Shift Key with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins

Over the weekend, the U.S. military entered Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife. Maduro will now face drug and gun charges in New York, and some members of the Trump administration have described the operation as a law enforcement mission.

President Donald Trump has taken a different tack. He has justified the operation by asserting that America is going to “take over” Venezuela’s oil reserves, even suggesting that oil companies might foot the bill for the broader occupation and rebuilding effort. Trump officials have told oil companies that the U.S. mi...

​​Shift Key is off for the holidays, but we hope you’ll enjoy this classic episode.

Rooftop solar is four times more expensive in America than it is in other countries. It’s also good for the climate. Should we even care about its high cost?

Yes, says Severin Borenstein, an economist and the director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In a 2024 blog post, he argued that the high cost of rooftop solar will shift nearly $4 billion onto the bills of low- and middle...

2025 has been a rough year for climate and energy news. But enough about that. Let’s start looking at 2026!

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by some of Heatmap’s writers and editors to discuss our biggest stories and predictions for 2026 — what we’re tracking, what could surprise us, and what could happen next. We also discuss a recent op-ed in The New York Times arguing that Democrats should work more closely with the U.S. oil and gas industry. Today’s panel includes Heatmap’s founding staff writer Emily Pontecorvo, staff writer M...

Over the past decade, the oil and gas industry has sharpened its drilling skills, extracting fossil fuels at greater depths — and with more precision — than ever before. What if there was a way to tap those advances to generate zero-carbon energy?

The Canadian company Eavor (pronounced “ever”) says it can do so. Its closed-loop geothermal system is already producing heat at competitive prices in Europe, and it says it will soon be able to drill deep enough to fuel the electricity system, too. It just opened a first-of-its-kind demonstration facility in Germany, which is successfully heating and powe...

China’s electric vehicle industry, it’s now well understood, is churning out cars that rival or exceed the best products coming out of the West. Chinese EVs are cheaper, cooler, more innovative, and have better range. And now they’re surging into car markets around the world — markets where consumers are hungry for clean, affordable transportation. 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Ilaria Mazzocco about her new report on how six countries around the world are dealing with the rise of Chinese EVs. Why do countries welcome Chinese-made EVs, and why do coun...

2025 has been incredibly eventful for decarbonization — and not necessarily in a good way. The return of Donald Trump, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the rise of data centers and artificial intelligence led to more changes for climate policy and the clean energy sector than we’ve seen in years. Some of those we saw coming. Others we really did not. 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse look back at the year’s biggest energy and decarbonization stories and examine what they got right — and what they got wrong. What’s been most su...

It’s been a tumultuous year for climate politics — and for climate nonprofits. The longtime activist group 350.org suspended its operations in the U.S. (at least temporarily), and Bill Gates, the world’s No. 1 climate funder, declared that the decarbonization movement should make a “strategic pivot” to poverty reduction. How should someone who wants to help the global climate navigate this moment?

Our guest has recommendations. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Dan Stein, the founder and executive director of Giving Green. Giving Green is a nonprofit that researches the most high-im...

The boom in artificial intelligence has become entangled with the clean energy industry over the past 18 months. Tech companies are willing to pay a lot for electricity — especially reliable zero-carbon electricity — and utilities and energy companies have been scrambling to keep up.

But is that boom more like a bubble? And if so, what does that mean for the long-term viability of AI companies and data center developers, and for the long-term health of decarbonization? 

On this week’s Shift Key, we’re talking to Advait Arun, a senior associate for capital markets at the Ce...

It’s been a huge few weeks for climate news. Democrats swept state and local elections in New Jersey, Virginia, California, and New York City — and won two crucial regulatory races in Georgia. A few weeks before, the climate tech investor and philanthropist Bill Gates released a memo arguing for a pivot on climate funding vis a vis global health.

On this special episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Heatmap staff writers Emily Pontecorvo and Matthew Zeitlin about what the 2025 elections might mean for climate policy, why “affordability” politics could hamper decarbonization, and whether the Gates me...

​Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins are off this week. Please enjoy this selection from the Shift Key archive.

China’s greenhouse gas emissions were essentially flat in 2024 — or they recorded a tiny increase, according to a November report from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, or CREA. A third of experts surveyed by the report believe that its coal emissions have peaked. Has the world’s No. 1 emitter of carbon pollution now turned a corner on climate change?

Lauri Myllyvirta is the co-founder and lead analyst at CREA, an independent research o...

Data centers aren’t the only driver of rising power use. The inexorable shift to electric vehicles — which has been slowed, but not stopped, by Donald Trump’s policies — is also pushing up electricity use across the country. That puts a strain on the grid — but EVs could also be a strength.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Apoorv Bhargava, the CEO and cofounder of Weavegrid, a startup that helps people charge their vehicles in a way that’s better and cleaner for the grid. They chat about why EV charging re...

Electricity prices are the biggest economic issue in the New Jersey governor’s race, which is perhaps next month’s most closely watched election. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate and frontrunner, has pledged to freeze power prices for state residents after getting elected. Can she do that? 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America, a center-left think tank that aims to encourage a “full-employment, robust-growth economy.” He’s also a nearly lifelong NJ resident. They chat about how New Jersey got such expensive electricity, whether the n...

