Austin environmental activist Paul Robbins joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss the 2025–26 edition of the Austin Environmental Directory, framed around “resilience” in the wake of Winter Storm Uri and recurring disasters, and packed with practical guidance on low-cost outage survival, home-scale energy and water conservation, and local food security. Paul describes the obsessive labor behind producing the first hard-copy edition since COVID, updating years of web-published reporting, editing hundreds of graphics, and synthesizing material “not reported anywhere else.” The hosts dig into systemic failures that made Uri so devastating, including inequality (wealthy residents can buy resilience, most can’t). The conversation expands to looming stresses from AI/data centers and cryptocurrency on the Texas grid, debates over dispatchable clean energy and storage beyond intermittent wind/solar (including emerging battery chemistries and geothermal “fracking for heat”), and the accelerating water crisis: groundwater competition, costly aquifer-storage schemes, and the limits of desalination and atmospheric water capture. Ultimately, Paul argues that government won’t act boldly without public pressure, urging collective local activism to demand better planning, R&D investment, conservation, and regional food production, and he closes by sharing where listeners can find the Directory in Austin.
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Paul Robbins:
The Directory has a chapter in it on low-cost solutions that will get you through a power outage. So, in terms of survival, that might help a bit. TI’ve written in other past directories, and this is on my website still, about alternative energy and clean energy that can be used in buildings, water conservation that can be used In homes. There’s all manner of things that can be done on an individual level.