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Rob talks through Rhodium Groups’s latest emissions report with climate and energy director Ben King.
Rob takes Jesse through our battery of questions.
Rob talks about the removal of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro with Commodity Context’s Rory Johnston.
A blast from the past with the director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Severin Borenstein.
A lookahead with Heatmap’s own Emily Pontecorvo, Matthew Zeitlin, and Jillian Goodman.
Rob and Jesse catch up with Mark Fitzgerald, CEO of the closed-loop geothermal startup Eavor.
Rob catches up with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Ilaria Mazzocco.
China’s electric vehicle industry, it’s now well understood, is churning out cars that rival or exceed the best products coming out of the West. Chinese EVs are cheaper, cooler, more innovative, and have better range. And now they’re surging into car markets around the world — markets where consumers are hungry for clean, affordable transportation.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Ilaria Mazzocco about her new report on how six countries around the world are dealing with the rise of Chinese EVs. Why do countries welcome Chinese-made EVs, and why do countries resist them? How do domestic carmakers act when Chinese EVs come to town? And are climate concerns still driving uptake?
Mazzocco is the deputy director and senior fellow with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 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. Jesse is off this week.
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:
Ilaria Mazzocco: Chinese batterymakers have persisted in focusing on LFP batteries with some spectacular results, I would say. And partly I think that’s been thanks to just being able to deploy them at really large scale and just testing and getting them out there.
But I think BYD is really a great example of that. They invest so much in R&D that it’s really hard to compete with them on some of these things. That’s really the big challenge, where, if you want to make a cheap car, you need LFP. That’s why Ford sought out that licensing deal with CATL, was to acquire LFP battery technology. And LFP batteries are really something that Chinese batterymakers have really excelled at.
Now, there could be breakthroughs in other chemistries. There could be a catchup game with non-Chinese batterymakers that actually become good at making LFP. That’s entirely possible. But right now, if you’re an Indian carmaker and you want to make a cheap car, your best bet is probably to get it from BYD or CATL, or maybe Gotion or something like that. That’s really what you’re looking at.
Robinson Meyer: It also, though, really changes how we talk about a lot of the development of auto industries abroad. Because I mean, I realize this is how cars were made for a long time, but I think … basically like if you were to say, Oh yeah, we make our own internal combustion cars here, we simply import the engines from Detroit, and then we place them in our otherwise finished vehicles that we’ve made domestically, and then we put it under a domestic label. We’re very proud of that. That’s essentially what is happening when countries import batteries. The batteries are so central to the operation of the EVs and what the EVs are capable of that when you import your batteries, you’re really relying on your trade partner for a lot of the core physical capacity of that vehicle, and a lot of the core, underlying chemical engineering capability that that vehicle affords you.
It suggests to me that in terms of when you think about the global EV industry, there are companies that are dependent on some kind of Chinese battery export. There are companies that are dependent on some kind of Korean battery export. There’s a few American entrants — mostly Tesla. There’s a few European entrants. And that’s kind of it. Everyone else is piggybacking on the back of one of those core technologies.
Mentioned:
Ilaria’s new report: The Global EV Shift: The Role of China and Industrial Policy in Emerging Economies
Previously on Shift Key: How China’s EV Industry Got So Big
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Heatmap Pro brings all of our research, reporting, and insights down to the local level. The software platform tracks all local opposition to clean energy and data centers, forecasts community sentiment, and guides data-driven engagement campaigns. Book a demo today to see the premier intelligence platform for project permitting and community engagement.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Jesse and Rob take stock of 2025.
2025 has been incredibly eventful for decarbonization — and not necessarily in a good way. The return of Donald Trump, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the rise of data centers and artificial intelligence led to more changes for climate policy and the clean energy sector than we’ve seen in years. Some of those we saw coming. Others we really did not.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse look back at the year’s biggest energy and decarbonization stories and examine what they got right — and what they got wrong. What’s been most surprising about the Trump administration? Why didn’t the Inflation Reduction Act’s policies help prevent the law’s partial repeal? And why have AI and the data center boom become a much bigger driver of power growth than we once thought?
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: I think what I’m saying on the organizing side is that all of the organizing and comms effort was going in, as you pointed out, to a base-building and turnout strategy, not a constituency-expanding, coalition-building strategy, right? The effort was to go deep, not wide.
I think that was the fundamental mistake because there wasn’t a lot of depth there. There wasn’t this big, untapped pool of youth voters waiting to be turned out. And it meant we put basically no effort into expanding the broad set of constituencies that, for various ideological backgrounds and various motivations, could have all agreed that hey, bringing manufacturing jobs back to America finally after 20 years of politicians talking about it is maybe a good thing we want to sustain. Hey, lowering energy prices by building new energy supplies at a time when demand is growing, that’s a good idea, maybe we should sustain that, right? Creating tax bases in rural areas through investment in solar farms and wind farms — maybe that’s a good thing we should sustain.
Politics isn’t about getting everybody to agree on motivation, right? It’s about getting people to agree on what we’re going to do as a body politic. And unfortunately, that’s what I guess I’m getting at by this hyperpartisan, ideologically-driven world is, now it is all about getting everybody to agree on motivations, and —
Robinson Meyer: That’s what I was going to say. I actually think it’s —
Jenkins: And that’s just a terrible way to make policy. And I guess it makes this all that much harder.
Meyer: I think for me, I fear we’ve run the climate base experiment so well now that people have gotten this message, and people are starting to understand these policies in terms of energy affordability or clean energy policy. And that means lots of good things for clean energy. I think people should keep making the argument because it seems to me to be true that, for instance, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s termination of the wind and solar tax credits is going to mean bad things for American electricity customers. It’s going to raise rates.
But I do think that we should take the full lesson of the IRA experience and say, look, if people care about affordability and you tell them you’re working for affordability, you actually do need to put affordability at the center of your policies. And you need to be willing to understand that there is a tradeoff between affordability and emissions, but unfortunately, the electorate might care about affordability.
Mentioned:
From the Shift Key archive: A Skeptic’s Take on AI and Energy Growth, with Jonathan Koomey
The R2 Is the Rivian That Matters
Ford, Hyundai US sales down slightly in November as EVs drag
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s sorta upshift.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