Simply operating America’s buildings uses more than a third of the country’s energy. A major chunk of that is temperature control — keeping the indoors cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Heating eats into families’ budgets and burns a tremendous amount of fuel oil and natural gas. But what if we could heat and cool buildings more efficiently, cleanly, and cheaply? 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Dulcie Madden, the founder and CEO of Dig Energy, a New Hampshire-based startup that is trying to lower the cost of...

Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His first book, We Survived the Night, was released this week — it uses memoir, reporting, and literary anthology to tell the story of Native families across North America, including his own. 

NoiseCat was previously an environmental and climate activist at groups including 350.org and Data for Progress. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks with Julian about Native American nations and politics, the complexity and reality of Native life in 2025, and the “trickster” as a recurring...

China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on. 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity a...

It’s been a busy few weeks for climate and energy. New York Climate Week brought hundreds of events — and thousands of people — to the city to discuss decarbonization and energy policy. The New Jersey governor’s race has raised the salience of electricity rates. And suddenly everyone is talking about energy affordability.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by his colleagues at Heatmap to discuss some of the biggest topics in energy and climate. What did they take away from New York Climate Week? What do the new politics of affordabil...

Artificial intelligence is helping to drive up electricity demand in America. Energy costs are rising, and utilities are struggling to adjust. How should policymakers — and companies — respond to this moment? 

On this special episode of Shift Key, recorded live at Heatmap House during New York Climate Week, Rob leads a conversation about some potential paths forward. He’s joined first by Representative Sean Casten, the coauthor of a new Democratic bill seeking to lower electricity costs for consumers. How should the grid change for this new moment, and what can Democrats do to become the party of chea...

A new stack of electricity technologies — including solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and power electronics — seem to be displacing fossil fuels across China and the developing world. Are we watching an irresistible technological revolution happen? Or is something weirder going on — something that has far more to do with China’s singular scale and policy goals than physics and economics? 

Kingsmill Bond argues that a global electrotech revolution has already begun — and that it will soon sweep Europe and the United States, too. Bond is an energy strategist at Ember, a London-based electricity data think tank. He previous...

We live in a new energy era — one in which the inputs and technologies key to clean electricity production are at the heart of international politics. What will that mean for decarbonization? And how should climate tech companies prepare? 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob chats about those questions and more with Dr. Sarah Kapnick. She is the Global Head of Climate Advisory at J.P. Morgan, where she advises the bank's clients on climate, energy, biodiversity and sustainability topics. She was the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from...

Electricity is getting more expensive — and the culprit, in much of the country, is the poles and wires. Since the pandemic, utility spending on the “last mile” part of the power grid has surged, and it seems likely to get worse before it gets better.

How can we fix it? Well, we can start by fixing utility regulation. 

On today’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about why utility regulation sucks and how to make it better. In Europe and other parts of the world, utilities are better at controlling their cos...

How did life first form on Earth? What does entropy have to do with the origins of mammalian life — or the creation of the modern economy? And what chemical process do people, insects, Volkswagens, and coal power plants all share?

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob chats with Peter Brannen, the author of a new history of the planet, The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything. The book weaves together a single narrative from the Big Bang to the Permian explosion to the oil-devouring economy of today by means of a singl...

Shift Key is off for Labor Day, so we’re re-running this classic episode.

For the first time in 15 years, American electricity demand is rising again as new data centers, factories, and electric vehicles come online. The easiest option is to meet that new demand with new supply — new power plants. But in many parts of the country, it can take years to hook up new wind, solar, and batteries to the grid. The reason why is a clogged and broken system called the interconnection queue.   

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, whic...

So far on Shift Key Summer School we’ve covered how electricity gets made and how it gets sold. But none of that matters without the grid, which is how that electricity gets to you, the consumer. Who actually keeps the grid running? And what decisions did they make an hour ago, a day ago, a week ago, five years ago to make sure that it would still be running right this second? 

This week on Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat with Mark Rothleder, senior vice president and chief operating officer of the California Independent Sys...

Most electricity used in America today is sold on a wholesale power market. These markets are one of the most important institutions structuring the modern U.S. energy economy, but they’re also not very well understood, even in climate nerd circles. And after all: How would you even run a market for something that’s used at the second it’s created — and moves at the speed of light? 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key Summer School, Rob and Jesse talk about how electricity finds a price and how modern power markets work. Why run a p...

The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joine...

In the next few years, the United States is going to see the fastest growth in electricity demand since the 1970s. And that’s only the beginning of the challenges that our power grid will face. When you step back, virtually every trend facing the power system — such as the coming surge in liquified natural gas exports or President Trump’s repeal of wind and solar tax credits — threatens to constrain the supply of new electricity. 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about why they’re increasingly worried about a surge in elec...

The two fastest-growing sources of electricity generation in the world represent a radical break with the energy technologies that came before them. That’s not just because their fuels are the wind and the sun.

This is our third episode of Shift Key Summer School, a series of “lecture conversations” about the basics of energy, electricity, and the power grid. This week, we dive into the history and mechanics of wind turbines and solar panels, the two lynchpin technologies of the energy transition. What do solar panels have in common with semiconductors? Why did it take so lon...

