Quinn Slobodian
speaker
708 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Jun
Quinn Slobodian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But Barack Obama comes into office as, of course, the anti-war president.
And one of the forgotten things about that moment is he said one of the ways we're going to be less militaristic is
is we're going to make ourselves less dependent on fossil fuels.
We're gonna unplug from Middle Eastern oil.
We're gonna use the bailout of the auto sector to actually electrify the auto sector.
We're gonna go hard into renewables.
And this was the whole clean tech moment that actually gave Tesla its first life-saving government loan, nearly $500 million in 2009 from Obama's Department of Energy to be part of that push, which was basically green industrial policy.
create what we call electric autonomy in the United States.
So you don't have to be going and fighting stupid wars on the other side of the world.
Well, there was a world historical problem, which was fracking is discovered just a couple of years after that.
And then America just forgets all about renewables for many, many years and decides now we are the petroleum giant.
That's
And actually, then the current debacle is in a roundabout way the product of that because the feeling that we can do whatever we want in the Middle East because we are our own oil producer.
Yeah.
I mean, barring that discovery of fracking, we might have been on a trajectory more similar to China because at that point, China got on the green path and stayed on it.
And now they do have electric autonomy.
They are much more resilient in moments of supply shocks.
And they dominate the global EV and lithium ion battery market.
But the point is, in both of those cases, EVs, satellite launch, rocket launch, the state actually did get something out of it.
What's missing, and as you point to correctly, is where the worker fits into that.
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