Shift Key with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins

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 th...

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 administr...

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, ...

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-i...

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 Plane...

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, lecture...

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-s...

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 survi...

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 ...

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 advis...

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 ...

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. Enhanc...

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. 

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 Princeton University, discuss th...

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 carbon emissions go up or down?