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Robinson Meyer:
[0:46] Hello, it’s Monday, May 11. And some of you may remember a few years ago, we had a little law called the Inflation Reduction Act. It was quite a big deal. Some may have even called it America’s first comprehensive climate law. Imagine that. Well, as many of you know, it was partially repealed last year as part of President Trump’s big tax and spending bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The IRA’s solar and wind tax credits, for instance, which were initially set to stay on the books into the 2030s, were junked. So were tax credits to help people buy electric vehicles, which would have come in handy right now. Other policies such as tax credits to build new grid scale battery storage or nuclear energy or enhanced geothermal were preserved and so were other subsidies such as those that would help automakers produce batteries in electric cars.
Robinson Meyer:
[1:30] Now, I could keep listing the effects of these laws all day, but the point is we actually don’t know yet what the Trump law will ultimately do to the energy system. It was passed less than a year ago. And in fact, solar and wind developers still have until July of this year to begin construction on projects if they want to qualify for the old Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. But we are starting to get a sense of what its ultimate effects may be. And on that front, a new paper came out this week in Nature Review’s Clean Technology that is quite interesting. It’s an assessment of how the IRA and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act could shake out together what their combined effects on the U.S. Energy mix and on U.S. carbon emissions could be. Joining me today are two of the co-authors of that paper. John Bistline is the head of science at the Climate Tech Startup Watershed, but he was for many years an analyst or leader at the Energy Systems and Climate Analysis Group at the Electric Power Research Institute, or EPRI.
Robinson Meyer:
[2:23] Ryna Cui is an associate research professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and research director for the university’s Center for Global Sustainability. On this show, we talk about what modelers got right and wrong about the IRA, whether emissions will still decline even though OBBBA was passed, and how the two laws kind of shake out together. I’m Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, and it’s all coming up on Shift Key.
Robinson Meyer:
[2:49] John and Ryna, welcome to Shift Key.
John Bistline:
[2:51] Great. Thanks for having us, Rob. Excited to be here.
Ryna Cui:
Thank you for having us.
Robinson Meyer:
[2:56] It’s a very cool paper. It just came out. And I feel like it’s beginning to answer the question that has been in a lot of people’s heads since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year, which is we got the Inflation Reduction Act. It was supposed to do amazing things. It was supposed to be on the books for a long time until 2032 or 2035. Some tax credits, of course, extending well past that. And then the One Big Beautiful Bill Act came along. It repealed a lot of the green energy tax credits, but not all of them. And trying to understand where that puts us, what has come out in the wash, was it all for naught, has been at least part of where my brain was. And so I was so excited to see this paper because it gives us the beginning
Robinson Meyer:
[3:38] of some answers about where we might wind up. What did the IRA actually do? And how much of the IRA’s life have we seen since it passed? In other words, you know, is there still some oomph left in this law, and we’re still trying to understand that? Or have we mostly seen the story at this point?
John Bistline:
[3:58] Yeah, I would say that there’s a couple things to highlight from our study. And one is that whenever you look at historical investments to date, it does seem that IRA already brought striking investments to U.S. clean energy. This tended to amplify pre-existing trends rather than being a complete paradigm shift by itself. But we show that clean energy investment was something like $729 billion in the three years after IRA passed. And that’s roughly double what it was in the three years prior.
Robinson Meyer:
[4:31] That’s everything. That’s solar, wind, batteries, but also like EV manufacturing capacity as well and battery manufacturing, right?
John Bistline:
[4:40] That’s right. Yeah, it was led by battery manufacturing, electric vehicle sales on the retail side, as well as solar and battery storage on the electric grid. And we see that IRAB was roughly expected to double the rate of electric sector capacity additions over the next decade as well. But we also see at the same time that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, as I sometimes call it, the impact there is large. But the clean energy transition isn’t stopping because of that. We see that even with many of those IRA tax credits being modified, investment is still projected to be near the upper end of the historical range, especially given the competitiveness of some of the technologies like solar, batteries, alongside rising electricity demand.
Robinson Meyer:
[5:29] So what does this mean for our understanding of emissions, because one of the many things the IRA was supposed to do, but I think one of the things that it got the most credit for, and that ultimately got some people who were maybe wavering about the law to get to yes, is it was supposed to really drag down the path of U.S. emissions, I think, as far as 33% or 35% below where they would be otherwise. It’s now been partially repealed, and without getting too much into it, basically, as we’ve talked about before, the solar and wind and some of the clean energy tax credits are going to terminate as soon as this year or next year. And then tax credits for energy storage for nuclear will remain on the books for longer. And it’s a more complicated story as we get into EVs.
Robinson Meyer:
[6:13] But it’s now been partially terminated. Like, do we have a sense for where U.S. Emissions will wind up? Will they be lower thanks to passing IRA, then they would have been in a world where we didn’t get IRA, even though we now also have OBBBA.
John Bistline:
[6:29] Yeah, I think one of the big stories from this paper in aggregating the modeling work that a range of different teams have been doing is that IRA was roughly expected to double emissions reductions over the next decade. I think the exact numbers is that, you know, across the economy, greenhouse gas emissions would be something like 40% to 50% below 2005 by 2035 with IRA in place. But without it, given the changes in OBBBA, something closer to 25% to 35% lower than 2005.
John Bistline:
[7:05] Just as context, we’re at about 20% below 2005 right now. So with OBBBA, emissions are still projected to decline, just not as steeply as with IRA in place.
Ryna Cui:
Yeah, I will add there, and we are also one of the modeling teams that’s doing the emission pathway trajectories. And I totally agree on John’s points there. Definitely IRA and other actually federal action on the climate policy front. It’s an important, very important contributor to the emission reduction trajectory in the U.S.. And I do think the context about declining technology costs and also stronger market forces, it’s going to make it even more effective. It’s not like we have era going to replace the other enabling factors. So I do think with the now the context is all the enabling market forces are more favorable to the transition. On top of that, with the policy incentive, we’ll see deeper reduction. Of course, with a series of rollbacks, we’re going to slow down that trajectory. But I also want to mention there’s also beyond federal action, there are other level of governments are still engaging and there are potentials to continue those trends.
