before you get on the slide, which is about a concern of. about punctures. Right. So I guess if you had a really sharp piece of luggage, that would be an additional problem.

But I think it's mainly about speeding the evacuation. Do not carry your knife studded laptop case on a plane. The other thing about them doing this is that they had just witnessed like the worst case scenario of what happens when someone doesn't follow the rules. Like someone jumped over an airplane thing and then got destroyed by an engine. Yeah. Then after that, when I would be like, I would be the best student in class, I would do whatever they wanted. I am not arguing for taking your luggage. I just don't understand the ban.

And I think the FAA often does these rules that are meant to exclude extreme edge cases. And it's hard to do. So, like, I still don't know why I have to have my phone in airplane mode. Well, you don't really anymore. Yeah. Like, and I realize that like enforcing bullshit rules then reduces trust in that the rules are there for a good reason. And then maybe some people have like a little Megan McArdle on their shoulder saying to them, Is it really so bad?

I am not. Like, I, no, my advice about any sort of plane evacuation is, first of all, a surprising number of people just kind of sit there and move slowly. And I think this is a case of this, right, where people are not appreciating the urgency of the situation. And so when you get on a plane every time, you should look at the exit and visualize yourself rapidly exiting the plane in the event of an emergency. This actually apparently helps people overcome the kind of normalcy bias that keeps them in their seat too long. And then also, yes, you should do whatever they say because you should do it, right? Like, I don't know what the rule is, but I am not a plain design expert, and I'm not going to, like, test whether my rational calculation about the evacuation is correct. But I do think that, like, it might help to explain to people why the rule exists, because I think there are a lot of FAA rules that no one really knows why they exist.

Have you, have either of you guys gotten to go down the slide? No. No. into my eternal sadness. I haven't, but I would be so excited if this had happened to me. I don't think you would end up in a situation where you have to go down the slot.

No, but I mean, in this case, in this case, it's harmless. You just get to go back to the Denver airport. They have a lot of really nice airport lounges. Maybe just the jet bridge is broken and they can't find a stairway. Like some benign yet fun. The best would be if they asked you to open the door,

The exit door. We all hear it in the exit row. We've all been listening to those warnings for years. Now I'd finally get to do it. I sit in the exit row a lot and I visualize what it would be like to actually do it. It's very exciting. I'm terrified that I would be bad at it. Like, I don't have the world's best.

And they'd laugh at you. Yeah, no, I don't have the world's best to find motor skills. And sometimes, like, you present a novel locking key to me and I cannot figure out how to get the thing to open. Like, I realize that it's like, you know, you throw that big lever or whatever. The door is also really heavy. Like those things are about like, you know, you have to be able to lift, I don't know, 40, 50 pounds, whatever, which obviously I can lift something that heavy. But I'm just imagining in a stressful situation being given this, you know, somewhat more mechanically complex than I expected task. And then like-

While the babies are crying and someone's going, God, you just want me to do it, Mr. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I believe in you, Josh. Thank you. I do. I do sit in the exit row. So I am taking on that responsibility. And I guess someday maybe I'll get to live out Ben's,

fantasy. Go down the slide. Finally, this week before we go, an update on a topic that we spent a lot of time on a couple of weeks ago, that Virginia remap, where we had Sean Trindy, who had drawn the old map that was getting replaced. And so good news for Sean, his map continues to be used, at least for this next election. The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled four to three, throwing out that voter referendum. And it was the, it turned on this issue of the Virginia Constitution. If you want to amend it, you have to have success. votes of two Virginia legislatures to amend it. And the vote has to be taken before the election and then after the election. And so the question is, when is the election election? Is the election election

day or is the election the entire period during which early voting is happening? Because the first vote of the Virginia legislature occurred in October after some people had already started casting ballots in the 2025 election. And the court, four to three, decided the election is that entire period. And therefore, the constitutional amendment to do the remap was invalid. And it's been thrown out. And I understand why Democrats are very frustrated here because we are in a situation where Republicans do, in fact, have a freer hand to do these remaps than Democrats do, in part because a lot of these Democratic states have set up strictures around how to do remapping. And you may have to do things like amend the state constitution, whereas in Tennessee they can just

