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America should eat more chicken. But how many is too many?
On nuclear progress, Italian coal, and Canada’s climate retreat
Reflections on a rock ’n’ roll road trip.
The fundamentals are the same — it’s the tone that’s changed.
I wanted to update you on some very exciting news — our Decarbonize Your Life section just won the National Magazine Award for Service Journalism. It’s a huge honor for a publication that just turned two years old last month and a testament to the outstanding journalism our small but mighty newsroom does every day guiding our readers through the great energy transition.
A huge shout out, in particular, to our deputy editor Jillian Goodman for making the section so smart and helpful, to Robinson Meyer for dreaming up the idea, and to all the writers — Jeva, Katie, Emily, Charu, Taylor, and Andrew — who reported so insightfully for it. Tackling a complex but consequential subject like how to make better personal decisions around climate change was a massive undertaking, but a labor of love.
If you missed this special section, you can check it out here.
And thank you, as always, for reading us and making our work possible.
Nico
Founder & Editor in chief
Answering your questions on AI and energy, the economics of solar, the Green New Deal’s legacy, and more.
Happy new year! On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse answer some of the questions they’ve received from readers throughout the year. Hot topics include: What happened to the Green New Deal, and is the Inflation Reduction Act part of its legacy? Should U.S. policy prioritize solar manufacturing or solar deployment? And how can normal people keep AI-driven data centers from blowing up the grid?
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: If you build a tariff wall around America and you say, You must buy American-made panels or pay a huge tariff, we could build a domestic solar manufacturing sector, but it would by no means be required to be globally competitive. And if you were to remove those protections, it would probably immediately collapse. […] If you want to, you have a competitive agenda, you need to be developing a particular type of industry that can be competitive. And I think that Michael’s question hints that maybe that’s not that important in the case of solar because it’s just not a very high-margin business. It’s kind of a bad business to be in. There’s consistent overcapacity and margins are thin, if not non-existent.
Robinson Meyer: Jenny Chase At BloombergNEF, who is the master of solar manufacturing, consistently describes it as one of the worst businesses in the world because these Chinese manufacturers — and now, more broadly, these Chinese and Southeast Asian manufacturers — are just constantly competing each other out of business.
I will say, I want to attach an asterisk to globally competitive, right? There’s like a B part to that, which is, do you think dominating in this industry is going to create know-how that allows you to dominate future technologies we don’t understand yet?
Jenkins: Yeah, are there general-purpose manufacturing techniques or core technology components here that you think are going to be useful in a variety of other sectors? I think that’s true.
I look at batteries, for example, as a critical general-purpose technology for the 21st century, right? Like, good batteries are going to be in everything, and so the ability to produce those and to continue to innovate and be at the frontier there, it’s important to national defense. It’s important to the transportation sector. It’s important to consumer products. You know, it’s just a critical platform technology, and a lot of the innovations in material science and electrochemistry and other things that you need to develop for batteries have other broader applications in decarbonizing industry and producing other products.
So I think that’s a good example of a case where, even if you’re a little behind the technology or frontier, there’s a lot of value to trying to catch up there for, for broader reasons.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
