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Jesse teaches Rob all about where solar and wind energy come from.
Rob does a post-vacation debrief with Jesse and Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman on the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Jesse and Rob go back to basics on the steam engine.
Jesse teaches Rob the basics of energy, power, and what it all has to do with the grid.
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.
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.
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: So what are some of the strategies that you think policy makers can take if they adopt this sort of asset theory mindset?
Jessica Green: So there’s kind of two pieces to this. One is to recognize the many flaws in the status quo approach, which sidesteps all of these questions of asset revaluation. So I spend a lot of time explaining why managing tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or [greenhouse gases] in the atmosphere is not a helpful approach.
There is a huge swath of the policy space — and I know this may upset some of your listeners that are dedicated to things like greening the supply chain and voluntary net zero commitments and public-private partnerships and improving the robustness of carbon offsets. And you know, I document extensively in the book why these things do not work. And so even though many of us think, Oh, well, we’re past that, this is everywhere in climate policy. Anywhere you see net zero — anywhere you see the word ‘net,’ you have some kind of offset, whether it’s a carbon offset, CCS. This is really everywhere in climate policy.
So I think that’s step one. And then step two is to really address both pieces of the equation of fossil and green asset owners. One is you have to build green asset owners, which is the thing you guys talk about so much in your podcast. How do we do industrial policy and create carrots to incentivize particularly these decarbonizable industries to flip?
But the other piece, which is the one that nobody wants to talk about, is how do we constrain the material and political power of the fossil fuel industry or fossil asset owners? And that is the big one. And so I try, in my own pragmatist way, to talk about the international institutions that are available to us to think about constraining them both in trade, but also in tax and investment law. And I think those are ways that we can think more productively about how to lessen this power asymmetry between fossil and green asset owners.
Also mentioned in this episode:
Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change, by Jessica Green, Jeff Colgan, and Thomas Hale
Tax Policy Is Climate Policy by Jessica Green
Why Carbon Pricing Falls Short, by Jesse Jenkins
Jesse’s 2014 article on asset specificity and climate change
Jesse’s downshift; Rob’s downshift.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Rob and Jesse pick apart Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s latest opinion with University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley.
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.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor and frequent writer on permitting issues. He is also Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s former chief legal counsel. Rob, Jesse, and Nick discuss what NEPA is, how it has helped (and perhaps hindered) the environment, and why it’s likely to change again in the near future. 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: It seems like what the court is doing here is not only basically using this to make a statement, it’s announcing a new jurisprudence on NEPA. We want you to start treating this law really, really differently than you’ve been treating it in the past. And like, we are going to come down into your room and force you to clean up this mess whenever we want to now because of how important we think this is.
Do you think that’s too strong a statement? It seems this is not only declaring what the court’s view on NEPA is, but almost declaring a new plan of action.
Nicholas Bagley: Like many Supreme Court decisions, I think it’s amenable to two competing interpretations. One is exactly as you say: It’s a new era of NEPA jurisprudence, and the basic rule of a NEPA case is now going to be that environmental groups lose. And so I think there’s no way to read the decision except as a walloping loss to environmental groups, at least as a matter of tone and, I think, intention by the Supreme Court.
But there is a narrower reading available, and one that suggests that maybe this decision won’t have as big an effect as maybe the Supreme Court justices want it to. And the reason for that is they didn’t close the door altogether on the judicial evaluation of the reasonableness of its actions. And when a court goes in and says, Hmm, has an agency acted arbitrarily? Again, that’s a multifaceted inquiry. It’s going to involve a lot of different factors. And the court says be deferential, but that’s actually always been the rule.
They use a lot of strident language here, but that strident language is not going to make a lick of difference if you get in front of a highly motivated judge who happens to dislike the project in question in a district court in New Mexico. And that happens. So if you’re an agency and you’re thinking to yourself, Can I cut back on the amount of environmental studies that I do? Can I not investigate these dopey alternatives? You might think to yourself, you know, I have like a 20% or a 30% chance, my odds are a little better than they were before — maybe even a lot better than they were before — at winning if this case is litigated. But they’re also not 100%. So maybe what I ought to do is keep doing what I’ve been doing just to be safe. And I think that’s at least a possibility. We don’t know how it’s going to play out on the ground.
The last thing I’ll say about this is, you said that the Supreme Court is going to act like your mom who’s going to come and tell you to clean up your room.
Meyer: Yeah, exactly. Yes.
Bagley: The trouble is it takes something like, what, 50 cases a year? There are hundreds of these cases brought, and there’s only so much the Supreme Court can do, and in closer cases I think it might just be inclined to let matters lie.
So, you know, I think it is reasonable to think that this is the Supreme Court’s effort to usher in a new era of unique NEPA jurisprudence. It is reasonable to think it is going to have some effects on agency behavior and some effects on lower court behavior. But it may not pretend the revolution that it looks like on its face.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
