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Rob and Jesse visit Intersolar and Energy Storage North America.
Rob and Jesse sort through their feelings after Trump's second first month in office.
Rob and Jesse get real on energy prices with PowerLines’ Charles Hua.
Rob and Jesse talk Trump, contracts, and climate messaging with the lawmaker from Hawaii.
Rob and Jesse talk with former Ford economist Ellen Hughes-Cromwick.
Jesse and Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman talk Canadian tariffs with Rory Johnston.
Rob and Jesse talk with Wharton’s Benjamin Keys, then dig into Trump’s big Day One.
The Los Angeles wildfires have killed at least 27 people, destroyed more than 17,000 structures, and displaced tens of thousands. In the next few months, the billions of costs in damage to homes and property will ripple through the state’s insurance market — and likely cause its insurer of last resort to run out of money.
Benjamin Keys has studied how natural disasters, rising sea levels, and increasing exposure to risk have driven up insurance costs nationwide. He is a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and one of the country’s top experts on climate change, home values, and insurance markets.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Keys about how California broke its insurance market, why insurance costs are rising nationwide, and how homeowners, home buyers, and communities can protect themselves. They dive into President Donald Trump’s dizzying first day of executive actions and how they’ll affect the future of energy development. 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: We should have warned you ahead of time that this podcast always devolves back to the tri-state area. It’s just sort of inevitable. We saw this dynamic on the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy, where a lot of more working class-type communities that had homes there, they ended up either getting wiped out or having to leave and sell, and moving out. And what replaced them were very large houses — some of them built in a more secure way, up above the floodplain on elevated floors. But most of them, as I understand it, don’t have insurance.
So they are self insured, in the sense that people think they’re wealthy enough that they can just absorb the loss. That’s one type of self insurance. The folks who are coming off the federal flood insurance plan are probably folks who are not really self insured. They can’t diversify there. They don’t have enough wealth to absorb that risk. They’re just simply exposed now and rolling the dice.
Benjamin Keys: And for the time being, the cost of flood insurance is still subsidized. And so, you know, even if you see your rate jump by 18% and you say, wow, that’s expensive, it’s going to get substantially worse. And so it’s a huge mistake to leave that path, and have interrupted flood coverage. That’s a tough one. And you know, most of the flood policies that are out there are mandatory. Those are ones that are being required by the mortgage market that, say, if you live in a flood zone, you have to have flood insurance.
So actually, I have flood insurance on my house in Philadelphia. I live close enough to the Schuylkill River, a couple of blocks away, that — and my neighborhood did flood just a few years ago. We fortunately weren’t harmed by it, but that flood insurance policy is mandated by the mortgage market. And so that’s where most of the coverage comes from.
But when you look at the voluntary take-up of flood insurance, it’s very low.
Jenkins: Are we likely to see something similar for wildfire risk? That effectively, insurers say, we'll continue to write policies in California, but if you're in a wildfire prone area, we're not going to give you wildfire insurance, which would create a kind of similar issue.
Keys: It's possible that we could see a national wildfire program or a broader national disaster program develop. The insurance industry would love to carve out these risks, right? These are very difficult things.
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.
Rob and Jesse go deep on the universe’s smallest molecule.
Hydrogen. What are you even supposed to think about it? If you’ve spent serious time focusing on climate policy, you’ve heard the hype about hydrogen — about the miraculous things that it might do to eliminate carbon pollution from cars, power plants, steel mills, or more. You’ve also seen that hype fizzle out — even as governments have poured billions of dollars into making it work.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse give you a rough guide for how to think about clean hydrogen, which could help decarbonize the industrial — even the molecular — side of the economy by storing energy and helping to make clean steel and chemicals. Do we really need hydrogen to fight climate change? Where would it be useful? And why has it failed to take off in the past? What will Trump and China mean for global hydrogen policy? 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: This is the next crazy thing that I think is just starting to kind of bubble up to the public awareness: Basically, hydrogen itself is not a climate forcer. It doesn’t warm the planet the way methane or [hydrofluorocarbons] or CO2 does. But it does react in the atmosphere in ways that increase the concentration of greenhouse gases.
Robinson Meyer: I think specifically that right now, we talk about when methane leaks into the atmosphere. And it may apply to other greenhouse gases, too, but the big one that you tend to hear about is that when methane leaks into the atmosphere from natural gas — and of course, we’re very worried about methane leaks. Because the thing about methane is that it traps a lot of heat, but it breaks down really quickly, right? So it tends to break down, unlike carbon dioxide, which, when you release it into the atmosphere. sticks around for millennia. When you release it into the atmosphere, it captures a lot of heat, but then breaks down into a smaller amount of CO2 after about 20 years.
The issue, and why it breaks down, that — we never talk about this, or we had no need to talk about this until hydrogen — and it’s crazy because the world is a closed system, or a largely closed system, right? Why it breaks down is it reacts with the free hydroxyl radicals floating around in the atmosphere.
Jenkins: Right, OH molecules.
Meyer: Well, what else reacts with OH molecules? Hydrogen. And so if we leak too much industrially produced hydrogen into the atmosphere, it could mess with the rate of breakdown of all methane in the global atmosphere, and thus increase the global warming potential of natural gas.
Jenkins: It makes the methane last, traps more heat, yeah. So let the record show that Robinson Meyer, the journalist, accurately captured the atmospheric chemistry of this process better than Jesse Jenkins, professor at Princeton. Nicely done.
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.
