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Podcast

Early solar panels.
Podcast

Shift Key Summer School: How Sun and Wind Become Electricity

Jesse teaches Rob all about where solar and wind energy come from.

Podcast

Climate Policy in America: Where We Go From Here

Rob does a post-vacation debrief with Jesse and Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman on the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Yellow
Podcast

Shift Key Summer School: What Is a Watt?

Jesse teaches Rob the basics of energy, power, and what it all has to do with the grid.

Green
Cattle.

How to Stop Eating the Earth

Rob and Jesse talk with Michael Grunwald, author of the new book We Are Eating the Earth.

Harbinger.

It’s Easiest to Electrify This Type of Truck

Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.

Podcast

A New Grand Theory of Why Decarbonization Is So Hard

Rob and Jesse talk with Jessica Green, author of the forthcoming book, Existential Politics.

Flooding.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

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 generates winners and losers, defined primarily by who owns what.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Jessica Green, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. She calls for “radical pragmatism” in climate action and an “asset revaluation”-focused view of the climate problem. Green is the author of the forthcoming book Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.

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Podcast

The Supreme Court’s Double-Edged Change to Permitting Law

Rob and Jesse pick apart Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s latest opinion with University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley.

The Supreme Court.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

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 conservative majority issued a much stronger and more expansive ruling, urging lower courts to stop interpreting the law as they have for years. That decision, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, may signal a new era for what has been called the “Magna Carta” of environmental law.

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