Data centers are where the industrial policy rubber meets the road. Where should they be sited? Who makes the decisions? What happens when the equipment ages out and the site goes quiet—what should a community expect in return? 

Kate Gordon and Priyanka Mohanty get into all these questions and more with two people watching the data center boom from the ground up: Dana Kuhnline, Programs Director at ReImagine Appalachia, and John Kostyack, founder of Kostyack Strategies. 

Dana brings the view from coal country, a region that created enormous wealth and kept little of it. John has tracked the buildout, and the fast-growing, cross-partisan movement pushing back on it.

Topic discussed: why the siting predictions of a year or two ago no longer hold; what Appalachia’s coal history says about where an industry’s wealth ends up; the “but what about China” argument that surfaces in nearly every local fight; whether a moratorium buys anything without a plan for the time it buys; what each guest would tell California’s next governor; and lots more.

Links & resources

From our guests

• Data Centers: Steps Communities Can Take to Avoid Stranded Assets — ReImagine Appalachia (Aug 2026)
• Local Government Resources Regarding Data Centers — ReImagine Appalachia webinar series
• The New Environmental Movement Could Change AI’s Trajectory — John Kostyack, Forbes (July 2026)
• Data Center Moratoriums and the Rise of Private Grids — John Kostyack, Forbes (Aug 2026)
• Kostyack Strategies
• ReImagine Appalachia

Support Nepal flood relief

• Direct Relief (Santa Barbara-based; 100% of Nepal gifts go to the response)
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“Insurable” has become a loaded term in California. But what does “being insurable” really mean? This conversation slows down and takes the word apart: what a risk actually needs in order to be pooled, where the real limits sit versus where we only think they do, and why getting back to insurability turns out to involve a great deal more than insurance.

Today’s guests have spent years looking at climate risk from opposite ends of the financial system: Spencer Glendon, who spent nearly two decades at Wellington Management before founding the climate literacy nonprofit Probable Futures, and Barney Schauble, who helped build the catastrophe bond market from its earliest days.

They discuss: 

• Why human settlement itself is an artifact of roughly 12,000 years of unusually stable climate, and what that means for orchards, sewer systems, mortgages, and municipal budgets built on the assumption it would hold 
• Why property insurance is a stranger instrument than most people realize, covering one property, for one year, against a narrowly specified list of perils 
• How society reshaped itself around insurance — fire departments, building codes, etc. — rather than the other way around
• Why home hardening runs into a wall when your neighbor does nothing 
• What happens to a market when the price signal is quietly removed 
• The three axes the group argues every policymaker is choosing whether they name them or not: transparency versus opacity, public versus private, and time
  

The closing argument is that “solution” may be the wrong word for a problem of this shape. What is available instead: no-regrets policy, frameworks built to be revised, room to experiment, and communities committed enough to do the work together.

• Is the Future Insurable? — Carolyn Kousky, Spencer Glendon & Barney Schauble
• Built on Assumptions: Two Tales of One Building — Glendon & Schauble, Probable Futures (May 2026)
• Probable Futures — climate maps and literacy tools referenced in the episode
• Insurance for Good resource library — primers on parametric insurance and catastrophe bonds 
• Housing insurance is melting down — Glendon & Schauble, Fortune (2024)
• The Daily on this year’s El Niño
• Insurance for Good / CA FWD report on the role of insurance in funding and financing resilience 

Hashtags

#CaliforniaDreamshot #Insurance #ClimateRisk #Resilience #Wildfire #InsuranceForGood #ProbableFutures #ClimateAdaptation #CaliforniaForward #CAFWD #CAPolicy #CapitalMarkets

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.

In this inaugural episode, Dreamshot co-hosts Kate Gordon, Nuin-Tara Key, Priyanka Mohanty, and Carolyn Kousky, talk through California’s volatile state budget, the Rainy Day Fund, why resilience investment keeps losing out to short-term costs, and what it would take to treat resilience as a core economic strategy rather than an add-on. 

They close with a round of “By the Numbers”—guessing how many California homeowners in high-risk wildfire zones rely on the state’s FAIR Plan for insurance —and preview what's coming up on both halves of the show, from grid transmission and manufacturing to adaptation finance.

The California Dreamshot podcast is hosted by Kate Gordon (CEO, California Forward), Nuin-Tara Key (COO, California Forward), Priyanka Mohanty (UAW Center for Manufacturing a Green Economy), and Carolyn Kousky (Insurance for Good) on the fiscal side of climate change.

***

California Dreamshot is a podcast from California Forward (CA FWD) — a multi-partisan, nonprofit organization working to build a new California economy that’s resilient, sustainable, and inclusive. Our hosts and their guests go past the headlines to the decisions that actually shape the state. With a focus on industrial and energy policy, and climate and economic resilience, California Dreamshot is made for the people who move California forward. New episodes every other week.

Learn more at CAFWD.org/podcast

#CaliforniaForward #CaliforniaDreamshot #CaliforniaPolicy #ClimateResilience #EnergyPolicy #IndustrialPolicy #ClimateFinance #StateBudget #WildfireRisk #JustTransition #PublicPolicy #California