call a special session and draw a new map. But people are a little bit on tilt about this. and there's been this new boomlet of this idea that, well, the legislature could lower the mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court justices to 50, which would force all seven members of the Supreme Court to retire, and then they can replace them with a new court, which will then uphold the map. And Governor Spanberger, to her credit, has been holding off against that idea. And I'm not precious about judicial supremacy, and I know that there have been Republican court packings in Republican-controlled states over the last few years. But, you know, we can draw this map again in two years.

We can amend the Constitution in a way that is compliant with the process the court set out. The Virginia Democrats are also going to get to name two new justices to the court in the ordinary course without changing the law at all. But I think people, you know, it sucks when the rules are unfair to you and the rules are unfair to Democrats in certain ways. But sometimes you just have to deal with that. And the main way to deal with it is, you know, if you need to win the election by three or four points to get a majority of the seats, then you just need to figure out what. it is that you need to do to win 52 or 53% of the electorate, which is doable this year. And that's the main thing Democrats need to focus on now. Yeah. Look, it strikes me that I am perhaps more fond of judicial supremacy than you are.

Not like totally, but I think like we've, we're asking courts to do too much. But I think this was a reasonable read of the law and that, well, yes, both sides have packed courts in various ways. ways, forcing the whole court to resign so you can replace their appointments with a mandatory retirement age of 50. I mean, like, what are we here? Firefighters? Like, this is banana republic stuff, right? And we say that about Trump a lot.

And it's true. He tries to do banana republic stuff, which, thanks to judicial supremacy, he is often prevented from doing, thankfully. But there are lines you should not cross, especially for something so dumb. This is, as you say, they're going to get to appoint two justices. But also, this redistricting was really extreme. And it's like, I mean, you can say, well, Texas was extreme too. Texas, it looks like the Republicans cost themselves seats in the next wave election.

Good job, guys. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of guys. like the argument that this has to be done to like save american democracies strikes me as deeply specious and that that often what's driving this is just a base that in the case of virginia's mad about doge very understandably but more broadly the progressive base is just like the old political syllogism something must be done this is something therefore this must be done not every something needs to be done and both the redistricting and the redistricting and the the idea to pack the court.

Those are some things that should not and need not be done. And we should not be like doing them just because the progressive base would really like to feel like they're winning. You're going to win in November, guys. Just wait six months. I agree with basically all of this. And I also just think like the main point of Josh making of like they just need to figure out how to win and not whine about the.

the proceduralism. But I do also need to point out that over the last few days, a lot of conservatives have been like, well, well, Democrats tried to play the game. They ain't played it right. Well, we go, this is what you get. And the thing is, Democrats didn't start this. You know, like, Trump did start it.

And I do understand just the impulse of just when someone brings a gun to a fight, you should also bring a gun. You shouldn't bring a knife. And so, like, there is a, like, it made perfect sense to me why Virginia would do this because they thought they could. I mean, the objections that they had to it, that the court had to it, fine. But, like, the impulse was them responding to an acceleration that happened by the GOP. And it hasn't worked out for them, you know, you play your hand, you lose sometimes. But I don't think that it's a, I don't think that they woke up two years ago being like, all right, let's, let's gerrymandered these states more.

just mid-decade. And Democrats are going to have to redraw the map in the next cycle because after the Calais Supreme Court decision, you're going to see more Republican remaps that will draw out even more seats for Democrats in Republican-controlled states. I mean, you can draw a Texas map that's even more aggressive that has even less than eight Democratic seats in a, you know, in a neutral year for Democrats. And I don't like the arms race here, but there's no rational response for Democrats other than to maximize their advantage in the states they control, because otherwise you end up with a

situation where Republicans can lose the national popular vote for the House by, you know, six, seven points and still can, and still get a majority in the House of Representatives. And that's both undemocratic and obviously unacceptable to the Democratic Party. My understanding is that Texas is complicated, right? Because the ability to draw the super aggressive gerrymender where they're winning like every seat outside of like Austin, et cetera. relies on the Rio Grande Valley and other highly Hispanic areas that seem to be turning on the Republican Party for, again, very understandable reason. So I'm actually not sure this is like deeply necessary. But I'm also not suggesting that like, oh my gosh, Democrats, the most immoral people.

