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Inside episode six of Shift Key.
Few people have shaped Bidenomics more than Brian Deese.
From 2021 to 2023, Deese led the National Economic Council at the White House, serving as President Joe Biden’s top economic aide during such events as the post-pandemic recovery, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Before that, Deese was global head of sustainable investing for Blackrock and a senior political advisor to President Barack Obama. He’s now the Institute Innovation Fellow at MIT, where he helps lead the Clean Investment Monitor, a project that tracks investment in climate technology and infrastructure across the U.S. economy.
On this episode, Deese joins Shift Key for a two-part conversation. Part 1 focuses on the future of Bidenomics, Biden’s State of the Union speech, what the 2024 campaign might mean for the politics and policy of climate change.
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: I want to start by talking about the State of the Union. Jesse, I feel like you had a stronger response to the State of the Union than I did. Where I saw it and I was like, yes, the president is talking about the IRA, he's talking about big climate legislation, primarily in a jobs context. I feel like you were maybe more surprised.
Jesse Jenkins: What I was kind of expecting was Biden to lean in a bit more on the manufacturing Renaissance story. And he referenced it a couple times as sort of the high level numbers, which we can come back to, which probably came from your Clean Investment Monitor project, if I'm not mistaken. And he told the story of the Belvedere plant that was saved from bankruptcy through the UAW negotiations and is now being rebuilt as a EV manufacturing facility. But I was expecting him to say something more broadly about how we have been talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America for my entire lifetime, right, for decades.
And the previous president, of course, also made lots of promises about trying to support US manufacturing. And then of course, did basically nothing to do that. And Biden has an incredible track record on that front, an enormous amount of investment happening across multiple sectors, and in particular in the clean energy domain.
And maybe this is just the limits of a State of the Union address where you got to touch a lot of different issues. But I kind of expected him to lean into that a little bit more and to make it clear that it wasn't just this one plant, that there are dozens of stories like Belvedere out there across the economy that are being fueled specifically by the Inflation Reduction Act, which by the way, he did never really mention by name.
So I was curious how you saw it and if you thought he had the right balance or maybe could have leaned in more or could do so in the future.
Brian Deese: Well, I think one of the things about State of the Unions is that its quality and moments are often more important than quantity. And so I think that may be a little bit of what's going on.
But let me step back. Look, I think it was an excellent speech and I think it was delivered in an even more excellent way. And at the top line, the speech was designed to drive pace and clear contrast.
It's interesting that some of the reaction has been partisan. But if you actually go through the speech, it's really clear-eyed contrast. And a lot of the things where the contrast exists are between, as the president said multiple times, his predecessor and the vast majority of the American people. And that's smart.
And the pace was evident from the get-go and positioned President Biden to do exactly what he wanted to do, was to get in the chamber at the podium and go at this thing and demonstrate his capability, but also his enthusiasm. I think for people who actually watched it on TV, you saw not only a president who was in command, but who was having a lot of fun. And a lot of fun because I think he believed in what he was doing.
So that's the most important. And when you're structuring a speech like this, you want to say, if that's your goal is to try to have clear contrast and pace, how do you keep that going? I think in some ways the most important line which goes, Jesse, to the point you are making is he said something to the effect of, it doesn't make the news, it doesn't make the headlines, but in thousands of cities across America, people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.
And I would anticipate that in that idea, in thousands of cities and towns across America, greatest comeback story never told will be a consistent refrain and a throughline to try to get at exactly your point, which is there's an element of that, which reflects a little bit of immediate criticism, right? The greatest comeback story never told, which is why do we never hear about these things going on again?
But it also reflects the kind of great American story that these comeback stories are in fact happening. And for the people and the communities themselves, it matters.
And look, I think that that's where Belvedere fit in, which is oftentimes the best way to try to bring to life that idea is not by trying to describe or animate all of the ways in which it's happening across the country and people like the three of us get very gripped by the overarching statistics.
But the story and the story of Belvedere was one that if you look across the speech, there aren't that many moments where you can actually tell a story like that. And so there was a clear decision to say, this is a story and we are going to tell the story about clean energy manufacturing through the lens of a place and a community, which is really about jobs and grit and resilience. And for those who weren't paying line by line attention to the story of Belvedere, is Belvedere, Illinois, home of a storied Chrysler plant that was initiated in 1965 I'll continue to refer to Stellantis as Chrysler because I still can't get over the idea that we're not still referring it to as that name, but was basically for a whole bunch of reasons an auto plant that was on its back and then was closed and for a variety of reasons, including the strength of UAW's negotiating posture, but also the prospect of bringing battery manufacturing here to the U.S., Belvedere has gone from, you know, is really a Phoenix rising story in a pretty concrete way.
So my takeaway from Jesse, your surprise, is that in fact, what the president did was provide a frame for going out and telling that great comeback story and going and telling it. And in fact, the way to tell it will actually be in individual stories in most cases.
