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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.
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.
Rob preps for Giving Tuesday with Giving Green’s Dan Stein.
It’s been a tumultuous year for climate politics — and for climate nonprofits. The longtime activist group 350.org suspended its operations in the U.S. (at least temporarily), and Bill Gates, the world’s No. 1 climate funder, declared that the decarbonization movement should make a “strategic pivot” to poverty reduction. How should someone who wants to help the global climate navigate this moment?
Our guest has recommendations. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Dan Stein, the founder and executive director of Giving Green. Giving Green is a nonprofit that researches the most high-impact climate groups and helps people and companies donate to them. Stein talked about the top five climate groups Giving Green recommends this year, effective altruism and the future of climate philanthropy, and whether Bill Gates is right that climate activism has focused too much on emissions targets.
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:
Dan Stein: You can think of this set of solutions that’s very easily measurable, and to a first order approximation call that the carbon offset market. And so if you’re very obsessed about measurements and accountability, you’re playing in the offset market — which is okay, but I just think people can do better, right? Like, we need to change systems. We need to change laws. And you can’t do that with a carbon offset. So we sometimes advise companies, as well, and that’s what I tell them. I’m like, if you put yourself in this box of having to measure the amount of tons that you are reducing to solve your net zero goal, well then you’re extremely restrained in terms of the upside impact you can have.
Robinson Meyer: It seems like you’ve followed an arc that is not unrecognizable from other parts of life. Like, I think of what’s happened with effective altruism, which is kind of where GiveWell initially came out of — this idea that everyone could be saving more lives if they were way more thoughtful and exact and precise, and scrutinized their methods much better in picking which groups to give to. And that obviously has had some big successes, among them GiveWell, which is quite impressive, I think, in some ways, and has saved a lot of lives and changed how people think about development. But ultimately you do run into politics, at the end of it.
I even think in economics more broadly, there’s incredible attention given to small policy changes that can produce more or less growth and more or less equality or inequality. But then when you talk about these big picture questions like why do certain countries become rich, or why does development happen in some places and not others? Once you move past the basic geographic constraints, then as far as I can tell, the current economic answer is like, well, some places had histories that developed good institutions and some places didn’t. And if you have good institutions, you have economic growth.
And it feels like we’re hitting the institution question of climate tech, or of decarbonization. Like, yeah, your dollars could go a little farther on some sorts of carbon offsets than others. But if you really care about decarbonization, you’re actually back at this big set of very mushy questions at the intersection of society and technology and policy and politics.
Stein: Definitely. And I mean, not to get us too derailed — you know, I’m an economist, Rob. But anyway —
Meyer: That’s why I’ve intentionally driven this car into a ditch.
Stein: Development economics has also gone through waves of this. If you think of the 70s and 80s, like, early versions of the World Bank were all about institutions and getting the rules of the game, right? And then free markets will solve everything. And then you kind of get a reaction to that in the 90s and 2000s of more microdevelopment.
And now I actually think maybe the pendulum is swinging the other way, going more towards growth. Now you even see it for someone like GiveWell. They’re now making a ton of grants not just to these super measurable direct intervention orgs, but to more meta orgs that are trying to increase the total amount of aid or the quality of aid or health systems or whatever. It’s really hard to avoid these questions of policy and technology and markets if you’re trying to solve big problems.
Mentioned:
Giving Green’s top climate nonprofits for 2025:
The Giving Green regranting fund
Bill Gates’ memo on “three tough truths about climate”
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
Uplight is a clean energy technology company that helps energy providers unlock grid capacity by activating energy customers and their connected devices to generate, shift, and save energy. The Uplight Demand Stack — which integrates energy efficiency, electrification, rates, and flexibility programs — improves grid resilience, reduces costs, and accelerates decarbonization for energy providers and their customers. Learn more at uplight.com/heatmap.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
