This is Democracy – Episode 80: Energy Transitions

Announcers: This is Democracy. A podcast that explores the interracial, inter-generational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today, we are going to discuss one of the most important issues confronting our democracy today and an issue that’s been at the center of the history of American democracy and global democracy. In many ways, the uses of energy and how democracies deal with transitions in the sources and distribution of energy to citizens and other actors within their spaces. We have with us today one of the foremost experts and a wonderful friend. We go back a long way. Clark Miller, professor at Arizona State University. Clark is really a pioneer studying the intersection between energy, politics, environment, and democracy. Among his many accomplishments, Clark is the director of the Center for Energy and Society at Arizona State University. He’s a Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. That’s a great name for a school. He leads a sustainability team at the Quantum Energy and Sustainability Solar Technologies Photovoltaic Energy Research Center for the past decade and even longer. His researches explored the human dimensions of large-scale transitions in the energy sector and the potential challenges and opportunities for leveraging energy transitions for human improvement. Clark, you’re a busy man these days, aren’t you?

Clark Miller: I am. Yeah. Thank you for that kind introduction.

Jeremi Suri: It’s great to have you here, Clark. Before we turn to our discussion with Clark Miller, we have, of course, our scene-setting poem from Zachary Suri. What’s the title of your poem today, Zachary?

Zachary Suri: “Eulogy.”

Jeremi Suri: “Eulogy.” Well, let’s hear it.

Zachary Suri: Eulogy. Oil, old greasy elixir of smoke-filled Saturdays and moss changing color and industrial revolution era Britain. The dormant remnants of dinosaurs listless in the gasoline tanks of petrol stations across a thousand oil-rich utopia’s, West Texas or Saudi desert. The hidden shell pockets of millennia of plants, ages of animals, the way it used to wait in the cold metal tanks to explode, and in excessive, smoky, passionate cloud diffusing towards the stratosphere. What an odd thing that must have seemed to the first person who thought to take the black spouts of carbon viscosity, shot heavenward into some primitive metal contraption, to somewhere turned an axle of wheel and world civilization. It seems a little sad to think about it now, to try and imagine a world slowly sinking into the forgotten wetlands of ergonomic obscurity, the ultimate fungible, the universal black gold, the barrels refined not into gasoline, but into the electric renaissance to save the planet. Oil, sad body that lies in state at every gas station now, erecting electric super chargers. Sad corpse of hazy duality, good father of the American interstate, false mother of the stalwart corporate environmental destruction. We remember you as we would a great statesmen. We sing of your great progress, pushing the liquid ice dust of mastodons that turned on a light bulb in a farmer’s house in these hills millions of years later. We remember you as we would a great statesmen. We prayed for you to be redeemed beyond this threshold. We whisper of the glories of misremembered memory, but in the eyes of all, linger the title wounds of your smokestacks finally ebbing.

Jeremi Suri: Wow, there’s a lot in that, Zachary, what is your poem about?

Zachary Suri: My poem is really about how we need to recognize as a society that oil has brought a lot of good to us, but that it is also caused a great deal of harm. We need to recognize that transition from fossil fuels like oil and coal is inevitable. We need to accept that, and we need to understand the historical reasons that we are at this moment.

Jeremi Suri: Seen it as an opportunity in many ways, right?

Zachary Suri: Right.

Jeremi Suri: Well, Clark, I think that’s a perfect spot to turn to you. One of the things I known you’ve worked on are the ways in which energy technologies and energy transitions are not just changes in technology, they’re social, they’re economic, they’re cultural, and political transformations, how do we understand the intersection between these elements?

Clark Miller: Yeah. I thought Zachary’s poem was fantastic in that regard. I mean, so many different facets of American society and really global society have been built in around and through these new energy technologies as they get developed. There was a phrase in there about the American highway system.

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Clark Miller: We just think about that for a minute. If you want to think about what has symbolized freedom to Americans for the last 100 years, is this idea of the automobile. The idea that you could get in your car and you can just drive. You could go to the national parks, which again, you think about Yosemite, you think about Yellowstone, you think about all these different parts all over the country that are so important to our sense of national character and the national significance of our landscape and how that was opened up to the American public, because we could drive, and how that process helped create a very different world, a different community. You think about what that did to our cities. What have we been talking about in terms of American politics for the last 8 years, maybe 28 years, maybe 58 years, I don’t know, but the suburbs, right?