It’s official. On July 4, President Trump signed the Republican reconciliation bill into law, gutting many of the country’s most significant clean energy tax credits. The future of the American solar, wind, battery, and electric vehicle industries looks very different now than it did last year.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we survey the damage and look for bright spots. What did the law, in its final version, actually repeal, and what did it leave intact? How much could still change as the Trump administration implements the law? What does this mean for U...

Just two types of machines have produced the overwhelming majority of electricity generated since 1890. This week, we look at the history of those devices, how they work — and how they have contributed to global warming.

This is our second episode of Shift Key Summer School, a series of “lecture conversations” about the basics of energy, electricity, and the power grid for listeners of all backgrounds. This week, we dive into the invention and engineering of the world’s most common types of fossil- and nuclear-fueled power plants. What’s a Rankine cycle power station, and how does it us...

What is the difference between energy and power? How does the power grid work? And what’s the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour? 

On this week’s episode, we answer those questions and many, many more. This is the start of a new series: Shift Key Summer School. It’s a series of introductory “lecture conversations” meant to cover the basics of energy and the power grid for listeners of every experience level and background. In less than an hour, we try to get you up to speed on how to think about energy, power, hors...

Food is a huge climate problem. It’s responsible for somewhere between a quarter and a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, but it concerns a much smaller share of global climate policy. And what policy does exist is often … pretty bad.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Michael Grunwald, the author of the new book We Are Eating the Earth. It’s a book about land as much as it’s a book about food — because no matter how much energy abundance we ultimately achieve, we’re stuck with the amoun...

You might not think that often about medium-duty trucks, but they’re all around you: ambulances, UPS and FedEx delivery trucks, school buses. And although they make up a relatively small share of vehicles on the road, they generate an outsized amount of carbon pollution. They’re also a surprisingly ripe target for electrification, because so many medium-duty trucks drive fewer than 150 miles a day.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors. Harbinger is a Los Angeles-based startup that sells electr...

Why has it been so hard for the world to make progress on climate change over the past 30 years? Maybe it’s because we’ve been thinking about the problem wrong. Academics and economists have often framed climate change as a free-rider or collective action problem, one in which countries must agree not to emit greenhouse gases and abuse the public commons. But maybe the better way to understand climate action is as a fight that generates winners and losers, defined primarily by who owns what. 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse t...

Did the Supreme Court just make it easier to build things in this country — or did it give a once-in-a-lifetime gift to the fossil fuel industry? Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 against environmentalists who sought to use a key permitting law, the National Environmental Policy Act, to slow down a railroad in a remote but oil-rich part of Utah. Even the court’s liberals ruled against the green groups. 

But the court’s conservative majority issued a much stronger and more expansive ruling, urging lower courts to stop interpreting the law as they have for yea...

Shift Key is off this week for Memorial Day, so we’re re-running one of our favorite episodes from the past. With Republicans in the White House and Congress now halfway to effectively repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, the United States’ signature climate law, we thought now might be a good moment to remind ourselves why emissions reductions matter in the first place.

To that end, we’re resurfacing our chat from November with Kate Marvel, an associate research scientist at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. At the time, Trump had just be...

Republicans are preparing to tear up America’s clean energy tax credits as part of their budget reconciliation megabill. Hollowing out those policies will have sweeping implications for the country’s energy system — it could set back solar, nuclear, and geothermal development; bring less electricity supply onto the grid; and devastate the country’s fledgling electric vehicle supply chain. 

A new report — written by our own Jesse Jenkins — is all about the real-life consequences of killing the tax credits. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse shares the forthcoming analysis of the bill from Princeton Unive...

The fight over the Inflation Reduction Act has arrived. After months of discussion, the Republican majority in the House is now beginning to write, review, and argue about its plans to transform the climate law’s energy tax provisions. 

We wanted to record a show about how to follow that battle. But then — halfway through recording that episode — the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee dropped the first draft of their proposal to gut the IRA, and we had to review it on-air. 

We were joined by Luke Bassett, a former senior advisor for dome...

Last week, more than 50 million people across mainland Spain and Portugal suffered a blackout that lasted more than 10 hours and shuttered stores, halted trains, and dealt more than $1 billion in economic damage. At least eight deaths have been attributed to the power outage.

Almost immediately, some commentators blamed the blackout on the large share of renewables on the Iberian peninsula’s power grid. Are they right? How does the number of big, heavy, spinning objects on the grid affect grid operators’ ability to keep the lights on? 

On this week’s episode of Shift K...

Texas is one of the country’s biggest producers of zero-emissions energy. Last year, the Lone Star State surpassed California to become the country’s No. 1 market for utility-scale solar. More solar and batteries were added to the Texas grid in 2024 than any other energy source, and the state has long dominated in onshore wind.

But that buildout is now threatened. A new tranche of bills in the Texas House and Senate could impose punitive engineering requirements on wind, solar, and storage plants — even those already in operation — and they could send the state’s power bills soar...

