Shift Key with Robinson Meyer

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 c...

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 Heat...

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 Repr...

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?...

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. Mo...

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 regu...

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 boo...

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...

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...

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 w...

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 wee...

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 constra...

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 an...

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, i...

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 backgro...

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 liste...

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...

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...

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 cli...

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 gre...

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 resur...

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...

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...

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...

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 Tex...