Robinson Meyer:
[8:27] That’s so interesting, because that gets at, I think, what is the natural follow up to this, which is that, look, IRA was supposed to lower emissions. I mean, we spent a lot of money to lower emissions with IRA. And we also spent a lot of money to do lots of other goals in IRA, build up manufacturing capacity, build out clean energy, reduce conventional and climate pollution. But now we’ve passed OBBBA, it took a lot of that money and it spent it largely elsewhere, largely on tax cuts, primarily for wealthy Americans. And yet emissions are going down Anyway, how much of maybe the IRA emissions reductions were going to happen anyway? And given that we kind of expect emissions to decline through 2035, no matter what, what did we lose by repealing IRA?
John Bistline:
[9:15] Yeah, I would say in terms of the numbers for emissions reductions, roughly half of the reductions you would expect under IRA, we still expect under OBBBA. And that includes with higher projections for electricity demand from things like data centers, manufacturing. That’s something that’s materially changed since we first looked at IRA in 2022. But I think when we look at some of the other missed opportunities here are partially under the development of some of these new and nascent technologies. And that’s a lens that I think, Rob, you alluded to, is that IRA was looking at not just reducing emissions, helping with affordability, but it was also looking at developing these more emerging technologies that would be really important for deeper emissions reductions, whether that’s carbon capture or clean hydrogen, advanced nuclear. And some of the IRA credits for those technologies have continued under OBBBA. But importantly, there’s two things that are sort of missing there. One is that many of those credits have shorter lifetimes now, especially with clean hydrogen. And given the long lead times to scale some of these emerging technologies, there’s a little less support for the demonstration there. But it is encouraging to see that, you know, the credits for geothermal, advanced nuclear are still on the books. And we do see, you know, a lot of project movement on that side.
Ryna Cui:
[10:44] I don’t think the gap that IRA repeal left here can be easily filled with any other sources. It’s still very critical, very important components of an all-of-society approach to deliver the U.S. climate goal. So I do think the gap is still there and is very strong. And also, I think it’s hard to separate what IRA does versus the other federal action, including strict regulatory action and also other climate leadership. I think all of that all add up to what the U.S. climate goal can be delivered. So I do think there’s IRA itself, but also other federal action may also impacting what the authority that subnational have. There’s like a lot of budgetary implication of what state now can do and also other non-federal, not just state. But I think there’s a kind of a package of impact that’s probably beyond what IRA itself is doing.
Robinson Meyer:
[11:46] One of the things I really liked about the paper was that it did a good job of specifying all the contingent aspects of IRA in that this is a law that exists because partially of the Byrd rule in the Senate, because of the kind of legislation that the Senate can advance because of the filibuster rule. It exists partially based on this idea that the EPA was going to follow through and regulate on these technologies. I mean, there was a lot of different policies that were supposed to come together to create a pretty strong climate policy regime that then, of course, have been dismantled by the Trump administration. So there’s this remarkable chart, or really there’s two maps in the paper. We’ll put, of course, the paper in the show notes. I realize we keep talking about it. There’s this remarkable set of maps in the paper and they show where manufacturing went and they also show where new electricity generation capacity went and I wonder if both, could you describe like what regions did the best under IRA? And then maybe who stands to lose the most from OBBBA to the extent that we know?
John Bistline:
[12:53] Sure. Yeah, I would say that in terms of manufacturing investment, that’s one of the places where we’ve seen the largest changes since IRA was passed. And so the emerging battery belt in the Southeast and partially in the Midwest, those are ones that we’ve seen a lot of investment. That investment is continuing. I think one interesting story there is that there’s potentially a story of oversupply relative to domestic electric vehicle demand. And that does raise questions about how that capacity might be repurposed. That’s another interesting conversation by itself. But when we look at investments in the energy supply side, Those are spread out throughout the country. I like to compare periodically Texas and California, but beyond those, there are places like Utah that even though it’s kind of a smaller state, the energy storage investment there has been significant. So I think those are areas that OBBBA has sort of kept the incentives largely untouched with the exception of foreign entity of concern restrictions.
John Bistline:
[14:01] I think some of the areas that are maybe hardest hits are ones where maybe the solar and wind resources aren’t as strong and aren’t attracting the type of investment that some of these, you know, well-resourced regions are like Texas. So I think places in the Midwest, maybe that you would expect greater investments in wind under IRA, you know, those are ones that you would see, you know, soften investment, at least in the near term. But yeah, I don’t know, Ryna, if you want to talk about the intersection with state policies here, I think matter a lot too.
Ryna Cui:
Yeah, I think what from what John described is actually the trend we observe are driven by different probably motivation. It’s a combination of like a policy, but also natural resources, market forces, the cost perspective. And for Texas, and it’s very interesting comparison between California and Texas, just given, you know, the electricity demand growth, what’s the cheapest and convenient way to meet that growing demand? It’s been proved to be solar plus storage in Texas. And with the permitting root air, I think it make it successful. And it’s nothing much relevant to climate motivation. And of course, there are very strong policy incentives and state level action in California that being a climate leader forwarding states. So I think when we look at the trend, it actually now have a broader framing we can utilize to think about what the transition will deliver and is actually coming together with climate benefits.
Robinson Meyer:
[15:39] What do we still not know about OBBBA? So this law only passed last summer. It’s been on the books for less than 12 months. We haven’t even hit the first deadline for when wind and solar projects that still want to use the IRA credits have to formally begin construction. Obviously, I would imagine there’s so many unknowns about this law and you try to constrain them a bit in this paper, but what are your biggest questions about how the new Trump tax law will play out in the world of energy and manufacturing.
John Bistline:
[16:08] For me, I think one of the most interesting stories is how OBBBA intersects with these other trends that I would say have been emerging in a couple of years. The biggest one, of course, has been data centers. Every energy conversation is implicitly a data center one as well. And I think there, the honest answer is you can both be optimistic and pessimistic about how data centers may intersect with changing tax credit landscape. I would say on the pessimistic side, the scale of what’s coming is pretty significant. I was part of EPRI’s powering intelligence report that looked at how data centers may become something like nine to 17% of total electricity demand in the U.S. by 2030 compared to about four or 5% today. And so if that scaling happens largely with new gas-fired resources or existing coal plants, that could materially increase emissions.