In just the past few years, Chinese EV-maker BYD has become the most important car company most Americans have still never heard of. It is China’s biggest private employer, the world’s third most valuable automaker (after Tesla and Toyota), and it’s capable of producing more than 5 million cars a year. It’s also just one of dozens of innovative new Chinese auto companies that are set to transform the global mobility market — regardless of what happens with Trump’s tariffs. 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob talk with Michael Dunne...

Donald Trump has implemented what is easily the most chaotic set of American economic policies in recent memory. First, the U.S. declared a trade war on the entire world, imposing breathtaking tariffs on many of the country’s biggest trading partners. He’s paused that effort — but scaled up punitive tariffs on China, launching what would be the 21st century’s biggest global economic realignment without any apparent plan. Now Trump says that more levies are coming on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, no matter where we get them.

All of this is a disaster for the U.S. eco...

China’s industrial policy for clean energy has turned the country into a powerhouse of solar, wind, battery, and electric vehicle manufacturing. 

But long before the country’s factories moved global markets — and invited Trump’s self-destructive tariffs — the country implemented energy and technology policy to level up its domestic industry. How did those policies work? Which tools worked best? And if the United States needs to rebuild in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, what should this country learn? 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with two scholars who...

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After fa...

If you care about decarbonizing the power grid anytime soon, you have to care about data centers. The AI boom and the ongoing growth of the internet have driven a big new cycle of data center construction in the United States, with tech companies trying to buy amounts of electricity comparable to those used by large cities. 

Peter Freed has seen this up close. As Meta’s former director of energy strategy, he worked on clean energy procurement and data center development from 2014 to 2024. He is now a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group, where he...

Republicans in Washington are pushing for at least two big changes to the country’s car-related policies. In Congress, some lawmakers want to repeal the $7,500 tax credit that helps consumers buy or lease a new electric vehicle — as well as a matching tax credit that lets companies buy heavy-duty zero-carbon trucks. And at the Environmental Protection Agency, officials are trying to roll back Biden-era rules encouraging dealerships to sell more EVs through 2032. 

What will that mean for the climate — and for the slate of new EV and battery factories popping up around the country? On this week’s...

Donald Trump’s second term has now entered its second month. His administration is doing much to slow down renewables, and everything it can to slow down offshore wind. Jael Holzman is a senior reporter at Heatmap and the author of our newsletter, “The Fight,” about local battles over renewable permitting around the country. 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Jael about the bleak outlook for offshore wind, the use of presidential authority to impede energy development, and why solar has been spared — so far. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Je...

Longtime listeners of Shift Key will recognize the name Intersolar and Energy Storage North America, one of the country’s premier solar industry conferences. Shift Key was live at this year’s event, hosting a panel on the present and future of the solar industry featuring a pair of marquee panelists: Tom Starrs, currently the vice president for government and public affairs at EDP Renewables, North America, who has more than 30 years of experience in the renewables industry; and Maria Robinson, until recently the director of the Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office and now the president and CEO of...

Congress is still debating the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act, but the Trump administration has already torn up energy and climate policies across the federal government. It’s time to step back and try to take stock. How much damage has the Trump administration already done to decarbonization? What’s most worrying? What was going to happen anyway? And what might still be saved? 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse go agency by agency to understand the most important changes and try to understand the deeper agenda — including potential points of incohe...

The most important energy regulators in the United States aren’t all in the federal government. Each state has its own public utility commission, a set of elected or appointed officials who regulate local power companies. This set of 200 individuals wield an enormous amount of power — they oversee 1% of U.S. GDP — but they’re often outmatched by local utility lobbyists and overlooked in discussions from climate advocates. 

Charles Hua wants to change that. He is the founder and executive director of PowerLines, a new nonprofit engaging with America’s public utility commissions about how to deliver eco...

The first few weeks of the new Trump administration have seen an onslaught of anti-climate actions: an order punishing the wind industry, an attempted reversal of the Environmental Protection Administration’s climate authority, and a brazen — and possibly unconstitutional — attempt to freeze all spending under Biden’s climate laws. Democrats’ climate legacy seems to be under assault. How will they respond? 

Senator Brian Schatz has represented Hawaii in the U.S. Senate since 2010. He is the chief deputy whip for the Democratic Party. A self-described climate hawk, he helped shape what became the Inflation Reduction Act, and he has...

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. automaking industry has transformed how it builds cars and trucks, constructing a continent-sized network of factories, machine shops, and warehouses that some call “Factory North America.” President Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports will disrupt and transform those supply chains. What will that mean for the automaking industry and the transition to EVs?

Ellen Hughes-Cromwick is the former chief economist at Ford Motor Company, where she worked from 1996 to 2014, as well as the former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Commerce. She is now a seni...

On February 1 — that is, three days from now — President Donald Trump has promised to apply a tariff of 25% to all U.S. imports from Canada and Mexico, crude oil very much not excepted. Canada has been the largest source of American crude imports for more than 20 years. More than that, the U.S. oil industry has come to depend on Canada’s thick, sulfurous oil to blend with America’s light, sweet domestic product to suit its highly specialized refineries. If that heavy, gunky stuff suddenly becomes a lot more expensive, so will U.S. oil refining.

Rory J...