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Clark Miller: The suburbs is a space in which American elections are contested time and time and time again. The hearts and minds of this population that’s not urban and yet not rural. The suburbs, of course, are a product of the automobile society. I lived in a giant suburb called Phoenix. It’s a society here that’s been created around the automobile. You’d literally cannot walk as a pedestrian in the vast majority of Phoenix, because it’s not designed for pedestrians. Things are too far apart. The streets are not safe places to be as a pedestrian. There are walls around neighborhoods. It’s just so much of how we think about culture and society and then our political economy are structured. Think about how important it was that GM took a loan from the federal government to survive the financial collapse in 2008.

Jeremi Suri: Of course.

Clark Miller: How symbolic that was as a statement about, do we need to be worried about American capitalism? Because all of a sudden, General Motors, the symbol of industrial dominance of America of the world, is now dependent on a bailout kind of thing. There’s just so many dimensions in which, when we create new technologies like oil as energy sources, and we create new technologies like automobiles that use energy and new ways and allow us to do new things. With those, we create whole new forms of living, whole new ways of imagining ourselves. I like to talk about people cars, because, as a hybrid entity.

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Clark Miller: Because the car, of course, doesn’t go anywhere. Forget the robots that are driving around my neighborhood these days, the Waymo robots. But the traditional car for 100 years, it didn’t go anywhere unless somebody got behind the wheel and took it, and drove it.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Clark Miller: But at the same time, that very act of getting behind the wheel of an automobile, purchasing an automobile, it transformed you as a person. You imagine the world in different way and you think about time and distance.

Jeremi Suri: That’s exactly where I wanted us to dig a little deeper, because this is where your work has been so pioneering, Clark. I mean, how do we understand how those decisions are made? You gave a great overview of the consequences and implications to our social beings that come from technological choices. But how do we make these decisions? What’s the process in a democracy, at least historically to this moment, that we have made decisions about where to put interstate highways, who to bale out, which technologies to support, in which moments. How does that happen?

Clark Miller: Well, it happen through multiple mechanisms, and I think that’s part of what it means to live in a democracy. Some of those decisions have been made by individual voting with their feet, so to speak. If you look at the great movement out into the suburbs, a lot of that movement was driven by individual purchasing decisions, and there’s a way in which the history of American cities is of city transportation departments trying to catch up.

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Clark Miller: The movement of individual citizens making decisions with their own purchasing power, their own choices about where they want to live. But at the same time, there have been other moments where those decisions are made by democratic institutions. Like for the American highway system is a product of Congress. Congress said in 1965, “We need an ability to move the US Military across this country at high speed.” We’re going to deploy these vast interstate highway system to give us the wherewithal to do that if we need to, and by the way, this will be awesome for America. It will open up all opportunities for moving goods and services and that will grow the economy for moving people around the country, and that will help create a national labor market that will do all good things for us. There was all these different dimensions to it, so as a national political decision. But then, the one that I think is most interesting, not most interesting of all, but most interesting in the sense that most people aren’t aware of it is the energy industry also influences these decisions and also make these decisions at times, often because of the needs of the technological infrastructures that they create. One of the examples of this that I like to tell is about the early history of electricity. In the early days of electricity, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in order to get electricity prices low enough, in order to serve everybody, which was an important goal that lots of people had, you had to build large-scale power plants. Most of these were fossil fuel driven whole predominantly some oil. One of the challenges was when you did that, they didn’t like to turn off. Those power plants like to run 24/7/365.

Jeremi Suri: Interesting.

Clark Miller: Human society in the 19th century was not 24/7/365. People got up when the sun came up, they did their business during the day and for the most part at night, they went to bed. One of the things that.

Jeremi Suri: They slept, Clark, really?

Clark Miller: They slept. Yeah, I know. It’s ridiculous. So the utility industry was stuck with this problem that they had an abundant electricity source at night and relatively little demands for that electricity, and so they went looking for things that they could invest in to make use of that electricity. So they got cities to light up their street, they got downtown to light up their shopping districts. The first shopping districts that were open into the evenings were in fact invested in by the electric utility industry. The electric utility industry turns out invented the amusement park industry.

Jeremi Suri: Wow.

Clark Miller: Because they used electricity on nights and on weekends, and they could run their electric trams to and from the population areas to those amusement parks and use more electricity.