John Bistline:
[17:03] But I also think there’s an optimistic scenario there as well. So the same capital that’s flowing into AI infrastructure is also potentially a very large pool of private investment that could be assembled for clean electricity deployment. That’s both deploying more solar and battery storage and wind, but also if AI companies are willing to pay a premium for that speed to power, that potentially could help to accelerate advanced nuclear, geothermal, long duration storage, those types of technologies that really need large committed buyers. So I think that that’s one of the big unknowns for me is how that will play out along with, of course, these geopolitical shocks that are really upending markets.
Robinson Meyer:
[17:51] Ryna, what are your biggest questions going forward, I think, about OBBBA or about any of this?
Ryna Cui:
[17:56] Yeah, I do think we now exist in an interesting period of time, both on the positive side, there’s a lot of progress on technology. And also in globally, there’s not just in the U.S., but globally, all the technologies are getting to a point, they are very competitive across the board. At the same time, I think there’s other uncertainties related to trade, but also the energy crisis, make another clear and loud point about this dependence on fossil fuel, make it really just long-term and secure. So I do think there are broader and multiple drivers now, we can talk about the transition we’re looking for. And it’s related to energy affordability, related to better economy, better health, better jobs. So I think there’s just a kind of a very rich narrative and also a lot of opportunities we can tackle this issue. And it’s probably very limited to do with climate in the first place. But of course, the climate outcome out of that is critical as well. Yeah, so I do think it’s a critical moment we’re living, and it’s hard to really predict where that goes. And I think also the business community, the private sector also exists in a global market in many ways, and it’s hard to isolate the U.S. versus the rest.
Robinson Meyer:
[19:20] I feel like one question that actually emerges from my reading of this paper is like, solar and wind were going to do great in an IRA world. Solar and storage are going to do great in our world. And I think there’s a question facing Democrats, frankly, and just policymakers as they think about the next few years, which is, should they try to reinstate IRA? Or should they try to, let’s say they have a discrete amount of money. Now, some people would contest that assumption, but let’s just assume that they’re going to be working with a discrete amount of money. In fact, what they should do with that discrete amount of money is repair the policies in IRA that have been completely disassembled, which is industrial decarb, which is technologies that are much further away on the cost curve and much further away in kind of deployment curve. And we should say, actually, the U.S. should focus on developing some level of expertise and development and deployment expertise with these more experimental or further away technologies, because solar and wind and storage are just going to romp kind of no matter what. And how the U.S. can most contribute to the project of global decarbonization and also remain competitive and build up new industries is by supporting these frontier technologies.
Robinson Meyer:
[20:42] Is that, I don’t know, you guys know the data better. Am I totally off base or should, you know, is there a reward for Democrats or for future policymakers just go in and repair these subsidies basically as they were?
John Bistline:
[20:57] Yeah, I think that’s a great question, Rob. And I agree with your premise that right now, a lot of companies and a lot of state policymakers, they’re all thinking about, you know, solar and batteries being attractive in today’s environment and moving forward. But support for some of these more costly or less developed options, whether that’s industrial decarbonization or thinking about the next wave of carbon removal, those are more challenging. I obviously don’t have a crystal ball, but I know modeling teams are trying to understand the different policy levers that would be available on the federal side, whether that’s budget reconciliation friendly or something more ambitious. Just as an example, I think one of the big questions is how climate policy and technology policy will intersect with these really salient interests about fiscal costs of policy and affordability. And I think one design space that I’ve been exploring with Catherine Wolfram and others on is thinking about things like energy or industry-only carbon fees that might be paired with revenues that could lower energy bills, especially residential ones. I think the insight there is that, you know, you can design a carbon price that maybe doesn’t touch household energy bills by partially exempting residential electricity, maybe natural gas for heating, but then using revenues to reduce spills.
John Bistline:
[22:24] And of course, you know, there are tradeoffs to navigate as with any policy where maybe if you have a bottom up approach that would target specific industrial facilities that may generate less fiscal revenue than a kind of top down approach. But that’s something that the political economy may look really different. And I think that the CBAM, the carbon border adjustment angle, is also important to think through as well. Here, a domestic carbon fee potentially could shield relatively clean U.S. Industrial facilities, especially from an EU border carbon adjustment.
John Bistline:
[22:59] So that’s more of a competitiveness argument. But I don’t know how to, you know, whether this is one conversation that would reframe the conversation in a way that OBBBA’s critics and supporters, you know, may engage with more.
Ryna Cui:
Yeah, I also think it’s a very interesting question. And you are probably right. I think I agree in terms of the policy focus of, you know, the new administration. And I do think the gap, it is very heavily in the industrial sector. It does require more policy incentives or policy different type of instrument to do more there. In terms of electricity sector, I also wonder the technology on solar story itself, it’s pretty competitive now, but the supporting infrastructure may still require a lot of advancement there, both on technology, but also large investment on build-out. So that could be an area where it requires some focus. Another possibility or kind of an important area I see is on methane emissions, especially from the energy supply sector, which the waste sector methane could be more local restriction. But I think on energy methane, that’s the most effective and the only lever probably to limit the overshoot of 1.5, both the duration and kind of the level for global outcomes. So I do think the methane also cost effective in the near term. So those are good opportunity and we can see more immediate effect.
Robinson Meyer:
[24:32] There was one line in the paper that caught my eye, which is that, you know, I think when we look forward at what OVA is going to do to U.S. residential electricity prices or energy prices, it’s going to raise them, but I will say the numbers are a little small. It’s like 50 to $150, I think, or $168 or something by 2035, which is significant. But maybe I think in terms of costs, we’re presenting to voters about the various impacts of the Trump administration might seem to come out in the wash a little bit. There’s a line in the paper that says, but some regions could see energy costs rise by as much as $500. What regions are those? To the extent that we know where we’ll see the worst energy impacts of OBBBA in terms of just their household bills.
