Shift Key with Robinson Meyer

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...

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...

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 —...

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...

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 decar...

It has been a catastrophic 12 months for offshore wind in the U.S. Large projects have been canceled, and Orsted, the world’s biggest offshore wind developer, has laid off hundreds of employees. Is the industry dying?  Maybe it’s actually about to turn a corner. In this episode, Robinson Meyer, the executive editor of Heatmap News, and Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems expert and professor at...

Last month, President Biden announced the federal government would temporarily stop approving new export terminals for liquified natural gas. The move was hailed as a victory by climate activists and lamented by fossil-fuel companies. But what will the pause mean for the climate — really? Will it stop exports from rising in the near-term, and can we say with any certainty whether it will make carb...

Every week, Heatmap News Executive Editor Robinson Meyer and Princeton University Professor and energy systems expert Jesse Jenkins, make sense of the biggest shift of our time -- navigating the energy transition away from fossil fuels. Drawing on their years of experience reporting on and researching climate change and decarbonization, Meyer and Jenkins unpack the most important issues of the wee...