Dave Roberts is an energy and climate writer at Vox and a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He started as his career covering climate science and clean energy technology, but — for reasons we discuss here — he now writes just as much about political psychology, media ecosystems, political institutions, and how they intersect with climate change.

We cover a lot in this conversation, including:

• “Tribal epistemology,” and why it’s crucial to climate paralysis 
• How the GOP went from the party of cap-and-trade to the party of climate denial 
• Why the right and left-wing media ecosystem’s diverged so dramatically
• What today’s climate activists get right about our politics that their predecessors got wrong
• The carbon tax dead-end
• How nuclear energy became so divisive
• The conflicting moral and social visions at the heart of the climate movement 
• Why it is impossible to separate technological innovation from the policy ecosystem that shapes it 
• Whether climate change really is an “existential” threat 
• What climate change will mean for the world’s poor

Book recommendations:

• Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston
• “State of the Species” by Charles C. Mann