John Bistline:
[25:26] You’re right, Rob, that in surveying the different studies, there is a range nationally that goes from something like $50 to several $100. And that’s by 2035, right? So that’s not a change right away. But you’re also right that some states in the country, especially we’ve seen a lot of Southern states, potentially having, you know, larger increases with the removal of IRA. But I think there’s a lot of uncertainty there, right? Both because that was a kind of difference between a world with IRA credits and a world without them, it may be that a world without them is still increasing due to things like grid modernization or changing fuel prices. I know that’s a sort of big lever that can influence affordability, both on the electric side and non-electric side. But yeah, again, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty about exactly where those affordability increases might be biggest. And the fact that it takes so long for those to materialize probably means that they extend beyond an election cycle. And yeah, it probably leads to a lot of confusion, especially as people are seeing pain at the pump and other impacts today.
Ryna Cui:
Yeah, I don’t have the answer to that.
Robinson Meyer:
[26:44] Part of the IRA story was that we had these models, including by esteemed Shift Key guest co-host Jesse Jenkins, that were quite important to how we understood what these policies would do. Because IRA just by itself is a whole set of tax credits and incentives and grant programs. And there’s a methane fee in there. It’s all these disparate policies. And what pulled them together was a story we could tell with the models, which showed that they were going to reduce emissions over the long term. It’s now been several years. Of course, the law was repealed, which doesn’t help. But like, what did those models get right about IRA? And what did they get wrong? What happened in reality that maybe we didn’t anticipate when we were looking forward in the law?
John Bistline:
[27:29] Maybe taking a step back from a high level perspective, models were important, both as I was being developed and then understanding some of the implementation. And I think one of the interesting dynamics is that this is kind of like the Beach Boys song Kokomo, which is a song about a place that doesn’t exist. But the vision of it was apparently so compelling that there were actually two places that were named after it. The models that preceded IRA functioned a little bit like that. We were describing this clean energy future that hadn’t happened yet, but that description itself became part of what made it happen in part by giving investors and policymakers this coherent or hopefully coherent view of what to build toward. And looking at things that we got wrong, I think is really instructive here. Models were too bullish, I would say, on wind deployments, including ours at EPRI, where I was previously, the regen model.
John Bistline:
[28:31] And declining investment in wind is driven by a couple of things. I mean, one is just that solar outcompeted wind on cost. So that steeper learning curve for solar was anticipated, but not fully anticipated. There were supply chain issues and interest rate increases and permitting delays. Those are all things that over time we incorporated in our modeling and made it better. But we definitely overestimated the ability of wind to scale quickly based on the incentives. And at the same time, we were probably a bit too bearish on battery storage. It’s really been amazing to see how the battery industry has gone from a rounding error to such a big player. I think one of the stats that I really like is that the U.S. built more energy storage in 2025 than it had cumulatively through 2023. So that was one that I think we were a bit too pessimistic.
Robinson Meyer:
[29:29] That’s the kind of sad that people say about Chinese manufacturing. You never hear it about American manufacturing. That’s crazy.
John Bistline:
[29:35] Yeah. Yeah. So I think that was a really important story as well. I think that that overall picture of how electric sector investments have increased is one area that we did get right. I remember when IRA was passed in 2022, there were something like 32 gigawatts of clean energy deployed. And now when you look at the Energy Information Administration data, it looks like in 2026, we may have close to 80 gigawatts this year. And I remember when models said, oh, well, maybe 60 to 100 gigawatts might be a range with these new incentives, a lot of people said that was wildly unrealistic. So it’s good to see that aspect of our analysis come to pass.
Ryna Cui:
Yeah, that’s also an interesting question. I think as a modeler, we kind of always got that as a first question, like what your model can tell us. Also, it’s kind of as John described, all models are probably wrong in one way or the other, but there’s also very valuable insights that we can produce and generate. One thing I just want to add is it’s a very useful exercise for the community to do multi-model analysis, which we bring different models that have different structure and probably different coverage of the economy and different design of the mechanism.
John Bistline:
[30:57] And then we kind of compare our results and already can identify outliers, for example, and help us to improve through those exercises. And also together, when we can generate robust insights, it’s also very useful for policymakers to understand under different probably assumptions about, you know, future, we still get a very consistent, bigger picture analysis or results out of that. So I think I want to say it’s one approach. The community is managing that. Also, I think the models are different in terms of their both temporal resolution. A lot of us are doing the long term or mid to long term analysis. So definitely the very near term fluctuation of, you know, from day to day or month to month, it’s not being captured for sure. And, you know, the extreme events like the war, the crisis, we can never kind of include that in our model.
John Bistline:
[31:55] But I think those are some examples that need careful interpretation.
Robinson Meyer:
[31:59] I’d say that’s why I always thought that we wouldn’t even be able to assess these IRA models because it was repealed so quickly that it’s hard to know, which I think is part of the story, but it’s also, it does sound like they actually told us really useful things.
John Bistline:
[32:12] Yeah, I completely agree. I think there are a lot of lessons learned that we can take moving forward from this experience. And as Ryna mentioned, these multi-model studies are great because they’re like wisdom of crowd effect, where we do know more collectively than each team maybe knows individually. And whenever we came together to produce this first paper on the Inflation Reduction Act shortly after it passed, it wasn’t just to bring models together to help to inform conversations about what IRA could mean, but it was also for us to get together as a modeling community and share our insights, share data, especially given how complex IRA was. Many hundreds of pages initially, lots of treasury guidance that was also hundreds of pages. So I think that was a good example of the analysis community coming together to really inform decisions that people were making.
Robinson Meyer:
[33:06] You described a few things that got wrong, John. Modelers projected too much wind, and they projected too few batteries. It seems to me that you could kind of backtrack those to two key assumptions. The first was that we thought we were going to get permitting reform with the IRA. And permitting reform is very important for transmission development. And transmission development is what unlocks wind, because as soon as 2020 or 2021, we kind of knew that we were tapping out the ability of the existing transmission network to where there were good wind resources. And so we were going to need more power lines. And I think this is still the case. We need more power lines to go to where there’s better wind resources because right now where there’s good wind and good power lines we’ve already built wind farms but then the other one is of course data centers we didn’t know if we were going to get the data center boom in august 2022 when the IRA passed and data centers have driven part of the huge battery build out like how many of these errors just basically go back to we thought we were going to get permitting reform and we didn’t get it and we didn’t think we were going get a data center built out, like a massive secular surge in electricity demand. And in fact, we did.