Jeremi Suri: Wow.

Clark Miller: People often don’t know this, but the first working radio station and television station in America were both on the campus of General Electric in Schenectady, New York. Again, it was about General Electric could sell the TV cameras and the radio equipment and the power transmitters. At the same time, all the other Edison electric companies which were their partners, could sell electricity to the TV stations, and radio stations, and they could sell televisions and radios to houses and homeowners and they could sell electricity to run the TV and the radios.

Jeremi Suri: So Clark, this perfectly goes into one of our student questions which was about just this, which is lobbying interests groups. The vision you initially painted was a vision of a variety of inputs. A pluralistic democracy, madisonian democracy, a topic we’ve talked a lot about on the podcast, various weeks, different groups, different individuals voting with their feet, as you said. But it also appears at times that certain powerful interests have a great deal of influence.

Cloy Macpherson: My name is Cloy Macpherson and I’m a mechanical engineering senior. My question is, how can the government overcome lobbying from the fossil fuels industry, in order to act in the interests of the average citizen?

Clark Miller: Yeah, I mean it’s a great question, a bit misunderstood or maybe just not paid enough attention in a series of democracy is what happens to societies when they become routinized in their forms of life around large infrastructure projects like the oil industry, and the automobile industry, and the lives that they let us lead, because I think the power of these industries is not just because they have a lot of money. It’s because they’re wrapped up in our ordinary lives. In day-to-day ways that become very unnerving if you start to ask the question, well, I bought a house that’s seven miles from where I work. How am I going to get there if I can’t drive my car?

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Clark Miller: We know from all kinds of data, that one of the biggest dimensions of unemployment is access to transportation.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Clark Miller: So it goes to those fundamental questions of economic security. I would say, we saw that I think in the 2016 election, where you find people who have had very productive economic livelihood have those threatened when we start to say, we have to change these big infrastructure.

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Clark Miller: We know we have to change them, but that does present a set of rift to a whole bunch of people. It’s not just 60,000 coal miners. There are a million people in the United States that work directly in the fossil fuel infrastructure, and there are a whole bunch more who work in ancillary field like internal combustion. If you think about it, your local auto parts store, your local auto repair mechanic, all of these folks worked heavily with internal combustion engine. Turns out electric vehicles are much simpler in terms of their operational technologies. So we expect them to have much lower repair needs, and that could significantly impact small businesses in every community in America.

Jeremi Suri: Of course. So your argument is, and it’s a really important observation, is that it’s not just about those who are lobbying on behalf of the fossil fuel industry per se, it’s the way it’s built into our everyday lives that actually make all of us promoters of the system in our daily behavior.

Clark Miller: Yeah, and so to go directly to the question, how do you overcome?

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Clark Miller: In our political discussion, I think that’s one of the reasons why when you begin to engage in these questions about these large infrastructure transition that are so central to our lives, you have to make those robust democratic conversation, that go out into our democratic populist in a way that we’ve become less comfortable doing in some sense. In the late 20th century, despite the Internet, despite social media, and our ability to reach people, we’ve become much more elitist in how we organize policy decision-making, and much more closed and secretive about those processes. I think these large transition demand, that we open up those conversations in a more involved and engaged way on the part of democratic public.

Jeremi Suri: This is one of our themes of the podcast. What does that look like around energy? What if you could design the conversation? If you were the grand facilitator, which I understand will actually then reinforce the problem of elitism. But what should this conversation look like?

Clark Miller: Well, I mean it’s interesting. I go back to the previous transition 100 years ago. There’s a really interesting book that a guy named Samuel Insull published in 1914 and 1915. It’s a set of his speeches. He was the President of Chicago Edison. The company that wanted to be established as the electric utility for the entire city of Chicago. So what did he do? He had to sell the idea that in America, the land of capitalism, you would give a single company the right to sell electricity, within a fixed territory, no competition.

Jeremi Suri: Right. It’s a monopoly.