The Los Angeles wildfires have killed at least 27 people, destroyed more than 17,000 structures, and displaced tens of thousands. In the next few months, the billions of costs in damage to homes and property will ripple through the state’s insurance market — and likely cause its insurer of last resort to run out of money.

Benjamin Keys has studied how natural disasters, rising sea levels, and increasing exposure to risk have driven up insurance costs nationwide. He is a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and one of the countr...

Hydrogen. What are you even supposed to think about it? If you’ve spent serious time focusing on climate policy, you’ve heard the hype about hydrogen — about the miraculous things that it might do to eliminate carbon pollution from cars, power plants, steel mills, or more. You’ve also seen that hype fizzle out — even as governments have poured billions of dollars into making it work.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse give you a rough guide for how to think about clean hydrogen, which could help decarbonize the industrial — even the molec...

China’s greenhouse gas emissions were essentially flat this year — or they recorded a tiny increase, according to a recent report from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, or CREA. A third of experts surveyed by the report believe that its coal emissions have peaked. Has the world’s No. 1 emitter of carbon pollution now turned a corner on climate change?  

Lauri Myllyvirta is the co-founder and lead analyst at CREA, an independent research organization focused on air pollution and headquartered in Finland. Myllyvirta has worked on climate policy, pollution, and energy issues in Asia...

Happy new year! On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse answer some of the questions they’ve received from readers throughout the year. Hot topics include: What happened to the Green New Deal, and is the Inflation Reduction Act part of its legacy? Should U.S. policy prioritize solar manufacturing or solar deployment? And how can normal people keep AI-driven data centers from blowing up the grid? 

Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

The rise of artificial intelligence and the associated expansion of data centers is driving surging demand for new power supply. Earlier this fall at the annual meeting of Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Jesse sat down with a panel of experts to discuss how society can meet the growing energy demands of AI while staying on track broader decarbonization efforts.

How will we power the growing demand from AI and data centers? What role can nuclear power really play? Will AI lock us into a new generation of gas power plants? Are r...

Jennifer Granholm has long been one of the most interesting figures in the Democratic Party. A former federal prosecutor, she was the governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011, leading the state during the Great Recession and subsequent auto bailout. Since 2021, she has been the 16th U.S. Secretary of Energy. While there, she has overseen the department’s transformation from an R&D-focused agency to an aspiring engine of industrial strategy. 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob sits down with Secretary Granholm in person in New York to conduct an exit interview, of sorts. What...

The Chinese electric automaker BYD is entering a new stage in its history. Last month, it sold more than half a million electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. BYD has already shipped more cars this year than Ford and Honda, and it is fast coming for Volkswagen, GM, and Toyota’s crowns as the world’s three largest automakers.

Earlier this year, Rob and Jesse spoke with Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. She has watched China’s EV i...

The Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, is the biggest investment in clean energy in American history. It is also in danger. In January, the Trump administration and a GOP Congress will take over the federal government — and they have made a variety of promises about how they’ll disrupt the law, ranging from full repeal to a more “surgical” reform approach.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has worked since 2022 to implement the IRA’s climate provisions at the White House. She joins us t...

It’s been a news-filled few weeks — so it’s time for a roundup. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about what Trump’s cabinet selections might mean for his climate policy and whether permitting reform could still happen. Then Rob chats with Corey Cantor, senior EV analyst at BloombergNEF, about promising Q3 sales for U.S. automakers, General Motors’ turnaround, and how much the Trump administration might dent America’s EV uptake. 

Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of en...

Here’s the bad news: The world is almost certainly going to miss the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. The needed emissions cuts are too large and the direction of policy too slow to lead to any other outcome. In the next few decades, global warming will slip past the 1.5 degree mark — and temperatures will keep rising.

What does that mean? What comes next? And how should we feel about that? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat with Kate Marvel...

The rollbacks are coming. Donald Trump’s incoming administration is expected to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, weaken the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules for power plants and tailpipe pollution, and — potentially — rewrite or repeal big swaths of the Inflation Reduction Act. Each of those actions would seem to provide an opening for the world’s No. 1 polluter — China — to assert global leadership and zip ahead in the next generation of clean energy technology.

How will it respond? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat with Jeremy Wallace, the A. D...

Last night, Donald Trump secured a second term in the White House. He campaigned on an aggressively pro-fossil -fuel agenda, promising to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark 2022 climate law, and roll back Environmental Protection Agency rules governing power plant and car and truck pollution.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob pick through the results of the election and try to figure out where climate advocates go from here. What will Trump 2.0 mean for the federal government’s climate policy? Did climate policies notch any wins at the state level...

It’s all happening. The presidential election is a week away, and our cohost Jesse Jenkins is back from vacation. There is so much to talk about in the world of decarbonization and energy. So we tried to catch up on all of it. Are EV sales starting to rebound in the U.S.? What’s up with the Cybertruck? And what about Senator Joe Manchin’s permitting reform bill? 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob attempt to discuss all those questions and more. Peak oil demand — the IRA’s focus on manufactur...