John Bistline:
[34:13] Yeah, I completely agree with you, Rob, that those were two of the big blind spots that we didn’t know in 2022. Permitting reform is something that is really challenging to model explicitly. And I think many models at the time did assume that many of these real world frictions, whether that’s local ordinances or the ability to site and permit transmission projects and interconnection queue issues, that many of those would be accelerated. And we have seen some progress on that front, but clearly that was a good place to start, but a bad one to finish. And especially as we think about the data center build out, the coming wave of electrification, all of those things mean that strengthening the grid is really critical. And so, yeah, I would say that this is an area that you know, we as an analysis community are thinking toward. And, you know, it’s encouraging to see bipartisan interest here in permitting, not for one reason alone, but because of all of the drivers that you alluded to.
Ryna Cui:
Nothing to add there, but it’s more like we keep tracking the latest update, latest plan, and try to incorporate, improve our assumption. I think that’s always a needed exercise, especially in this moment.
Robinson Meyer:
[35:33] We’ll keep tracking these developments as they keep happening.
Robinson Meyer:
[35:37] And I look forward to the next paper on this. John and Ryna, thank you so much for joining us on Shift Key.
Ryna Cui:
[35:42] Thank you for having us. It’s a great pleasure.
John Bistline:
Yeah, I really enjoyed this. These are exactly the types of questions I think the field needs to be asking right now.
Robinson Meyer:
[35:55] And that will do it for today’s episode of Shift Key, but we will be back later this week with a new episode, so stick around for that, I guess. Until then, Shift Key is a production of Heatmap News. Our editors are Jillian Goodman and Nico Lauricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury. Our music is by Adam Kromelow. Thanks so much for listening. See you real soon.
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The global vehicle market is splitting into two — with just a few exception.
The past three months have been crucial for Rivian, America’s biggest all-electric car company not run by Elon Musk.
The California-based automaker debuted the R2, its long-awaited and somewhat more affordable sport utility vehicle. (Our reviewer gave it high marks.) Rivian also formally took out a nearly $6.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy to finance its new Georgia factory. And it finally unveiled the plans for that facility, which will include a rail tie-in and a 1,000-acre preserved woodland.
All that was well and good, but the crucial question remained: How is the R2 selling? And the answer is: Pretty well, seemingly! Rivian delivered 19,248 vehicles last quarter, beating analyst expectations and setting a new all-time quarterly sales record. More importantly, its vehicle deliveries have now recovered above where they stood in the third quarter of last year — a key milestone, since President Trump and Congress ended the federal government’s consumer-side EV incentives last September.
Tesla is seemingly also about to clear that threshold, although nobody outside the firm knows for sure. Elon Musk’s company doesn’t break out its sales by continent or model, but it delivered 486,532 vehicles last year — just about 2% below last year’s third quarter results. (Although a few of Rivian’s Amazon delivery vans have made their way into fleets abroad, the company only sells its consumer R1 and R2 vehicles in the United States and Canada, so its sales data is mostly U.S. by default.)
Alas, those two stand alone for now. No other automaker is close to breaking its quarterly EV sales record in the United States, and Ford, General Motors, and Hyundai all saw their domestic EV sales crumble last quarter. The new Chevrolet Bolt, GM’s most affordable EV — and its only American-made vehicle of any kind priced below $30,000 — has sold abysmally, moving just 8,090 units since the year began. The company is now likely to cap its production run at 35,000 units sold; it initially planned to produce 150,000.
Looking at these trends, I think you can see two different phenomena taking place.
The first is a big and growing divergence between America’s transportation sector and the rest of the world’s. The oil supply shock triggered by America’s war in Iran (and the resulting closure of the Strait of Hormuz) may be driving a long-term shift, encouraging consumers and countries to move away from oil. But for now, the crisis’s high prices have hit parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia far worse than they’ve impacted much of North America. Global EV sales reached a record high in the spring, for instance — just not in the United States.
The second is that we’re seeing demand destruction without decarbonization. According to new Nikkei data, gasoline-only cars made up less than half of global new car sales during the six months of 2026.
That’s never happened before, and it is a remarkable change: Gasoline-only cars have lost about a quarter of their global market share in less than five years. But as consumers switched away from gasoline, they didn’t move only to battery-only cars — instead, more than half of them shifted to hybrids or plug-in hybrids. That shift is good news, in that it will depress global oil use and therefore global greenhouse-gas emissions. But it won’t allow for the possibility of zeroing out emissions in the same way that EVs can.
But sometimes demand destruction will cut emissions significantly. If want to see that in the United States, check out the diesel market. As my colleague Alexander Kaufman wrote about this morning, FedEx has responded to eye-watering domestic diesel prices by placing an order for 2,000 electric box trucks with the California-based automaker Harbinger Motors. The shipper believes that the move will save it $800 million in fuel costs over time. When I talked to John Henry Harris, Harbinger’s CEO, last year, he told me the company didn’t need tax credits to sell vehicles — the math justified it on its own. Seems like FedEx agrees.
How the bill would have affected (or not affected) the Keystone XL pipeline, the Lava Ridge wind farm, and other major project proposals.
O ne of the non-negotiables for Senate Democrats in putting together a bipartisan permitting bill was to limit the president’s ability to reverse federal project approvals or otherwise gum up the works for developments they simply dislike. The authors’ goal was to prevent a situation like the one we’re in now, where Trump has revoked permits for wind farms, refused to permit new ones, and tried to stop construction of fully permitted offshore wind projects.
But the language on “project certainty” in the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is technology neutral — it would protect fossil fuels as much as clean energy. While Trump has perhaps gone the furthest of any president in using the authorities of the executive branch to enact his preferences, his Democratic predecessors have taken similar steps to stop mines, pipelines, and oil and gas drilling — often in the name of stopping climate change.
“This bill is clearly looking backwards at five to 10 years of case studies in how an executive branch can delay or revoke permits, and it is targeted at those case studies,” Travis Annatoyn, the former deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources at the Interior Department under Biden, told me.