Clark Miller: How do you sell that idea of a regulated monopoly? Well, the answer is, he went to every Elks Club, every Chamber of Commerce, every city council, and he gave talks about his ideas, and then he listened to the conversation. It’s really interesting. But if I think about our electric utilities here in Arizona for example, and the conversation that we’ve been having about the future of energy here in the state, they have been reluctant at every turn, to have a conversation with the public. So we’ve had some small exercises that we’ve been able to facilitate. We brought a 150 business and civic and policy leaders together for three days to talk about the future of Arizona’s energy, and the utilities were like, are you kidding me? We really have to come and be part of this conversation? Then recently, we had a California billionaire who put a ballot initiative on the ballot to force a constitutional amendment, and of course, then they poured $75 million into advertising to defeat this thing. They then decided that was a really bad idea. They didn’t like to spend that money, but they had to be forced into a larger public conversation about this. I just think that’s a mistake, and I would really like to see real leadership from the energy sector, stepping out and saying, “Hey, we know that these are issues that are going to be important for our communities.” They have a lot of presence in local communities. I think electric utilities in particular. Let me give you the reason why electric utilities are so important to this discussion. Right now, about a quarter of our energy usage, runs through electricity, the other three-quarters of it we burn fuel. But in the future, because of electric vehicles, because of other strategies for creating renewable energy for heavy industry, etc. We expect that maybe as much as 75 percent of our energy use will be electrified. That’s a huge growth opportunity for electric utilities, but it also puts them much more centrally in the driver’s seat in terms of the future of energy, and then they’ve been even in the past.

Jeremi Suri: Wow.

Clark Miller: I really think electric utilities have to step up and say, “This is a constitutional moment for our societies, and we’re going to leverage our position, our significance in the future of energy to say, we want to have a conversation with you, the people of Phoenix, about what that future is going to look like.

Jeremi Suri: Wow. That does sound like a really crucial opportunity. I know Zachary has a question. Here is Zachary.

Zachary Suri: Yeah. You talked a lot about economic inequality and how energy transitions are often a representative of such inequality. But when we’re talking about this, there’s also a very important way in which these energy choices have been used to define communities along racial lines, along lines that are based around immigrant backgrounds or not. I mean, for example Austin is divided by the very interstate highway systems that gave the freedom to so many. How do we think about energy in relation to racial equality?

Clark Miller: Yeah. That’s a great question too. Let me start by observing that one of the central questions of the coming energy transition in my view is how concentrated will energy wealth be in the future? The reality is at the moment that our existing energy infrastructures concentrate energy well, in a very severe way. Ownership over energy asset, the production and sale of energy goods and services is a very centralized business, and I mean, a couple of years ago I looked at the list of the Global Fortune 500 largest companies in the world by capitalization.

Jeremi Suri: Sure.

Clark Miller: In the top 20, 16 of them were either electricity companies, oil companies, or automobile companies.

Jeremi Suri: You’ve described Texas. Clark, you’ve described Texas.

Clark Miller: Well, the reality is that our renewable energy technologies and particularly solar which everybody expect, will constitute at least 50 percent of the world’s energy supply going forward, when we get to mid century and beyond. Is a much more flexible technology, the sunshine everywhere, not always in the same intensity, I can tell you living in Phoenix. But it does shine everywhere, and it shines at such high levels of intensity that you can actually generate energy pretty much anywhere on the planet from solar panel, during the day of course. Of course the other thing is that the scaling laws that we’ve seen with large scale fossil fuel infrastructures, don’t apply nearly as much with solar. You can generate low cost solar with much smaller installation than you can with fossil fuel infrastructures. So there’s at least the possibility that the wealth in the energy future will be much less concentrated than it is with the existing energy infrastructure. In fact, it’s almost hard to make it as concentrated, but not impossible. I often show people a picture of a set of Phoenix suburbs and actually put the picture up twice on the screen. Is the same picture, it’s a suburb, about half the houses have solar panels on the roof, and I stay on the left, you see a picture of a world in which each individual homeowner owns the solar panels on the top of their home, and they reap the revenue stream that comes from that solar energy. In fact, you can’t see it but they trade electricity using Bitcoin enabled peer-to-peer trading networks.

Jeremi Suri: Wow.

Clark Miller: It’s a libertarian dream of the future of America. We’re all our own little economic producers and consumers. On the other picture which is exactly the same picture, I say in this picture, Elon Musk owns every rooftop in America. He’s the largest single utility operator that the planet has ever seen.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Clark Miller: The technology is flexible, but we have choices to make about which futures we decide to build. To come back to the question about racial justice, I think we need to take this energy transition that we’re about to go through, and we need to make sure that it has two outcome criteria attached to it. The first being, of course carbon neutrality. We’ve got to get to the point where we’re not driving the planet’s ecosystems completely out of whack, with our energy infrastructure.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Clark Miller: But the second has to be human progress. We have to leverage this transition to do good, to make these investments, and we’re talking about huge investments to make this infrastructure change. By one estimate, the International Energy Agency $70 trillion to make this change.

