SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: NPR.
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STACEY VANEK SMITH, HOST:
This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I’m Stacey Vanek Smith.
ADRIAN MA, HOST:
I’m Adrian Ma.
DARIAN WOODS, HOST:
And I’m Darian Woods. And it is time for another round of Indicators of the Week.
SMITH: Woo-hoo. It was kind of an action packed week, right? And there was a lot to choose from.
WOODS: Panning for gold in a torrent of economic indicators.
MA: Sifting for golden numerical nuggets.
WOODS: Today on the show, we have indicators for a hydrogen-powered low-carbon economy.
MA: Also, an indicator about a group of people who may still be having a hard time finding work even in the strong labor market we’re in.
SMITH: And prices rising by a latte.
WOODS: I get it.
SMITH: Stay with us.
MA: It’s going to be a real grind.
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SMITH: Indicators of the Week. Darian Woods, why don’t you kick us off?
WOODS: My Indicator of the Week is 80%. The Biden administration want to see the price of hydrogen decrease by 80% over the next decade.
SMITH: Like a hydrogen sale.
WOODS: That’s right, 80% off in a decade, at least.
MA: I know vaguely what hydrogen is, right? It’s like the cutest of the periodic elements.
WOODS: Yeah, the smallest.
MA: And inside this, you know, tiny atom is a potential low-carbon source of energy. But, like, how does it work?
WOODS: That’s a really good question, Adrian. And so to answer that, I called up Bridget van Dorsten.
BRIDGET VAN DORSTEN: Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
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WOODS: And aside from doing chemistry comedy, Bridget is a hydrogen analyst at the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Bridget says that there are two main ways that you can use hydrogen gas like using it in a factory or in a car. So one of these ways to use it is burning it. Like, you might have a natural gas power plant. And you can add in, say, 10% hydrogen into the mix, and you can make a cleaner power plant. And the other way to use hydrogen is in these types of almost battery cells that power your car. They’re also known as fuel cells. And the car can be refueled in a matter of minutes without a dirty exhaust pipe.
SMITH: That sounds really dreamy.
WOODS: It can be quite a good fuel, but hydrogen is not always zero carbon, not all the time. It all depends on how the hydrogen is made. So in the industry, there is this whole rainbow of color palettes that they use kind of as this industry shorthand for how that’s done.
VAN DORSTEN: There’s green hydrogen, produced from renewable energy resources. There’s yellow hydrogen, which is hydrogen produced from nuclear energy. There’s turquoise hydrogen, gray hydrogen, blue hydrogen. You also have brown hydrogen. It’s a lot to keep track of.
SMITH: A hydrogen rainbow.
WOODS: That’s right.
MA: Darian, what’s your favorite color of hydrogen?
WOODS: I’m told that green is, you know, the greenest, as you can imagine.
MA: That’s easy.
WOODS: So all of these colors, this plethora, this palette, it all depends on how the hydrogen is made. So brown is made from coal, for example. That obviously has high carbon emissions. And this is something to keep in mind when looking at the government’s goal. Its goal is to, quote, “reduce the cost of clean hydrogen by 80%.”
VAN DORSTEN: They didn’t say what kind of hydrogen they wanted it to be. They referred to it as clean hydrogen. And this, to me, reminded me very much of clean coal, as Trump would say.
WOODS: Oh. So you can have dirty hydrogen?
VAN DORSTEN: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. The brown hydrogen and the gray hydrogen, it is dirty.
WOODS: So Bridget thinks that that word clean is just too vague.
SMITH: You cannot trust an atom.
WOODS: They make up everything.
SMITH: That was a wonderful Indicator of the Week. Adrian Ma, what is your indicator this fine Friday?
MA: My indicator a little bit continues the science theme that we’re on so far. The indicator is 64%. It comes from this new study from the RAND Corporation that was published in the journal Science Advances today. And don’t worry, there’s an econ bit here.
SMITH: I was getting worried – starting to panic, sweaty palms.
WOODS: Give us the econ.
MA: And it has something to do with what we’ve been following a lot of, which is there are tons of job openings and not enough people to fill them. So this Rand study, what it did was looked at this representative sample of unemployed American men in their 30s. And it turns out two-thirds of them at some point in their past had been arrested or convicted of a crime.