Like, it's all gross. It's gross when they do it in Texas. It's gross when they do it in Virginia. And I actually don't think that tit for tat seems to be slowing. this down any. And I also think that like the risk of aggressive gerrymanders in many cases, not all, is that you create seats you're going to lose. And that seems to be what happened in Texas. So saying like, and for them to get even more aggressive in Texas would indeed force them to put even more swingy Democrats, right? They would be spreading their hardcore base even thinner.

And that's always the trade off with gerrymandering. If your state is truly overwhelming, then it doesn't matter that much. But, but. But outside of those things, like, I actually kind of disagree with this that, like, these super aggressive gerrymanders are necessarily net beneficial for the party and require an aggressive response that, like, functionally disenfranchises 45% of the voters in Virginia. It's a nice story to tell because it, you know, encourages more civic-minded behavior. I just, I think it's not true most of the time. You know, I mean, this new map that's been drawn in Tennessee basically creates not. state, nine districts that have about the same partisan lien as the whole state of Tennessee,

Trump like winning by 20 points everywhere. And so that's, you know, that's not a dummy mander. That's a seat that that's a map that will reliably deliver nine out of nine seats for Republicans. And then in Texas, there's some questions down in the Rio Grande Valley with Hispanic voters, but you also still have a lot of rural Texas seats with overwhelming majorities for Republicans that you can just, you know, you can draw like a little finger sticking into Dallas or Fort Worth or San Antonio or whatever. And you can, because of the Supreme Court decision where you no longer have to draw a black district in Dallas and a Hispanic district in Dallas and that sort of thing, you can be more aggressive about using those areas of East Texas and West Texas that are mostly white and cracking the major cities like they had already done to Nashville. There are limits to exactly how aggressive you can get. And there are certain things you can do that will make mistakes and cause you to lose seats.

But in a lot of these states, there is room for the majority party to draw a map that just takes seats away from the other seats. side and doesn't create risk of losing. Like I said, I think in Texas, in particular, it's complicated. Yeah. In part because so many of their minority districts are Hispanic, and that's a very swingy constituency right now, right? And look, I grew up in a district that connected two completely unconnected neighborhoods with, I believe it was like a four-inch strip running down the west side highway.

I always, like, kind of wanted to go stand in that strip and, like, register to vote. But, like, yes, this has happened everywhere. It is, and often, like, the other thing is often these things are about incumbent protection. How many Republicans are going to be super enthused about risking losing their district and getting shot out of the state legislature in order to support these, right? Like, Trump really wanted to do this, but Trump is not the best political strategist. And, I mean, he's gotten his way in most states, just not Indiana. Like, thank you, Plucky, Indiana for upholding. And now, of course, the state legislators that did that opposed it are paying the price.

But, like, I am really skeptical that this is like an existential threat that Democrats are forced to. Yes, there are states where you can just draw a good gerrymender. But in the biggest states, that's actually the hardest. They're the most diverse states because they're large. Can I just to return briefly to Josh's point that Democrats are just moderating, and figure out how to win. I'm reminded of another Aaron Sorkin famous line from The Rock, where he says, losers always cry about their best, but winners go home and fuck the cheerleader.

And that's what Democrats should do. They should just win and stop whining. Aaron Sorkin wrote The Rock? No, he was a script doctor on it, but he wrote that line. Oh, okay. I was going to say, there wasn't a lot of walk-and-talk in The Rock. Yeah. I can't wait for your chemical weapons white paper, Ben.

I think we can leave that there this week. Ben, Megan, thanks as always. Thank you. Thanks. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Faye. We're a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swaddock mixed this episode. Our music is by Joshua Mosher. Thanks for listening and stay cool up.