Jeremi Suri: Seventy trillion dollars?

Clark Miller: Yeah. If you’re going to spend that much money, seven years worth of the US economy, US GDP. You cannot do that and not reap human benefits as well as carbon benefit from that. I think we need to think explicitly about how do we arrange the future of energy so that it benefits communities that we have systematically disadvantaged in the past. So that it delivers good in positive ways to all kinds of different groups and we have to make sure that the sacrifice them and we will have them. I mean, we have to do mining to make solar panels.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Clark Miller: We have to think about what we’re doing with all the waste that will be the future solar panels that we have to take down if they don’t last forever. So we have to think about where we’re getting these materials, what we’re doing with these materials, and make sure that we’re not systematically disadvantaging certain communities and creating new forms of environmental injustice, even as we solve old forms of environmental injustice.

Jeremi Suri: This comes back to your point earlier about a more democratic, inclusive conversation which would be one of the protections against that concentration. Another one of our students, Sierra Diallo, has a question that relates to this. She asks about how we should think about the role of government versus privatization.

Sierra Diallo: Hello, my name is Sierra Diallo and I’m a freshman in Plan II honors. My question is as follows, is it fair for the government to even manage these new energy forms? I feel as though traditionally they’ve been privately managed as they greatly affect the economy. If the government decides to get involved in create laws pertaining to the use of this new energy, are they further intervening in the US economy?

Clark Miller: So it’s interesting because I’m anticipating from the question that your student is from Texas.

Jeremi Suri: I think so.

Clark Miller: Which is obviously a place where energy has been privatized.

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Clark Miller: But the reality is globally that half the world’s energy supply is provided by state-owned organization and half the world’s energy supply is provided by private enterprise.

Jeremi Suri: Just as point of record. The City of Austin owns the utility that provides energy to the entire City of Austin.

Clark Miller: That’s exactly right. There are several other cities like that around the United States. Energy, because of its centrality to supporting industrialization, is one of those places where historically, we’ve had both public power and private power. The debate about how to organize the power sector has always been a robust political debate, and we need to get back to the point where I think we can have those conversations and debates as we move forward because it is going to be critical. I don’t think the answer is obviously one way or another. I think what we’re likely to see is complicated hybrid at every stage of the game. Let me just give you an example about why The Green New Deal folks like to say, “Well, let’s just take over the energy industry, make it clean, and we’ll be done with it.” I was at a Green New Deal conference, and this was the logic that was being put forward time and time again. I thought, this doesn’t seem right to me. So I went looking, and in fact, if you look not historically, but today, at the renewable energy deployments that have been made worldwide. The state-owned half of the world’s energy supply is behind, significantly behind. In terms of renewable energy investment, a privately owned industry. Private industry is way ahead on renewable energy investment. I think we’re always going to see that governments want to be involved, that there are important public values at play in the energy space that we need to make sure are protected. At the same time, we know that there are ways in which markets deliver products and services efficiently if you do them well. If you control and make sure that market failures are not creating problem that cause other kinds of issues and so forth. I think it’s going to be complicated messes. Historically, what that has meant is that the energy sector tends to be more insulated from public dialogue.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Clark Miller: You have to have more expertise in order to play in those conversations. It mitigates against the things that I have been calling for, and that’s one of the real challenges.

Jeremi Suri: Absolutely.

Clark Miller: That I think we have to confront.

Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. We always like to close Clark with a discussion looking forward. What are you most excited about? What do you see as the real exciting possibilities that our young listeners should be aligning themselves with? Obviously, the Green New Deal is something you’re partially excited about, but it has its limitations. What do you think young people should be joining up and doing right now? If they care about the environment and energy transitions and the sustainable planet, what should they be doing?