WOODS: I mean, two out of three, that seems really high.
MA: Yeah, and that is exactly what the RAND Corp’s Jeffrey Wenger said he and his co-authors thought.
JEFFREY WENGER: Both of us were absolutely shocked by how big this number was.
MA: He says what’s interesting is that this number doesn’t actually change when you break down the data by race. And he says even though this study is based on data from 2017, it is relevant to us today.
WENGER: There is definitely a high demand for workers these days. We have to ask ourselves the question, how many of the workers are being screened out by employers who don’t want to hire people with criminal history records? So some of the labor shortage that we’re experiencing is self-inflicted.
SMITH: But there’s also like a counter trend going on here too, right? Because we’ve seen employers kind of scrambling for workers in some cases. And obviously this can push them to consider hiring people who they might not consider hiring in other circumstances, like people with a criminal record.
MA: Totally. Yeah. Jeffrey says it’s often the case that people who might have faced discrimination in a, you know, quote-unquote, “normal job market,” they do better when the labor market is booming. He says we saw that in the late ’90s, in the mid-2000s. Women and Black workers saw substantial job gains. And more recently, I’ve been reading about how some people with a criminal record are starting to get more job opportunities.
WOODS: All right. So I guess the big question is like, how long could this last? Like, a booming economy can open up opportunities for groups that have been historically discriminated against like Black workers and others. But those gains can also be erased when the economy slides.
MA: Yeah. Jeffrey says whether this is a blip or a longer term trend will depend in large part on employers’ attitudes. He’s hoping going forward, more employers will rethink what it means when a job applicant has a criminal record. You know, after all, by some estimates, as many as 1 in 4 or even 1 in 3 Americans has some sort of criminal record. So that is my indicator. Stacey, how about a pick me up?
SMITH: Oh. Well, I don’t know if this is actually going to be a pick me up. In certain ways, it’s a little bit of a downer, at least if you are a great coffee lover like I am.
WOODS: Love a good cup of coffee.
SMITH: Coffee prices are in this position where they are set to rise. And obviously prices for a lot of things are rising right now. Coffee is among them. But what you might not know is that there are two kind of main kinds of coffee beans, arabica and robusta. So robusta is like very caffeinated, but arabica is the one with like the sort of the sweet, chocolatey flavor that coffee lovers love. And as we’ve become a nation of coffee snobs in the U.S. we’ve, like, gravitated toward the arabica bean.
Now, the arabica bean, the price of it has gone up 75% in just the last few months. So there are a few things going on here. The first one, the thing that kind of tipped the domino effect on all of this was there was a freeze in Brazil. Now, Brazil produces more coffee than any other country, and they produce about a third of the coffee that we drink in the U.S. And this frost was very, very destructive, and it killed some of the coffee trees. And coffee trees can take years to grow and produce beans. So when the trees die, that is like a year-long setback of supply that we’re talking about.
WOODS: That’s really sad for the coffee growers. And I guess it’s not like there are coffee farms proliferating in the U.S.
SMITH: Almost none of it is grown in the U.S. because coffee needs to be grown pretty near the equator, so it has to be imported. But most of the cost of a, like, a bag of coffee beans does not come from the beans. In fact, it’s less than a third of the cost comes from the beans themselves. A lot of the cost comes from other things. So usually in the past, when the prices of beans have fluctuated, it hasn’t had necessarily that big of an impact on price.
But now this is where we’re getting into like why coffee prices might really go nuts because a lot of the coffee price comes from overhead, like the store that sells it, the labor, keeping the lights, on all of those things. Of course, the price of labor is going up. The other thing that contributes a lot to the price of a bag of coffee is the roasting, which is also labor. And, of course, transportation costs are up because gas prices are up. And then all the supply chain issues are happening. Every part of the coffee supply chain is going up. And now even Starbucks has announced, like, brace yourselves for more expensive coffee.
MA: Is there any good news here, Stacey?
SMITH: I guess the advantage would be maybe we start weaning ourselves off of caffeine. That could be good, right?
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MA: This episode of THE INDICATOR was produced by Nikki Willett (ph) with help from Isaac Rodrigues. It was fact-checked by Taylor Washington. Our senior producer is Viet Le. Our editor is Kate Concannon. And THE INDICATOR is a production of NPR.
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