The bill section in question contains two key provisions. The first would make it illegal for a federal agency to rescind, terminate, or alter a federal authorization or permit, or to prevent the construction or operation of a project that has all of its necessary federal approvals — though there are exceptions for cases involving a court ruling, violation of a permit’s terms, fraud, or new environmental harms or threats to national security.
The second big provision would give companies a course of action if they suspect the federal government is discriminating against certain types of projects or unduly dragging out the permitting process. An applicant can sue the government for displaying a “pattern of disparate treatment,” defined as a “substantial increase” in delays or “improper” denials for a given project type compared to the previous five years. Applicants also have the right to sue if the government takes longer than a year to issue a decision on a permit after all of the applicant’s paperwork is deemed complete.
Environmental nonprofits, particularly those that work on public lands issues, are extremely worried about these provisions, as illustrated by a transcript of several groups discussing the bill on a conference call that was leaked to Punchbowl News last week. “A future administration will not be able to challenge anything that is in fact permitted during the presidency of the Trump administration,” Erik Shlenker-Goodrich of the Western Environmental Law Center said on the call, “which is going to create an incentive for all these data centers and fossil fuel companies to rush through a process, hoard leases, permits and authorizations, and then basically tell a future administration to go fly a kite.”
But constraining the power of the executive branch is tricky. Even if the bill passes as written, and its provisions work as intended, there will probably still be some ways by which a president could throttle permits if they are motivated enough to do so, Annatoyn said.
Case in point: The laws as written haven’t stopped Trump from testing their limits. The main advantage to these provisions would be clearer consequences in the courts, giving affected parties more confidence to file a suit, and compensation if they win. On the other hand, those affected parties would still need to have the resources to sue the government.
It’s helpful to apply BAAJA to past examples of executive energy decisions to see how they would fare under the law. I walked through some case studies with Annatoyn and Ben Schiffman, the former attorney-adviser at the Interior Department’s Office of the Solicitor under Biden, to get a better understanding of what these provisions would do.
First proposed in 2008, the Keystone XL pipeline would have brought Canadian crude oil from the Alberta tar sands into the U.S. Almost immediately it attracted fierce opposition from environmental advocates, indigenous groups, and even Midwestern farmers, who eventually formed a coalition that staged attention-grabbing protests aimed at convincing the federal government not to approve the plans.
In a presidency-defining move, Barack Obama sided with opponents and rejected the project’s permit in 2015, stating that to prevent the worst of climate change, “we're going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground.” Trump later reversed that decision, however, approving Keystone in 2019. Then the project got held up in litigation brought by the Northern Plains Resource Council, a Montana environmental group, over one of its Clean Water Act permits.
When Biden took office in 2021, he signed an executive order reversing Trump’s reversal. Leaving the permit in place, he wrote, “would not be consistent with my Administration’s economic and climate imperatives.” A few months later, Keystone XL’s developer, TC Energy, officially canceled the pipeline.
Keystone is unique, however, because it would have crossed an international border, which requires direct presidential approval. Had BAAJA been in effect, Biden still would have been able to revoke the permit, Schiffman told me. “Keystone is a really unusual example,” he said. “The president is not considered an agency under the Administrative Procedure Act, so it’s just not subject to review in the way an action by the Secretary of Interior or other agencies are,” he said.
This bill’s effect is more ambiguous in this example. Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act required the Interior Department to hold two oil and gas lease sales on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain. Trump held a sale in January 2021, just before he left the White House, issuing nine leases. When Biden took office later that month, he signed an executive order directing his Interior Secretary, Deb Haaland, to conduct a new environmental analysis of the entire leasing program, citing “alleged legal deficiencies underlying the program.”
That June, Haaland concluded that there had been “insufficient analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, including failure to adequately analyze a reasonable range of alternatives in the environmental impact statement,” and suspended the previously sold leases. Two years later, after completing a new environmental review, she canceled all the remaining leases in the Refuge. Biden’s Bureau of Land Management also later issued a new Record of Decision significantly downsizing the leasing program from 1.6 million acres to the minimum 400,000 required under the law.
When Trump began his second term, he directed his own Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, to consider reversing the cancellation of the leases and to reinstate the Record of Decision that his first administration had issued in 2020. Ultimately, Burgum did not have to reverse the cancellations because the lessees had sued the government and a federal court sided with them, vacating the terminations in March 2025. (Alaska Native and environmental groups are currently appealing that decision.) Meanwhile, Trump’s Interior Department has issued a new Record of Decision reinstating the leasing program’s original 1.6 million acres.
There’s nothing in BAAJA that would seem to have prevented the Biden administration from conducting a new environmental analysis and issuing a new Record of Decision on the leasing program. It’s less clear whether it would have prohibited Haaland from terminating the leases. The word “lease” is conspicuously absent from the definition of a “federal authorization or permit” in this section of the bill, which would seem to have supported Haaland’s decision. But it’s an open question, Annatoyn told me, because the bill’s definition of federal authorization contains the catch-all phrase “or any other approval or order that is necessary … for the construction or operation at full capacity of a project.”
“I imagine if something like this gets passed, someone will make the argument that it includes leases,” Annatoyn said. It will be a question for the courts.
In 2011, Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency rescinded a key Clean Water Act permit for Spruce No. 1, which would have been the largest mountaintop-removal coal mine in West Virginia. The type of permit, known as Section 404, was for the discharge of dredged material, and it had initially been approved by George Bush’s Army Corps of Engineers in 2007. Under that section of the Clean Water Act, however, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator has broad authority to reject the Corps’ decisions about discharge sites “whenever” he or she determines, after notice and public hearings, that there would be unacceptable adverse environmental effects. The move was extremely controversial, as the EPA’s reversal came four years after the Corps approved the permit.
BAAJA contains an amendment to Section 404 that would seem to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening again. It establishes a limited window during which the EPA can review and veto a given site for a discharge permit, beginning when the applicant first submits their complete application for the permit, and ending when the Corps approves it. That means a Section 404 veto post-permit would have been off the table.
BAAJA appears tailor-made to prevent what happened here. In December 2024, Biden’s Interior Department issued a Record of Decision to approve the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, set to be one of the largest such developments in the country. When Trump stepped into office in January, he issued an executive order asking his Interior Department to review that decision. Secretary Burgum canceled the permit last August, again citing unspecified “legal deficiencies in the issuance of the approval.”
