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Rob and Jesse talk with Michael Grunwald, author of the new book We Are Eating the Earth.
Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
Rob and Jesse talk with Jessica Green, author of the forthcoming book, Existential Politics.
Rob and Jesse pick apart Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s latest opinion with University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley.
Revisiting a favorite episode with guest Kate Marvel.
Rob and Jesse dig into the implications of the House budget bill.
Rob and Jesse dig into the implications of the House budget bill.
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 Jesse Jenkins — is all about the real-life consequences of killing the tax credits. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse shares the forthcoming analysis of the bill from Princeton University’s REPEAT Project. Rob and Jesse discuss what best-in-class modeling tells us the bill will mean for carbon emissions, the energy economy, the power grid, and consumer energy costs. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
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:
Robinson Meyer: We may not know exactly what Republicans in Congress are going to do, but when you look at the set of possibilities encapsulated by the Republican bill, what does this mean for the energy system and for the climate? Is it good?
Jesse Jenkins: Uh, no, it is not good. And I wish I had some silver linings to pull out here, but they are non-existent — or few and far between, if there are any we can find. Dismantling the current policy trajectory would result in a substantial increase in greenhouse gas emissions, on the order of half a gigaton, 500 million tons, by 2030, rising to over a billion metric tons, or a gigaton by 2035.
And at the same time it would, of course, slow the energy transition. So less deployment of clean electricity technologies, a slower uptake of electric vehicles, and other impacts across the economy. And all that also translates to higher energy costs for Americans, for households, for businesses as we do two things. One is we remove tax credits and subsidies that are currently lowering the cost of investing in all of this new infrastructure, whether it’s new power generation or storage or new vehicles for fleets or households.
So those subsidies shift some costs out of household and business budgets right onto the federal tax code. And by slowing down measures like energy efficiency, electrification, EVs, measures that reduce fossil energy consumption, we’re also likely to see fossil fuel prices go up as demand rises. So relative to a world where we’re reducing demand for these fuels, if we slow down that process and we consume more fossil fuels overall, that’s also going to translate through the law of supply and demand into higher costs for Americans.
So that’s, I think, the top line: Higher emissions, slow down — although not halt — the energy transition, and higher energy costs for most Americans and for our businesses around the country. It’s not quite our frozen policy scenario from the beginning of January, 2021. But not surprisingly, a scenario where we dismantle the entirety of the Biden-era policy apparatus does revert us pretty close to where we would be if those laws had not passed. Not entirely. There’s some momentum that will continue. But a full repeal scenario, which is maybe where the House is trending, would mean that we’re going to see half-a-gigaton-scale increase in emissions from our current trajectory in 2030, and about a gigaton or more in 2035.
Meyer: I realize that there’s a tendency for numbers, especially gigatons, these numbers attached to giant units, to slide by and kind of be like, Oh, that’s a number. But that is staggering. U.S. energy emissions are about five gigatons. I think global energy emissions are 38 gigatons …
Jenkins: Yeah, close to 40. Exactly.
Meyer: This is a sizable increase compared to baseline in carbon emissions.
You can read the complete transcript here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Rob and Jesse digest the Ways and Means budget bill live on air, alongside former Treasury advisor Luke Bassett.
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 draft of its proposal to gut the IRA, and we had to review it on-air.
We were joined by Luke Bassett, a former senior advisor for domestic climate policy at the U.S. Treasury Department and a former senior staff member at the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. We chatted about the major steps in the reconciliation process, what to watch next, and what to look for in the new GOP draft. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
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: Let’s come back to this as a negotiation. This is the first salvo from the House. What does this tell you about where we go from here? Is this a floor? Could it get worse? Is it likely to get better as the lobbying kicks off in earnest by various industries threatened by these changes, and they try to peel things back? What do you think happens next?
Luke Bassett: If you run with the horror movie analogy here, this is scary. I think a lot of people, especially in any energy startups or folks who have been penciling out deals, to start really lining up new projects — or even folks looking for a new EV to buy are suddenly going to have to totally rethink what the next few years look like.
And, you know, whether or not they want to build a factory, buy a car, or have to switch from an electric heat pump to a whale oil burning stove. Who knows? That said, there are champions for each of these in very different ways in the Senate. There are lobbyists who —
Jenkins: — in the House, too.
Bassett: Exactly. There will be lobbyists weighing in. And I think it matters to really think through … I think we’ve been faced with gigantic uncertainty since January. And there’s a part where companies all across the energy sector are looking at this text as we speak and thinking, whoa, I didn’t sign up for this. And to combine this with tariffs, to combine it with the cuts to other federal programs in the other committees’ jurisdictions, it is just a nearly impossible outlook for building new projects. And I bet a bunch of people, CEOs and otherwise, are thinking, I wish Joe Manchin were back in the Senate. But you know, it is what it is.
Robinson Meyer: I will say that it could get worse from here because they will be negotiating with the House Freedom Caucus and with various other conservative House members. And they’ll also be negotiating against the president’s wishes, which is that this move and get done as soon as possible. And so when I talked to Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah, who’s a supporter of the IRA, or wants to see it extended in large part, and I asked him questions like, what happens if Republicans really go to work in the House on the IRA and then it gets sent to the Senate? One dynamic we’ve already seen during this Congress is that te House Republican Caucus in this Congress is unusually functional and unusually strategic, and has been unusually good at passing relatively extreme and aggressive policy and then jamming the Senate with it.
And unlike what has happened in the past, which is the House Republican Caucus can’t really do anything, so the Senate passes a far more moderate policy, sends it to the House and dares the House to shut things down. This time the House, if folks remember back in March, the House passed a fairly aggressive budget and kicked it to the Senate and then dared the Senate to shut down the government, and ultimately the Senate decided to keep the government open.
I asked Curtis what happens if they do the same with the IRA. What happens if they really go to task on the IRA? They pass fairly aggressive cuts to it and they send it to the Senate. And his answer was, well, I don’t think the House is going to do that. I don’t think a bill that really savages the IRA could pass the House.
We’ll see, but I just don’t think there’s any floor here. I think there’s no floor for how bad this gets. And I think I just don’t, you know … Before we went into the administration, there was a lot of confidence that the Trump administration and the new Republican majority and the Congress was not going to do anything to substantially make the business environment worse. We’ve discovered there does seem to be a degree of tariffs that will make them squeal and pull back, but we actually haven’t found that in legislature yet.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
