Shift Key with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins

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.&n...

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...

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 re...

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 th...

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 a...

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 — ...

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 Shif...

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 gene...

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...

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 wi...

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 ...

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 dra...

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 ...

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...

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 — regard...

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 ...

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 need...

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. Si...

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...