Schiffman said the Interior Department would not have been able to do this if BAAJA was the law of the land unless it provided evidence that fit one of those exceptions I mentioned earlier, such as a court order, or if Lava Ridge violated its permit.
Annatoyn agreed, but added that this is not a totally foregone conclusion. “The agencies can still inadvertently or deliberately choose to press on the limits of that prohibition — you know, test it or even violate it outright,” he said. At the end of the day, he added, Trump could still do this under BAAJA, and the burden would fall on the project developer to undertake a lengthy, expensive court fight to undo it.
In December 2025, Burgum ordered the five offshore wind farms that were already under construction off the east coast to pause their work. He cited “national security risks identified by the Department of War in recently completed classified reports.”
While the courts quickly rejected those orders, BAAJA may have prevented them in the first place. The bill prohibits agencies from taking any action “to interfere with or prevent the construction or operation” of a project that has all necessary permits. And if the administration had chosen to issue the orders anyway, BAAJA would have at least given the affected companies the right to recover costs attributed to the delay, which in this case was millions of dollars per day. On top of that, the companies would be entitled to payment of 25% to 50% of their project’s total costs up to the time the government intervened.
Another reason BAAJA would have likely prevented Burgum’s December order, Annatoyn said, is that it contains a provision to bar serial attempts of the same action. Burgum had issued stop work orders on two of the five wind farms earlier in the year, both of which were struck down by courts. Under BAAJA, the companies would be entitled to injunctive relief preventing the government from taking the same action again unless it obtained a court order condoning the action from the same judge.
The Trump administration has stopped permitting offshore wind projects altogether, and has kept onshore wind projects in a holding pattern despite a court’s order to resume the permitting process. Under BAAJA, wind companies would have new ammo to challenge this inaction and delay. They might be able to identify a “pattern of disparate treatment” or cite other language in the bill that limits the number of days the government can sit on a permitting decision. At the same time, the discrimination language is a new area of law, Schiffman told me, so there’s some uncertainty as to how it would apply. And again, the burden would be on the company to bring a lawsuit.
Can a kit you buy at the hardware store really save your home from a Palisades Fire-sized blaze?
Nicholai Allen, a Southern California wildland firefighter, opened his Instagram DMs this summer to find a photo of a beautiful A-frame home set against a backdrop of mountains and pine forests. At first glance, it looked almost like an advertisement for a vacation rental. But the amazing thing about the picture was not the cozy mountain scene, but the fact that the house was still standing. “Very thankful this product works,” read the accompanying text. “Saved our house and all our outbuildings. Little Giant Fire.”
Allen is a firefighter — he was on the scene when the Pacific Palisades burned in 2025 — and a wildfire survivor, having evacuated his family from the deadly Woolsey Fire near Malibu in 2018. He’s also the founder of Safe Soss, a home-hardening company advertising a “three-step supplemental wildfire defense system,” which includes a carbon filter ember guard, ember tape, and the company’s marquee product: an ammonium phosphate-based wildfire risk-reduction spray. They’re all sold at Lowe’s, where you can get the whole kit for less than $200.
“In the aftermath [of the Woolsey fire], I kept asking: How come some homes survived, and some didn’t?” Allen recounted to me. “Some get retardant dropped on them, and some don’t. I thought, ‘Why don’t homeowners just do their own fire‑retardant drops so we’re not leaving that to chance?’”
The Little Giant Fire was Washington’s biggest fire of the 2026 season, and hearing from the homeowner who made it through intact “made my whole year, frankly,” Allen told me. But one happy customer doesn’t settle the lively and ongoing debate in the fire safety world about the effectiveness of wildfire mitigation products, which can range from lumber and vegetation treatment sprays to rooftop sprinkler systems and mesh vent covers. Some products — like a Class A metal roof resistant to ordinary combustible material like wood — are widely agreed to be effective, but can cost $10,000 or more. An off-the-counter mesh vent, spray, or treated wood is vastly cheaper — and certainly less overwhelming to install — but also a grayer area in terms of efficacy.
“To me, the concept of treating wood because you think it’s going to be fire-resistant or not ignitable is fooling yourself,” Beth Burnam, the Firewise USA Regional Coordinator for California’s Mono and Inyo counties, told me.
No single certification, organization, or agency vets new home-hardening treatments and systems before they hit the market, even as that market continues to grow; one estimate puts the wildfire home retrofit industry at $4.8 billion by the end of 2033, up from $2.1 billion in 2024. The stakes are high for homeowners, too, who not only put their faith in the hands of such products to protect what’s likely their largest asset, but who might spend $2,000 to $87,000 on a full hardening retrofit, a 2025 study by Earth Economics found.
Burnam’s assessment of the burgeoning home hardening market was blunt. “There’s a lack of knowledge base, and then there’s all the shysters out there trying to sell you the next best, greatest product that will let people pretend to sleep at night,” she said.
At the same time, it’s not the Wild West for home hardening products. The California State Fire Marshal tests wildfire-resistant building products and publishes a handbook of approved materials. The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a scientific research group that operates a large-scale ember lab for lighting things on fire, has also published a series of white papers on mitigation product categories, including one on flame retardant coatings.
In that report, the IBHS found that sprays and paints could potentially provide “enhanced protection to buildings during a wildfire” — but its researchers also raised concerns about the products’ durability. “It’s really hard to have something that you spray or paint onto a wooden surface maintain its fire-resistant or retardant capacity in a period that’s longer than a year,” Spencer Eusden, the curriculum developer of Living With Fire, a wildfire preparedness and education program based out of the University of Nevada, Reno, explained to me. “There’s so much UV exposure; there’s moisture. Wood contracts and expands as it changes temperature, so it’s hard to maintain a treatment.”
That conclusion is consistent with similar research by the U.S. Forest Service around flame-resistant paints. Laura Hasburgh, a materials research engineer at the Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, and one of the authors of that study, told me in an email that while flame-retardant vegetation treatments fell out of the scope of that particular research, she’s skeptical about them, too. “A vegetation spray might temporarily alter fuel moisture or flammability under particular conditions, but its performance could be affected by time since application, rainfall, irrigation, heat, wind, plant growth, uneven coverage, and the intensity of an approaching fire,” she said.