Clark Miller: I think they should be active and vocal in pursuing clean energy initiatives for there own community. I say this because I think one of the most important driving forces for opening up public dialogue about our clean energy future has come when we have seen groups of people, say, “Here’s a vision of an energy future that we are really excited about.” Some of those have been community energy initiative, where you’ve had a neighborhood, or a town that has said, “Here’s something we want to do.” We recently spent a year in dialogue between the City of Tempe, and the Salt River Project, which provides most of their electricity, in which the city council was sorted of saying, “Hey, we think we need to get to 100 percent renewable here in Tempe.” Then the Salt River Project said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re not going to go there.” We had a robust debate and a robust conversation, and a lot of good has come out of that. SRP has come entirely around and they’re now committed as a company to 90 percent reduction in their carbon emission by 2050. Not just for Tempe, but for the hole East Valley, two-and-a-half million people. I think that’s the change that can happen, but in this case, and I won’t say Tempe drove it all, there were lots of other things going on at the same time. But it’s when local groups get excited about new energy option that these organizations get the message. One of the things that’s happened here in the Valley is, we just had a huge number of individual households say, “Hey, we’re going to put solar on our roof.” That was like a wake-up call to the electricity industry. I guess I would encourage people translate that climate activism that you really want your leaders to get with it on solving climate change. Quit trying to make policy decision in effect, and start pushing on the idea of, “Hey, we could design a clean energy future for our neighborhood, for our city. What would that look like? What are the options that are available to us?” I think that bottom-up innovation is going to help open up lots of examples of different kinds of things that you can do. I think we’re going to see possibilities for having innovation that’s much more inclusive if we do it that way. It’s also just going to make the people who are making both the economic decisions and the policy decisions recognize that the demand is there for something different. Then I think the real cool thing about this is, they think there is an opportunity to create a new future of abundance. I’m not one of these people who thinks that clean energy is going to magically bring some wonderful future. I think we have to explicitly design it to do good for us. But the opportunities are there to get energy available two low-income communities, for example, at much lower prices than we’re currently delivering energy to those communities, and in ways that return ownership, and therefore returns on investment to those communities. So that energy becomes an accelerator of local economic growth in poor areas rather than what it is at the moment, which is in many poor areas, actually something that helps keep people in poverty.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Clark Miller: I think we can design so many cool things. The other thing is solar energy is vastly more abundant than any other form of energy that we have. If we can really figure out how to unlock its potential, we have the option to make energy available for new kinds of projects and new kinds of initiatives. Every time we’ve done that in history, we’ve opened up energy at lower costs in more abundance than we’ve had before. We’ve had huge periods of economic and social progress.

Jeremi Suri: You stole my point, Clark.

Clark Miller: Sorry.

Jeremi Suri: The historical lesson is definitely that if you want a more democratic polity with more participation and more opportunity, energy, resources. The availability of those resources is absolutely crucial. But every moment we’ve seen an expansion of opportunity in our society, we’ve seen an expansion of access to energy. I think that’s so well stated. Your comments, especially that last comment are one of the most eloquent descriptions I’ve herd of a very grassroots, bottom-up direct action, democratic approach to policy change around this big complex issue where the policy discussions often become very abstract and elitist. You’ve offered us a beautiful and pragmatic alternative. Zachary, is this attractive to young listeners? Is this something that you think that young listeners like yourself who care about these issues could get behind?

Zachary Suri: Yes. I think that climate change and issues of energy transitions in our society are the number one issue for young people in America. I think the real power of these issues is that they unite people from many different groups, from many different backgrounds. Each of us gets to articulate our own vision of what our energy future should be. Part of what we have an opportunity to do in the next few years is bring those all together into one national vision for an American energy futures.

Jeremi Suri: Right. Young people can feel that this is a place, as Clark described it, where they can make a real difference. Well, Clark, thank you for sharing your rich background around these issues, your deep analysis, and also a truly idealistic future. I’ve long enjoyed our friendship, Clark, because I think you and I at route are democratic idealists, and it’s really wonderful to share that with you. Thank you, Clark.

Clark Miller: Well, thank you, Jeremy. This has been a wonderful conversation, and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about these ideas in a broader way. We don’t often get to talk about energy in terms other than electrons and the price of oil. To talk about it as a thoroughly human and thoroughly democratic space is really an important one. Thanks for the opportunity.

Jeremi Suri: Well, you’re doing the cutting edge work on that issue, Clark. Zachary, thank you as always, for an inspiring poem, and for deep insights and great questions around these issues. Thank you everyone for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy. Thank you.

Announcer 1: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Announcer 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can found his music at harrisonlemke.com.

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