Jenkins: Yeah, I think that makes sense. I guess what I was thinking was there'd be an opportunity to draw a sharper contrast, which would be pretty consistent with the rest of the speech between President Biden and his quote unquote predecessor. In the sense that really, I mean, we, we've been literally politicians have been promising to bring manufacturing back since the 70s and 80s, right.
And now we are seeing that investment really thanks to a whole suite of policies, some of them bipartisan, like CHIPS and Science, and some of them, you know, I think with broad support in the American public, like you're saying, Brian, even if the partisan nature of the congressional debate right now, you know, makes it seem more partisan than it is, it's, you know, these are broadly popular policies. So it was kind of expecting a little bit more contrast there.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…
Advanced Energy United educates, engages, and advocates for policies that allow our member companies to compete to power our economy with 100% clean energy, working with decision makers and energy market regulators to achieve this goal. Together, we are united in our mission to accelerate the transition to 100% clean energy in America. Learn more at advancedenergyunited.org/heatmap
KORE Power provides the commercial, industrial, and utility markets with functional solutions that advance the clean energy transition worldwide. KORE Power's technology and manufacturing capabilities provide direct access to next generation battery cells, energy storage systems that scale to grid+, EV power & infrastructure, and intuitive asset management to unlock energy strategies across a myriad of applications. Explore more at korepower.com.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
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The CEO of Cleveland Cliffs is just the latest U.S. voice to affirm the dirtiest fossil fuel’s unexpectedly bright future.
While the story of coal demand has been largely about rapid industrialization in Asia — especially India and China — the United States under President Trump has been working hard to make itself a main character.
Case in point is in Middletown, Ohio, where a one-time clean steel project may be refashioned as a standard-bearer for an industry-driven U.S. coal revival. The company behind the project, Cleveland-Cliffs, won a Biden-era award of up to $500 million to develop and deploy hydrogen-based technology for iron and steel production. CEO Laurenco Goncalves began casting doubt on that project as long ago as September, when he told Politico that he was struggling to find buyers willing to pay more for low-carbon materials, and that he wasn’t sure the project “even makes sense with the grants.” Earlier this year, he told investors that the company was working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities.”
During an earnings call Monday morning, Goncalves said the company had scrapped the project not because of the DOE, but rather because it was unable to get sufficient hydrogen for use as fuel.
“The very first thing: It’s clear by now that we will not have availability of hydrogen. So there is no point in pursuing something that we know for sure that’s not going to happen,” Goncalves said. “We informed the DOE that we would not be pursuing that project.”
Instead, the company has had “a very good conversation” with the DOE “on revamping that project in a way that we preserve and enhance Middletown using beautiful coal, beautiful coke,” Goncalves said. (Where have we heard that kind of language before?) “We are vertically integrated, and we use American iron ore and American coal and American natural gas as feedstock, all produced right here in the United States of America, employing American workers,” he added.
The evidence for coal’s stubborn persistence globally has been mounting for years. In 2021, the International Energy Agency forecast that by 2024, annual coal demand would hit an all-time high of just over 8,000 megatons. In 2024, it reported that coal demand in 2023 was already at 8,690 megatons, a new record; it also pushed out its prediction for a demand plateau to 2027, at which point it predicted annual demand would be 8,870 megatons.
The IEA largely chalked up the results to the world’s energy needs, writing that “the power sector has been the main driver of coal demand growth, with electricity generation from coal set to reach an all-time high of 10 700 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024.”
More recent analyses confirm that power demand, especially in Asia, could prop up global coal demand possibly for decades.
“Coal-fired power could be a bigger part of the energy mix for longer than expected, scuppering efforts to meet climate change goals,” a pair of Wood Mackenzie analysts, David Brown and Anthony Knutson, wrote in a report last week, echoing the IEA’s findings. China alone is responsible for almost three-quarters of global coal consumption, according to Wood Mackenzie. “New realities for energy markets in recent years have become more, not less, supportive of coal-fired power,” Brown and Knutson write.
The analysts put peak global coal demand a year earlier than the IEA, at 2026. But they also noted that “coal demand has consistently proven more resilient than expected.”
It’s possible that these fast-growing Asian nations could, for reasons of energy security or economy, decide to keep younger coal plants active for decades while extending the life of older plants to keep costs down. In this scenario, much of the world largely transitions away from using coal for power generation, but thanks to persistent Asian demand, global coal demand peaks as late as 2030. That could mean an extra 2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions compared to a base case scenario.
The U.S. federal government, meanwhile, has taken on a role as both a coal-friendly analyst and an active promoter of every facet of the industry.
A couple of weeks ago, a Department of Energy report declared that “absent intervention, it is impossible” for the U.S. to power the growth of the artificial intelligence industry “while maintaining a reliable power grid and keeping energy costs low for our citizens.” That energy-poor status quo, the DOE argued, was due in part to scheduled retirements of coal-fired generation.