Over the past two months, the country’s biggest tech companies have announced a flurry of deals with advanced and conventional nuclear companies. At the same time, Democratic candidates running for federal office — including Kamala Harris and a handful of Senate candidates — have touted their support of building new nuclear power plants. Has nuclear’s moment finally arrived?

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we have Josh Freed, the senior vice president of Third Way’s climate and energy program, discussing why nuclear might be about to boom, why Democrats are embracing nuclear, and whether a Tr...

What’s next for the Biden administration — and for climate policy in the United States? Should Democrats negotiate with Republicans over permitting reform, even if it means making concessions to fossil fuel interests? And how should the country’s trade policy handle the problem of carbon pollution?  

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob speaks with Ali Zaidi, the national climate advisor to President Joe Biden. Zaidi leads the White House Climate Policy Office, which coordinates domestic climate policy across federal agencies. Before joining the White House in 2021, Zaidi was the state of New York’s dep...

How can you fight climate change in your daily life? Last month, Heatmap published our attempt at answering that question: Called Decarbonize Your Life, it’s a series of stories and guides to help you make decisions that nudge the energy system away from fossil fuels. We consulted studies, ran our own analysis (with help from some friends), and used our expert judgment to arrive at six big, high-leverage actions you can take to fight climate change.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with Heatmap’s deputy editor Jillian Goodman and fo...

This is a special Hurricane Helene edition of Shift Key. Our regular programming will resume next week.

Nearly a week after Hurricane Helene made landfall, we are still coming to terms with the scale of its destruction. The storm killed at least 182 people, making it the deadliest cyclone to make landfall in the continental United States since Katrina. From Tampa Bay to Asheville, North Carolina, it caused the worst hurricane-related damage in a century.

Why was Hurricane Helene so bad? Why did it cause such horrible flooding in western North Carolina, South Carolina...

In just over a month, America will elect hundreds of thousands of people to state, county, and municipal offices. While those elections might lack the splashiness of the race for the White House or Congress, they could shape how and whether the United States fights climate change. So which elections matter most?

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, a group that tries to do ‘Moneyball for climate policy,’ analyzing the races that could matter most for the country’s decarbonization. A winner o...

It’s potentially one of the most important — but least understood — provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, and it’s finally out in the world. Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency spent $27 billion to set up new green banks across the country. 

These new lending institutions could direct billions of dollars to supercharging decarbonization, financing new solar farms, geothermal projects, EV chargers, and more. They’ll also recycle their funding indefinitely, meaning they will likely last longer than any other provision in the law. 

On this week’s show, Rob and Jesse bring you a user’s g...

Geothermal is getting closer to the big time. Last week, Fervo Energy — arguably the country’s leading enhanced geothermal company — announced that its Utah demonstration project had achieved record production capacity. On the whole, enhanced geothermal — which borrows drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry — seems poised to become a player on America’s coming clean, 24/7 power grid. 

Why is geothermal so hot? How soon could it appear — and what advantages does it have other zero-carbon technologies don’t? On this week’s episode, Rob and Jesse speak with Sarah Jewett, the vice president of strategy at Fervo E...

Maybe you’ve never heard of it. Maybe you know it too well. But to a certain type of clean energy wonk, it amounts to perhaps the three most dreaded words in climate policy: the interconnection queue. 

The queue is the process by which utilities decide which wind and solar farms get to hook up to the power grid in the United States. Across much of the country, it has become so badly broken and clogged that it can take more than a decade for a given project to navigate. 

On this week’s epis...

You don’t need us to say it: The 2024 election will have enormous stakes for America’s climate policy and the planet’s climate. But how well can we quantify those stakes? What would a Trump presidency — or a Harris presidency, for that matter — really mean for the country’s emissions trajectory?  

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with Sonia Aggarwal, the chief executive officer of Energy Innovation, a climate policy think tank that operates across North America, Europe, and Asia. She was previously special assistant to the president for climate policy...

It’s time to start talking about a big year for climate politics and policy: 2025. No matter who wins this fall’s elections, next year’s executive and legislative climate policy will be huge for America’s decarbonization strategy. Congress is all but guaranteed to negotiate over key parts of the country’s tax code, and whoever controls the White House will have to finalize the Inflation Reduction Act’s last few big programs. 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob are joined by Josh Freed, who leads Third Way’s climate and energy progra...

Democrats are gathering in Chicago this week for their quadrennial convention and to celebrate Kamala Harris’s nomination for president. This year’s convention will look different from 2020’s for many reasons — but one of them is that we’re likely to hear far less about climate change. Unlike in 2020, when President Joe Biden described global warming as one of “four overlapping crises” confronting the country, Harris has been more subtle when discussing it.

So … is that a problem? Should we be freaked out? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse discuss the modern elector...

Two years ago this week, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in clean energy and climate mitigation in American history. It contained roughly two dozen new or expanded tax credits that will — if the forecasts bear out — provide hundreds of billions of dollars in funding over the next decade. The administration is now rushing to finalize those provisions before the November election. 

Perhaps no official has been more central to setting up those tax credits than Wally Adeyemo, the deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department. He is also the Treas...

