Shift Key with Robinson Meyer

Climate and environmental advocates are sharply divided over the Senate’s bipartisan permitting reform proposal. But what most people agree is that the bill’s changes to electricity and transmission law are really, really good — and in some sense are much better than expected. Because of how the media works, that means nobody has talked about these proposals very much. So on this show, we wanted t...

Every midterm, the focus is on Congress — and for good reason. But in two weeks, Americans will vote on a number of state races that will matter immensely to the energy system, the power grid, and the future direction of greenhouse gas emissions. Climate Cabinet tracks those races, using what it calls “the moneyball approach” to identify the local offices nationwide with the most potential climate...

No researcher has been more cited in lawsuits against fossil fuel infrastructure than Peter Erickson . As an affiliated researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Peter studies how pipelines and other oil and gas supply expansions can increase global carbon emissions. His work has been critical to the activist fights against the Keystone XL pipeline, the Enbridge pipeline, and others. But...

There are two big trends in the American battery sector at the moment. The first is that the electric vehicle market is deteriorating. GM, for instance, sold just 25,000 EVs in the third quarter of this year. Ford sold 6,000 EVs. Even the long-awaited return of the Chevy Bolt sold just 8,000 units — a small fraction of the vehicle’s already-limited production run. At the same time, the data center...

Governor Mikie Sherrill is a former Navy pilot, federal prosecutor, and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She was elected New Jersey's governor in November 2025 in a campaign dominated by the state’s surging electricity prices. For this episode of Shift Key, Governor Sherrill joined Heatmap correspondent Matthew Zeitlin for a live conversation at our Heatmap House event, part of N...

Former Vice President Al Gore needs no introduction. He is, in a way, the original climate influencer. His film An Inconvenient Truth gave rise to a new wave of climate activism in the 2000s. It was one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time upon its release, and it won an Oscar, a Grammy, and — for Vice President Gore — a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s remained active in climate policy since...

Since taking office last year, the Trump administration has blocked renewable energy development and attacked climate change policy, prioritized fossil fuels and encouraged nuclear energy, and started a war that led to a global oil and gas supply shock. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has been the face of much of that policy agenda. For this episode of Shift Key, he joined Rob for a live con...

In the past few years, something surprising has happened in American energy policy: States and utilities have started trying to build new nuclear plants. A new kind of company — the nuclear developer — is now trying to handle those projects. The most prominent by far is The Nuclear Company , a startup that has hired many of the same people who built the new Vogtle plant in Georgia. On this episode...

America has some of the world’s best data about its own internal energy, industrial economy, and carbon emissions. That’s thanks to a federal agency called the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which painstakingly collects and updates the data every week. But EIA data can be hard to access — and even harder to share and understand. A new project aims to change that. U.S. Energy Data takes fe...

As we catch up from summer vacation, we’re bringing you a favorite from the Shift Key archive. We’ll be back in your feed with more fresh episodes starting next week. 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 was the star...

The United States is staring down a natural gas buildout of gigantic proportions. Amazon wants to build what would be the country’s largest power plant in Texas — and run it entirely on natural gas. Not to be outdone, OpenAI is plotting an even larger power plant in Ohio that, if built, would become the world’s largest gas power facility. How should we think about this boom — and about the AI and...

Two years ago, Donald Trump made an outlandish campaign promise: He would cut Americans’ power bills in half. It was a ridiculous, impossible pledge — but even so, the affordability problem didn’t need to get this bad. A new report, out this week from the Natural Resources Defense Council, looks at the economic, environmental, and public health costs of Trump’s regulatory and legislative clean ene...

California now has the most expensive electricity in the continental United States. It also has expensive housing … and an increasingly broken home insurance market. Are the three phenomena linked? They might be. Due to a peculiarity in the state’s constitution, electricity utilities are incentivized to pay for a huge amount of wildfire prevention, above and beyond what would be seen as economical...

Every few years, the Pacific Ocean’s surface waters become especially warm near the equator, a climatic phenomenon known as El Niño. El Niño is a normal part of the climate system, but even in a normal year, it can trigger extreme weather around the world. Forecasters are worried that the current El Niño — which just began a few weeks ago — is going to be anything but normal. Models suggest that w...

At this point, when you hear “venture capitalist,” you probably think of … software. Or artificial intelligence. Or cryptocurrency. The Engine Ventures , which spun out of MIT a few years ago, is different. It tries to fund what it calls “tough tech,” a somewhat nebulous category that includes companies working in energy, decarbonization, health, and infrastructure. As such, it’s backed some of th...

The Democratic Party’s climate and energy policy is at a difficult moment. Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has attacked solar and wind energy, started an inflationary war, and repealed key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act. And about a year and a half from now, Democrats will pick a presidential candidate and pitch their energy and climate policies to voters again. How a...

There’s really one one good thing that could happen this year in Congress for clean energy: permitting reform. If lawmakers reached a bipartisan deal on the country’s permitting system, they could make it easier to build solar, wind, and transmission lines — as well as every other kind of infrastructure. But will it happen? What are the obstacles to a deal? What would be in a deal? On this episode...

Charm Industrial is a climate tech company that takes biomass and converts it into a heavy, carbon-rich oil that can be injected underground, transmuting and storing the greenhouse gas far from the atmosphere. They’re scaling up fast and recently announced a new $20 million debt facility with JP Morgan; the bank also agreed to buy more than 60,000 tons worth of removals from them. On this episode...

For more than 30 years, a heterodox group of scientists have proposed injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth, thereby cooling the atmosphere and reversing climate change. But actual research into the idea has remained taboo, or at least the province of university and government labs. Then, last year, Heatmap broke the story of an Israeli-American compa...

Wait, is the climate policy landscape … in better shape than it looks? Just over a year ago, President Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It repealed many of the Biden administration’s most aggressive climate policies, including tax credits for solar and wind energy. Although those policies are gone, the emissions cuts they achieved remain largely intact — at least in the power sector, a...

It has been a hard few years for climate tech. But we recently got a bright spot: Earlier this month, Gigascale Capital announced it had raised $250 million to build the physical infrastructure driving decarbonization. That was notable in part because Gigscale’s founder is Mike Schroepfer , Meta’s former chief technology officer, who has gone deep on climate tech since leaving the company in 2022....

When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year, experts projected oil prices would go to $200 a barrel. But then… they didn’t. In fact, while gasoline prices rose in the United States, and Europe and Asia suffered higher costs, the resulting energy crisis wasn’t even as bad as what followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Why? China. The country seems to have absorbed the costs of Trum...

One of the most interesting projects in carbon removal is doubling down on the industry. Frontier — a coalition of tech, finance, and fashion firms that buy carbon removal credits to support the crucial technology — has secured another $915 million to power its next round of buying. The artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has also joined the coalition alongside its existing members, including...

Last year, progressives pulled off their biggest state-level win in Georgia in 20 years when voters elected two Democrats to the state’s Public Service Commission, which oversees electricity utilities. It was the first time Democrats had won a state-level office in Georgia since 2006. This year, Democrats have a chance to take an outright majority on the board. What would that mean — and what has...

When New York passed its first major climate law in 2019, climate advocates hailed the work as a milestone: The Empire State vowed to cut its carbon emissions by 40% by 2030, as compared to their 1990 levels, giving it some of the world’s most ambitious subnational climate policy. But last week, Governor Kathy Hochul and the state legislature moved to rewrite key provisions in that law, weakening...