The DOE has been doing its part to keep that generation online, using its emergency authorities to keep some coal plants open. It has joined President Trump in becoming a kind of all-purpose pitch man for the industry. Over the weekend, the Department’s X account posted an image of Secretary of Energy Chris Wright with a shovel, copied and pasted in front of an open-pit mine, with the words “MINE, BABY, MINE.”
On the supply side, congressional Republicans tucked into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act a tax credit specifically for domestic metallurgical coal production, which could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Some of the largest end users of U.S.-mined metallurgical coal are outside the U.S., including the countries driving worldwide coal demand. India imported over 3 million tons of U.S. metallurgical coal in the first three months of 2025, with China just under a million, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.
The tie-up between Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel authorized in June, meanwhile, grants a “golden share” of the American company to the U.S. government, in part to ensure increased investment and capacity. That deal also explicitly provides for at least $1 billion of investment into U.S. Steel’s existing blast furnace operation, Mon Valley Works, in Western Pennsylvania. The investments “ensure Mon Valley Works operates for decades to come,” the company said in an announcement.
That means more coal: Mon Valley Works is the “largest coke manufacturing facility in the United States,” according to U.S. Steel, producing 4.3 million tons of the coal product both for its own operations and for sale to other steelmakers.
In an interview with Japanese media, Nippon Steel’s chief executive Eiji Hashimoto said that the newly expanded company will likely build a new steel mill in the U.S., as part of its goal to catch up in steel production with its Chinese rival China Baowu Steel Group Corp, while also using more of its existing capacity to increase production, hoping to eventually more than double its output by the middle of next decade.
(For what it’s worth, Japan is also a major importer of metallurgical coal from the United States, taking in just over a million tons in the first three months of 2025.)
While the future of coal will be determined in Asia, the U.S. steel industry is happy to work with the Trump administration and the coal industry to keep things burning.
“They see the value in blast furnaces just as we at Cleveland Cliffs do,” Cleveland-Cliffs’ Goncalves said of the U.S. industry’s new Japanese partners.
On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: Typhoon Wipha is barrelling through southern China, making its way across the mainland after pummeling Hong Kong with heavy rain • More than 60 million Americans are facing heat alerts as temperatures surge • The unusually warm 21-degree Fahrenheit temperature recorded at Summit Station in Greenland is just a few degrees off a record high.
EPA Administrator Lee ZeldinKevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency announced plans on Friday afternoon to shut down its research arm and fire hundreds of biologists, chemists, toxicologists, and other scientists whose work helps determine safe pollution levels for regulations. The announcement comes after months of denials from EPA administrator Lee Zeldin that he planned to close the division in question, the Office of Research and Development, which studies the threat from climate change, toxic chemicals, and air and water pollution on human health, and funds university research programs.
The closure comes as part of deep job cuts at the agency. In a statement on Friday, Zeldin said the more than 500 layoffs — which, combined with voluntary buyouts, will slash the EPA’s workforce by nearly one-quarter compared to January’s numbers — would save taxpayers nearly $750 million. The nation’s biggest chemical manufacturers’ lobby agreed, arguing to NPR that the cuts would “ensure American taxpayer dollars are being used efficiently and effectively.” But environmentalists warned that the cuts would “not only cripple EPA’s ability to do its own research, but also to apply the research of other scientists.”
Shares in non-Chinese producers of graphite surged on Friday after the Trump administration slapped new anti-dumping duties of 93.5% on imports of the key mineral for batteries, the Financial Times reported. Combined with existing tariffs on Chinese materials, the new trade levies total more than 160%, according to the consultancy Benchmark Minerals. In response, the stock price for Australia-listed Syrah Resources, the world’s largest non-Chinese graphite miner and the developer behind a key Inflation Reduction Act-funded project in Louisiana, shot up 22%. Canada’s Nouveau Monde Graphite spiked 26%. The dual-listed Australian-U.S. producer Novonix surged 15%.
Not all of President Donald Trump’s mineral tariffs are causing excitement for U.S. allies. Earlier this month, the White House announced 50% tariffs on copper to begin in August, but it has yet to clarify whether those tariffs will apply to refined metal, semi-refined products, or copper ore. The uncertainty is causing “anxiety,” Máximo Pacheco, the chairman of Chile’s state-owned copper miner, told the FT. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote when the tariffs were first announced, they have the potential to “provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place.”
Regulators in Virginia last week ordered electricity and natural gas provider Dominion to lay out a clearer blueprint for meeting the state’s legally-enshrined carbon-free electricity targets. But the State Corporation Commission still accepted the monopoly utility’s plans to build out more fossil fuel generation, Canary Media reported.
