Kate Gordon and Priyanka Mohanty are joined by two scholars who've spent their careers deep in industrial policy: Dr. Nikki Luke (University of Tennessee geographer, former DOE energy workforce advisor, author of Electric Life) and Dr. J. Mijin Cha (UC Santa Cruz environmental studies, Cornell Climate Jobs Institute fellow, author of A Just Transition for All).

The conversation traces how the U.S. got from the New Deal to today's “industrial policy moment” — and what actually happened when the infrastructure bill, the inflation reduction act, and the CHIPS and Science Act tried to turn theory into practice. Along the way: why the American South has its own coherent (if very different) industrial policy; the gap between prevailing-wage requirements and durable job quality; the case for a publicly led transition versus a privately led one; and why we need to center workers when we think about job creation.

The episode opens with a tribute to Dr. Sarah E. Knuth, a Berkeley-trained geographer and leading energy scholar whose research on federal tax policy and renewable energy adoption shaped much of the field, and who passed away in July 2026. A remembrance from the UC Berkeley Department of Geography is linked below.

Links & Resources

• In Memory of Dr. Sarah E. Knuth, UC Berkeley Department of Geography — https://geography.berkeley.edu/news/memory-dr-sarah-e-knuth
• Nikki Luke, Electric Life: Regulation and Industrial Environments — Amazon
• J. Mijin Cha, A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future — Amazon
• “Paying Fairer Dues in the South,” New York Times, 1977 — Read the archive piece
• Juhász, Lane & Rodrik, definition of industrial policy, Annual Review of Economics — Read the paper
• U.S. Energy and Employment Report 2025 (DOE) — Read the report
• Kate Gordon, “From Green Jobs to Bidenomics: The Arc of Green Industrial Policy,” Carnegie Endowment — Read the article
• Chart: rise of unions / drop in income inequality — View search results

Hashtags

#CaliforniaDreamshot #IndustrialPolicy #JustTransition #CleanEnergy #ClimateJobs #EnergyTransition #CaliforniaForward #CAFWD #CAPolicy #GreenJobs

Who pays for the disaster that didn't happen? Co-hosts Nuin-Tara Key (CA FWD) and Carolyn Kousky (Insurance for Good) dig into the economics of climate resilience—what adaptation finance actually is, and why it's so hard to get capital flowing toward it.

Drawing on interviews with five members of the CA FWD–Insurance for Good adaptation finance workgroup, the episode moves through four big questions: how adaptation finance differs from mitigation finance; the biggest barriers to scaling resilience investment—from our reliance on one-off grants to the difficulty of funding prevention; the audacious ideas that could break the logjam (rewiring the "operating system" of finance, equipping local officials to make risk-informed decisions, and financing resilience the way we finance roads and water systems); and the conversations we're still not having—starting with the fact that we already pay for climate risk, just reactively, after disaster strikes.

Plus: a "By the Numbers" trivia segment on California's 2021–2022 drought, and the first report from the CA FWD × Insurance for Good partnership, Paying for Preparedness: Why California Needs Sustained Investment in Climate Resilience: LINK

We asked our hosts and workgroup members to pick a

song that captures the urgency, frustration, and hope of this work:

• Birdsong at the Helsinki airport — not a song, but a recurring theme (host pick)
• "Respect" — Aretha Franklin
• "Where Were You Hiding (When the Storm Broke)?" — The Alarm — Francis: "where has the insurance industry been hiding?"
• "Burning Down the House" — Talking Heads — "the song is actually about liberation — about being trapped in a house that's burning"
• A moment of silence (one guest's meditative alternative)
• “You and Me on the Rock (feat. Lucius),” Brandi Carlile
• "When the Levee Breaks" — Led Zeppelin — "I've used that as walk-up music"
• "Don't Stop Believin'" — Journey — "a song of optimism — and it's got a damn good beat"

Transmission is a choke point. California’s rates are the second-highest in the nation and have risen nearly 39% since 2019. Lead times on transformers and circuit breakers have stretched from two months to three years, with prices up 50–100%. Roughly 13 gigawatts of renewable and storage projects — enough to power 10 million homes — are stuck waiting on transmission equipment that hasn’t arrived.

Kate Gordon and Priyanka Mohanty unpack how we got here: decades of flat electricity demand, a transmission supply chain we ceded overseas, and wildfire costs that are now part of everyone’s utility bill.

Then, Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (AD-73; Chair, Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee) joins to talk about AB 2516, the California Grid Manufacturing Initiative — a bill that would use California’s scale as a buyer to drive down the cost of transmission components, shorten delivery times, and seed in-state manufacturing. A study behind the bill projects more than 6,000 good-paying jobs, including 2,500 in direct manufacturing, and billions in ratepayer savings over two decades.

The conversation closes on affordability — not as a retreat from climate ambition, but as the precondition for it.

IN THIS EPISODE

• Why transmission is “calcified,” and what data centers did to the load curve
• Reshoring transmission components as industrial policy, not just supply chain hygiene
• Balancing incremental reform against calls to break up the utilities
• Implementation: what happens after the bill gets signed
• By the Numbers: the average new car in America costs $50,000. How many models sell for under $30,000?

LINKS & REFERENCES

• AB 2516 — California Grid Manufacturing Initiative (bill text & status): https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB2516
• Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris: https://petrie-norris.asmdc.org/
• The New York Times, “The Affordable Car Is Disappearing” (the By the Numbers source): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/13/opinion/affordable-car-cost.html
• More from California Forward: https://cafwd.org

California Dreamshot is a production of California Forward, in partnership with Pretty Good Productions. Executive Producer: Thomas Clayton Miller. Associate Producer: Sarah Walsh.