“In general, a product’s marketing claims should not be treated as proof that it can protect a home or stop a wildfire,” Hasburgh added. In general, she encouraged customers to “look for independent test results” and find out whether a company’s claims are “supported by a recognized testing organization or fire-safety authority.”
That doesn’t mean all sprays and foams are worthless, though. Stuart Mitchell, the founder of Wildfire Mitigation Advisors, a Santa Rosa-based home hardening consultancy, told me they have a time and place. “A simple example is: I would say, don’t have a fence connected to your home,” he said. “But if you say, ‘Well, my dad made that fence and gate, and it’s really dear to me,’ I’d say let’s keep it. Let’s go to plan B: Give that fence or gate defensible space, and then coat it in a long-lasting flame retardant coating.” Eusden, the Living With Fire curriculum developer, likewise said vegetation treatments can be useful when done by professionals, though he echoed Hasburgh’s urging that most homeowners are likely to find their time and energy better spent on other treatments such as moving vegetation back from a house.
Safe Soss’ spray, notably, is intended as a temporary treatment rather than a long-term solution. It’s designed to be applied during a red flag warning or when a home is under a pre-evacuation notice, which Allen said means it doesn’t need to last as long as a once-a-decade paint job. (He told me that a single application can last up to three months.) The product was self-certified by its Japanese manufacturer in a standard UL crib test, which is used to test fire extinguishers against a standardized pile of burning sticks (a “crib”) in a lab. But it also means it was only formally lab-tested as a “wetting agent,” i.e. basically a fire extinguisher, rather than as a retardant used to treat wood or vegetation before a fire. It’s a distinction that Allen is conscious of, since he doesn’t want Safe Soss to encourage people to stay behind and use it to fight fires themselves.
Instead, Allen told me he’s field-tested Safe Soss by using it himself on prescribed burns — that is, to help contain controlled intentionally set fires ignited by other fire professionals, sans the chaos of an actual wildfire but under real world conditions in a forest or field, rather than in a lab. The results were enough to give him the confidence to launch the product for commercial sale. “I can pursue more certifications as time goes on,” he told me. “But if I can help people right away, I’m not going to hold it up until I get some arbitrary number.”
Another company, CitroTech, produces what it boasts is the “only long-term fire inhibitor recognized by the EPA Safer Choice program,” a voluntary certification that is focused not on fire resistance but on the use of safe chemicals. While the company also makes an outdoor vegetation treatment spray, its chemicals are primarily designed for treating interior lumber, where concerns about weathering are less of a factor, Aaron Good, the company’s director of sales, told me. (California State Fire Marshal has not certified CitroTech, but the company is working to get it onto the Forest Service’s Qualified Products List.)
CitroTech also installs rooftop sprinklers on homes, which can activate during a wildfire to saturate a roof and surrounding vegetation with, in this case, CitroTech's proprietary fire inhibitor. But many home-hardening experts I spoke with expressed doubt about sprinkler systems more generally, which often rely on water mains and electrical grids that are prone to fail during major disasters. “After you’ve done all your other home hardening and defensible space work that you need to do, if you still have money left over, go ahead and buy a sprinkler system,” Burnam said. “But understand, it probably won’t work.”
Other experts warned that the water or chemical treatment likely won’t go where you need it to, could be blown away by the high winds that often accompany major conflagrations, or cause water damage to the home. Good himself acknowledged that fires can burn for weeks, offering the example of the 2025 Palisades fire, which burned for 28 days. “If you’re trying to protect a home or a property, that means you need access to water and power for the full 28 days throughout.” CitroTech’s chemical applicant uses no water, insulating it from the water failure problems its competitors face in a disaster like Palisades, though it still relies on working electricity.
Burnam told me that one of the fundamental problems with home hardening is a misunderstanding of how homes actually ignite. For too long, she said, experts — and firefighters in particular — have focused on direct flame contact as a source of ignition, such as when a bush or tree alongside an exterior wall of a home catches fire, and it spreads to the house. Direct flame contact makes creating a defensible space important — that is, the all-important buffer zones around your home where vegetation is removed in order to slow the progress of a wildfire. But it’s also why sprays and plant treatments can be so seductive to a concerned homeowner browsing the shelves of their local hardware store: It’s probably how you’d imagine a home catching in a wildfire, but you’d mostly be wrong.
Homes can also ignite from radiant heat, when materials exposed to a nearby fire get so hot they combust. But it’s the third ignition pathway, embers, that causes an estimated 90% of housing loss and damage during wildfires. Embers can travel two miles or more from the main fire front and drift into garages and attics through vents, igniting a house from the inside out. They also tend to accumulate in gutters or at meeting points between materials, such as an angle on a roof or at the edge where a house meets a deck. This is why roof replacements and covered gutters, while extraordinarily costly, are some of the best money you can spend to protect your home.
In fact, when Allen received the DM about the home in the Little Giant Fire, the homeowner didn’t credit the company’s smoke-filtering vent cover or its wood- and vegetation-treatment spray directly. Rather, they sent photos of the company’s “ember tape,” which the homeowner used to keep flammable material out of potential access points as the fire encroached.
Along with vent covers featuring eighth-of-an-inch holes of noncorrosive metal mesh — such as those sold by Wildfire Defense Mesh, which Burnam called “absolutely the gold standard” — it is the nitty-gritties of stopping embers from entering or accumulating on a house that seem to be the best hardware store-derived trick to preventing your house from burning down.
The risk, according to many of the researchers I spoke with, is that off-the-shelf or unvetted products could lull homeowners into a false sense of security. Allen, the Safe Soss founder, said his primary goal is the exact opposite: He wants people to leave their homes as early as possible. “I’ve witnessed loss of life from people staying behind during active evacuation orders because they had a trash pump and a fire hose from their pool,” he told me.
“If you don’t feel like you can evacuate because you haven’t given your home that fighting chance,” he added, “I’m hoping that these tools will provide you enough comfort to leave and save your life.”