The world uses about 30 billion tons of concrete every year — more than any other material except water. It is the most ubiquitous human-made substance in the global economy. It’s also a huge climate problem. Producing cement, which is the key ingredient in concrete, generates roughly 8% of global annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Cody Finke has a plan to change that. He is the chief executive officer and cofounder of Brimstone, a startup that says it can cheaply produce ordinary Portland cement — the kind used in construction worldwide — without carbon emissions. This week, Rob chats with Finke about wh...

Shipping is the backbone of the modern economy. At least 80% of all goods worldwide are shipped as ocean cargo, and the global economy rises and falls on the free movement of gigantic ships across the sea. But container ships and bulk carriers burn what’s known as bunker fuel, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels. The international shipping industry generates 3% of global carbon emissions, a proportion that’s projected to rise through the century. 

Most proposals to decarbonize ocean freight have focused on using ammonia or other zero-carbon liquid fuels. But Fleetzero, a Bill Gates-backed startup, is tr...

Jesse is on vacation until August, so this is a special, Rob-only summer episode of Shift Key.

Over the past few weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court has profoundly changed how the federal government does its day-to-day work. In a series of landmark rulings, the high court sharply curtailed the ability of government agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency — to write and enforce rules and regulations.

That will change how the federal government oversees the products we buy, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. But it could also alter how the...

Jesse is on vacation until August, so this is a special, Rob-only summer episode of Shift Key.

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The far right is rising across Europe. The global order seems to be deteriorating. And American politics is careening toward a crisis. Where does climate policy go from here? 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob chats with two leaders at Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates-funded climate venture capital and advocacy group. They are Ann Mettler, a former EU official who is now Breakthrough’s vice president for Europe, and Aliya Haq, it...

Congress just passed perhaps its  biggest support for zero-carbon energy since the Inflation Reduction Act. The ADVANCE Act, which the Senate adopted overwhelmingly last week, aims to keep America at the cutting edge of the global nuclear industry by cutting regulatory fees, making it easier for U.S. companies to build nuclear power plants abroad, and reforming the agency that oversees it all, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Ryan Norman, a senior policy advisor at Third Way’s climate and energy program, about how Americ...

China’s electric vehicle industry has driven itself to the center of the global conversation. Its automakers produce dozens of affordable, technologically advanced electric vehicles that rival — and often beat — anything coming out of Europe or North America. The United States and the European Union have each levied tariffs on its car exports in the past few months, hoping to avoid a “China shock” to their domestic car industries. 

Ilaria Mazzocco has watched China’s EV industry grow from a small regional experiment into a planet-reshaping juggernaut. She is now a senior fellow with the Trustee Chair in Chin...

Have you looked at your power bill — like, really looked at it? If you’re anything like Rob, you pay whatever number appears at the bottom every month and drop it in the recycling. But how everyone’s power bill is calculated — in wonk terms, the “electricity rate design” — turns out to be surprisingly important and could be a big driver of decarbonization.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about why power bills matter, how Jesse would design electricity rates if he was king of the world, and how to fix rooftop sola...

Rooftop solar is four times more expensive in America than it is in other countries. It’s also good for the climate. Should we even care about its high cost? 

Yes, says Severin Borenstein, an economist and the director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In a recent blog post, he argued that the high cost of rooftop solar will shift nearly $4 billion onto the bills of low- and middle-income Californians who don’t have rooftop solar. Similar forces could soon spread the cost-shift problem across the cou...

Why isn’t rooftop solar cheaper in America? In Australia in 2024, a standard rooftop system can cost as little as $0.90 per watt. In the U.S., a similar system might go for $4 per watt. If America could come even close to Australia’s rooftop solar prices, then we would be able to decarbonize the power system much faster than we are now.

Mary Powell has the answers. She is the chief executive officer of Sunrun, a $2.6 billion company that is the largest rooftop solar and battery installer in the U.S. Sunrun has set up or mana...

Transmission has been one of the biggest obstacles of decarbonizing the power grid in America. In the past week, however, the country has taken two big steps toward finally removing it.

Last week, the Department of Energy published a list of 10 high-priority areas for grid development, called National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors, designed to help accelerate some of the most annoying aspects of the siting process. Then on Monday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission passed a new rule directing grid planners to take a longer view on what America’s future electricity needs will look like.

Tesla is now facing its worst crisis in years. Last week, CEO Elon Musk laid off the automaker’s roughly 500-person Supercharger team and what remained of its policy and new vehicle teams. Before that, it reported its first-quarter financial results — and they were even worse than the lackluster performance that investors were expecting. 

Already this year, Tesla has cut around 10% of its employees. Now Musk is promising that it will shift toward becoming an “AI” company. 

Does Tesla, long a stalwart of America’s EV transition, now pose a danger to it? On this week...

One of the most important pieces of the Biden administration’s climate policy has arrived: On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency issued new rules restricting climate pollution from coal-fired plants and  natural gas plants that haven’t been built yet. The rules will eliminate more than a billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution by the middle of the century.

They are the long-awaited “stick” in the Biden administration’s carrots-and-sticks climate policy. So how do the rules work? Why do they emphasize carbon capture so much? And is this the end of coal in America? On this specia...