The Virginia Clean Economy Act, passed in 2020, requires Dominion to generate 100% of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. The accepted plan runs up to 2039, leaving just six years to sort out the details of decarbonization. The regulators cautioned that “acceptance does not express approval.” While the statement stopped short of calling into question a proposed 944-megawatt gas complex just south of Richmond, Virginia’s capital, the commission said it would debate plans for another roughly 5 gigawatts of gas-burning power plants before approving construction..
British energy giant BP is selling off its U.S. onshore wind business as the Trump administration appears ready to smother the industry. On Friday, New York-based developer LS Power said it agreed to buy BP’s share of 10 wind projects totaling 1,700 megawatts of capacity. As part of the deal, LS Power plans to fold the wind projects into its renewable energy subsidiary, Clearlight Energy, increasing its fleet to 4,300 megawatts.
BP’s exit comes as the Trump administration has vowed to crack down on the expansion of wind and solar power in the U.S. Trump has long personally opposed wind energy, dating back to his unsuccessful fight against turbines erected near his golf course in Scotland before entering politics. Last week, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported on a memo from the Department of the Interior calling for political reviews of essentially all solar and wind developments in the U.S. This would at minimum stretch out the already challenging development timeline for projects, a problem especially as developers rush to qualify for federal tax credits.
Mercedes-Benz is pumping the brakes on U.S. production of its EQ line of electric vehicles as the Trump administration winds down federal tax credits to support purchases of battery-powered cars. The German automaker told InsideEVs that, by the start of September, it planned to temporarily pause assembly lines of all variants of its EQE and EQS sedans and SUVs that are either located in the U.S. or producing vehicles bound for the American market. The manufacturer is no longer taking orders from dealers for the cars.
Reviewers had criticized the EQ models for lacking the quality and sophistication of similar gas-powered lines of Mercedes vehicles. Even before Republicans in Congress rolled back the federal government’s landmark $7,500 tax credit for EVs, Mercedes faced trouble finding buyers. Sales of the EQS sedan and EQS SUV were down 52% in the U.S. in 2024 compared to the previous year. China’s biggest electric automakers, meanwhile, are racing to build factories in Brazil, the largest car market in South America.
Like tiny winged Magellans measuring barely an inch in size, the Bogong moth of Australia regularly travels more than 600 miles using celestial navigation, according to a new study in Nature. “The moths really are using a view of the night sky to guide their movements,” a researcher told Euronews.
From the Inflation Reduction Act to the Trump mega-law, here are 20 years of changes in one easy-to-read cheat sheet.
The landmark Republican reconciliation bill, which President Trump signed on July 4, has shattered the tax credits that served as the centerpiece of the country’s clean energy and climate policy.
Starting as soon as October, the law — which Trump has dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — will cut off incentives for Americans to install solar panels, purchase electric vehicles, or make energy efficiency improvements to their homes. It’s projected to raise household energy costs while increasing America’s carbon emissions by 190 million metric tons a year by 2030, according to the REPEAT Project at Princeton University.
The loss of these incentives will in part offset the continuation of tax cuts that largely benefit wealthy Americans. But the law as a whole won’t come close to paying for those cuts in their entirety. The legislation is expected to swell federal deficits by nearly $3.8 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. This explosive deficit expansion could make it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, possibly further constraining energy development.
President Trump has described the law as ending Democrats’ “green new scam,” and conservative lawmakers have celebrated the termination of Biden-era energy programs. The law is particularly devastating for programs encouraging electric vehicle sales, as well as wind and solar energy deployment.
But the act is more complicated than a simple repeal of Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. In one case, Trump’s big law ends a federal energy incentive that has been in place, in some form, since the 1990s. In others, Republicans have tied up existing energy incentives with new restrictions, regulations, and red tape.
Some parts of the IRA have even remained intact. GOP lawmakers opted to preserve Biden’s big expansion of incentives to support nuclear energy and advanced geothermal development. That said, the Trump administration could still gut these tax credits by making them effectively unusable through executive action.
It can be confusing to keep the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s many changes to federal energy law in your head — even for experts. That’s why Heatmap News is excited to publish this new reference “cheat sheet”on the past, present, and future of federal energy tax credits, compiled by an all-star collection of analysts and researchers.
The summary takes each clean energy-related provision in the U.S. tax code and summarizes how (and whether) it existed in the 2000s and 2010s, how the Inflation Reduction Act changed it, and how the new OBBBA will change it again. It was compiled by Shane Londagin, a policy advisor at the think tank Third Way; Luke Bassett, a former Biden administration official and Senate Energy committee staffer; Avi Zevin, a former Biden official and a partner at the energy law firm Roselle LLP; and researchers at the REPEAT Project, an energy analysis group at Princeton University. (Note that I co-host the podcast Shift Key with Jesse Jenkins, who leads the REPEAT Project.)
You can find the full summary below.