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Podcast

Introducing Shift Key, a New Climate Podcast from Heatmap News

Hosted by me and Princeton University Professor Jesse Jenkins.

Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins.
Heatmap Illustration

I have some exciting news this morning: Heatmap is launching its first podcast.

It’s called Shift Key, and it’s hosted by me and Professor Jesse Jenkins, an expert on energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

Here’s the idea of Shift Key: It’s going to be like listening in on a call between Jesse and me every week. We want to bring you the most interesting conversation about climate change and decarbonization that you’ll hear each week.

Follow us right now at Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.

You’ve almost certainly seen Jesse’s work on Heatmap or heard him on another podcast before. He’s one of the country’s most important experts on decarbonization and his research helped inform the Inflation Reduction Act.

And while you are probably familiar with my work here at Heatmap, you may not know I’ve been covering climate change since 2015.

The founding idea of Shift Key — and something that Jesse and I agree on — is that the energy transition and climate change are not niche topics, and they’re not something happening hypothetically in the future.

Decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels are happening now — and it impacts everything from Main Street to Wall Street, from domestic politics to geopolitics. It is profoundly reordering the economy, public health, and consumer decisions.

So subscribe to Shift Key now at Apple Podcasts and listen to our teaser below. Our first episode will come out later this week.

Thanks as always for your support — and thank you for listening.

Green

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AM Briefing

Trump’s Reactor Realism

On the solar siege, New York’s climate law, and radioactive data center

A nuclear reactor.
Heatmap Illustration/Georgia Power

Current conditions: A rain storm set to dump 2 inches of rain across Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas will quench drought-parched woodlands, tempering mounting wildfire risk • The soil on New Zealand’s North Island is facing what the national forecast called a “significant moisture deficit” after a prolonged drought • Temperatures in Odessa, Texas, are as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than average.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump’s plan to build 10 new large reactors is making headway

For all its willingness to share in the hype around as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors and microreactors, the Trump administration has long endorsed what I like to call reactor realism. By that, I mean it embraces the need to keep building more of the same kind of large-scale pressurized water reactors we know how to construct and operate while supporting the development and deployment of new technologies. In his flurry of executive orders on nuclear power last May, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Energy to “prioritize work with the nuclear energy industry to facilitate” 5 gigawatts of power uprates to existing reactors “and have 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.” The record $26 billion loan the agency’s in-house lender — the Loan Programs Office, recently renamed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing — gave to Southern Company this week to cover uprates will fulfill the first part of the order. Now the second part is getting real. In a scoop on Thursday, Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported that the Energy Department has started taking meetings with utilities and developers of what he said “would almost certainly be AP1000s, a third-generation reactor produced by Westinghouse capable of producing up to 1.1 gigawatts of electricity per unit.”

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Podcast

The Peril of Talking About Electricity Affordability

Rob sits down with Jane Flegal, an expert on all things emissions policy, to dissect the new electricity price agenda.

Power lines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As electricity affordability has risen in the public consciousness, so too has it gone up the priority list for climate groups — although many of their proposals are merely repackaged talking points from past political cycles. But are there risks of talking about affordability so much, and could it distract us from the real issues with the power system?

Rob is joined by Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute and the States Forum. Flegal was the former senior director for industrial emissions at the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, and she has worked on climate policy at Stripe. She was recently executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation.

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Power lines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

This transcript has been automatically generated.

Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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