Jigar Shah might have more control over America’s new wave of industrial policy — not to mention its climate policy — than anyone not named Joe Biden. And he’s not even a Cabinet-level official. As director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which is akin to its in-house bank, Shah oversees how roughly $400 billion in lending authority will be spent. That money will help finance new EV factories, geothermal wells, carbon capture sites, and more.

On this week’s episode, Rob sits down with Shah to discuss the philosophy that he brings to his role. Wh...

It isn’t just bad vibes: Electric vehicle sales are slumping in the United States. Fewer than 300,000 EVs were sold nationwide during the first three months of 2024 — although it could be more than 350,000, depending on how you count and whose data you trust. That’s a slight decline from last quarter at a time when EV sales need to be accelerating.

What caused the slump, and what can be done about it? And could hybrids or plug-in hybrids help solve the problem? In this week’s episode, Rob and Jesse chat with Corey Cantor, an EV analyst...

Can capitalism solve climate change? Wrong question, argues the author and journalist Akshat Rathi: In fact, you can’t solve climate change without capitalism. Look around the world, as Rathi does in his new book Climate Capitalism, and he says you’ll find companies and leaders who are proving that cutting carbon emissions is not just possible, but also profitable. 

The venture capitalist Sophie Purdom, the founder of Planeteer Capital, spends her days looking for those profitable climate companies. She says that a newer, smarter generation of climate startups is on the way.

In th...

Will the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence break the climate system? In recent months, utilities and tech companies have argued that soaring use of AI will overwhelm electricity markets. Is that true — or is it a sales pitch meant to build more gas plants? And how much electricity do data centers and AI use today?

In this week’s episode, Rob and Jesse talk to Jonathan Koomey, an independent researcher, lecturer, and entrepreneur who studies the energy impacts of the internet and information technology. We discuss why AI may not break the electricity system and...

Radia is a $1 billion climate tech startup with an unusual pitch: It is trying to build the world’s largest airplane. Its proposed aircraft, the Radia Wind Runner, would be as long as a football field, nearly as wide as a New York city block, and capable of carrying 12 times the volume of a Boeing 747. Such a plane could ferry massive wind-turbine blades, unlocking what the company calls “gigawind” — the ability to build offshore-sized wind farms on land. 

In this week’s episode, Rob and Jesse talk to Radia’s chief executive officer, Mark Lundstrom. (Jesse’s consulting fi...

Earlier this month, the electric-car maker Rivian announced its new SUV, the R2 — a $45,000 family hauler that will get more than 300 miles in range. It also debuted the R3 and R3X hatchbacks, which entranced online car nerds. 

These new Rivian models are sleek and important, but they won’t go on sale until 2026 at the earliest. Can Rivian last that long? In this week’s episode, Rob and Jesse discuss Rivian’s quest to survive, how electrification is changing car design, and the coolest EVs coming down the pike. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, ex...

Few people have shaped Bidenomics more than Brian Deese. From 2021 to 2023, Deese led the National Economic Council at the White House, serving as President Joe Biden’s top economic aide. He’s now an Innovation Fellow at MIT, where he helps lead the new Clean Investment Monitor project.

In part two of Shift Key’s conversation with Deese, we discuss electric vehicles, the future of U.S.-China trade relations, and whether the Big Three automakers can survive. Shift Key is hosted by Heatmap Executive Editor Robinson Meyer and Princeton Professor Jesse Jenkins.

Mentio...

Few people have shaped Bidenomics more than Brian Deese. 

From 2021 to 2023, Deese led the National Economic Council at the White House, serving as President Joe Biden’s top economic aide during such events as the post-pandemic recovery, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Before that, Deese was global head of sustainable investing for Blackrock and a senior political advisor to President Barack Obama. He’s now the Institute Innovation Fellow at MIT, where he helps lead the Clean Investment Monitor, a project that tracks investment in climate...

For a few weeks now, Heatmap’s staff writer, Emily Pontecorvo, has been trying to figure out if installing rooftop solar panels on your home actually reduces carbon pollution in a systematic way. In other words: If you own a home, and install solar panels on it, are you doing anything to change how much fossil fuel gets burned in your region or around the world? Or — somewhat counterintuitively — will your panels just increase the cost of electricity near you while shifting demand for those fossil fuels around? 

On this week’s episode, we try to answer th...

When we talk about carbon removal, we often focus on “direct air capture” facilities — big factories that suck carbon dioxide out of the ambient air.  

But a simpler and easier way to remove carbon from the atmosphere may exist. It’s called “enhanced rock weathering” — grinding up rocks, spreading them out, and exposing them to the ambient air — and it works, essentially, by speeding up the Earth’s carbon cycle. Enhanced rock weathering recently got a major vote of confidence from Frontier, a consortium of tech and finance companies who have teamed up to support new and experimental car...

A year and a half ago, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in American history — and arguably in world history. But is it actually working? A new report from a coalition of major energy analysts — including our cohost Jesse Jenkins’ lab at Princeton — looks at data from the power and transportation sectors and concludes that yes, the law is starting to decarbonize the American economy. 

But it isn’t working in the way many people might expect. Robinson Meyer, the executive editor of Heatmap News, and Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems expert and...