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Heatmap Daily
ROBINSON MEYER • SEPTEMBER 25, 2026

This is Heatmap Daily, a weekday digest from our executive editor. Thank you for supporting Heatmap’s reporting.

Good afternoon and happy Friday.

Let’s start with the news: The new episode of our podcast, Shift Key, is my full interview with U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, which we recorded at Heatmap House in New York on Wednesday.

Listen to it here. You can find it on Heatmap’s website or wherever you get your podcasts. You don’t need to be a Heatmap subscriber to tune in.

My colleagues at Heatmap have covered a few takeaways from our conversation, including Secretary Wright’s prediction that there will not be a “blanket ban” on U.S. diesel exports, which he then hedged slightly. But we haven’t previewed everything, and I think the conversation is still worth your time. A few highlights:

We discussed the Trump administration’s lengthy war on wind and whether it might end in the future. “I do believe a successful permitting reform … changes the playing field for anything you want to build in this country, including wind,” Wright said. He also explained why he thought congressional Democrats should trust the administration’s word about that.

Wright hit on the Energy Department’s program to build a new fleet of nuclear reactors across the country, which could, if successful, bring roughly 10 gigawatts of zero-carbon electricity capacity online across five sites. There are now “well more than five” companies interested in entering the deal, he said, meaning that five will soon be selected.

Also up for discussion: whether the United States is leaning too hard into natural gas, how China has buttressed the global economy from the Strait of Hormuz oil shock, and why Wright thinks China is now the “swing importer” of oil globally and has successfully “taken off the peaks” of global pricing.

“If [China] were listening to me for their energy policy — and they are not — but if they were, I’d have them ramp up those refineries more rapidly because they have oil, the world has oil, but we’re very, very tight on refining capacity right now,” he said.

It was a fascinating conversation. Some of it pointed to ways that American energy policy will need to evolve in the future, regardless of which president or party is in charge. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube.

CRES Forum

***

I’d be loath not to mention — at least briefly — all the movement in the past week on permitting reform.

When we last checked in on permitting over the summer, Daniel Palken, the head of infrastructure at Arnold Ventures, helped me understand the emerging outline of a bipartisan compromise deal on energy and infrastructure permitting. Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico also sketched the state of negotiations for us in August.

Since then, I had heard that Senate negotiators were making progress, but had not heard many concrete details. But this week we saw a flurry of activity. At the beginning of the week, the White House seemed to want to move quickly to seal a compromise, promising to allow stalled solar and wind projects to proceed in return for getting something inked before the midterm elections. That said, actually getting a law passed before the November 3 elections would have required Speaker Mike Johnson to bring his caucus back to Washington, D.C.

But late on Wednesday, Senate Democrats signaled that they want to slow down the talks and seemingly delay any deal until after November. “We believe there is a good deal to be had,” the lead Democratic negotiators, Senator Heinrich and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, said in a statement. But “getting that [deal] right has to matter more than election-year deadlines.”

As a reminder, any permitting deal will need at least 60 votes in the Senate in order to clear the filibuster hurdle. That means such a deal will almost certainly need to be bipartisan — and therefore that a deal can only come together in a political environment where legislators from both parties feel like they can plausibly prosper in the near term by making it easier to build. Right now, it seems like both parties do feel that way, even if they’re bickering about whether to get a deal done before or after November.

I have been careful not to endorse any bill until I see it, of course. It will all depend on what’s in the final text. But it would be a mistake, I think, for House and Senate Democrats to let this legislating opportunity pass them by if they are indeed so close to a deal that the decarbonization hawks Whitehouse and Heinrich feel good about. Just because Congress reaches a deal now doesn’t mean it can’t reach another one in the future. As we’ve discussed on Shift Key, recent history suggests that when lawmakers adjust one part of the law or one statute, they feel more comfortable returning to it in the future, making further addendums as needed.

Remember: Because federal permitting laws chiefly constrain what the government can do, they act as a brake primarily on public infrastructure. It took years, recall, for state and local governments in New York to get the permits necessary to implement their own scheme to tax traffic congestion in New York City. If you want to build big new infrastructure in the United States, be it high-speed trains, transmission lines, or zero-carbon power plants — and if you specifically want the government to build public works faster and better than it has in recent decades — then you should want a different federal permitting scheme than we have now. Let’s hope congressional Democrats remember that in the days, weeks, and months to come.

Thanks as always for reading — more on this next week, I’m sure. And in case you missed it, here’s all the rest of our New York Climate Week coverage:

  • Katie Brigham wrote about the AI divide in climate tech, between companies that serve data centers and those that can’t.
  • Jeva Lange had the full-day recap from Heatmap House on Wednesday.
  • Matthew Zeitlin dug into the dilemma facing utilities on permitting reform.
  • Emily Pontecorvo checked in with the carbon removal crowd, which is feeling cautiously optimistic about its future.

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Good evening. COP28 wrapped up in Dubai today, with all 198 parties agreeing to final text of the Global Stocktake. While much of the focus has been on one phrase in that agreement — a promise about “transitioning away from fossil fuels” — I wanted to look at another phrase in the same document that may be more important in the near-term.

Thanks as always for reading. —Robinson

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The Stealth Hero of the COP28 Deal Is Technology

On a crucial — and underappreciated — phrase in the Global Stocktake.

ROBINSON MEYER • DECEMBER 13, 2023

Now it is over. Early on Wednesday morning, negotiators in Dubai reached an agreement at the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the global meeting otherwise known as COP28.

Their final text for  the Global Stocktake — a kind of report card on humanity’s progress on its Paris Agreement goals — is contradictory and half-hearted. Instead of blunt language instructing countries to “phase out fossil fuels,” it instead provides a range of options that could let countries achieve “deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” One of these possibilities is the tripling of global renewable capacity; another is a call for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.”

So far, this language — this call for leaving fossil fuels — has attracted the most attention by far. Simon Stiell, the UN’s top climate official,  said that it marked “the beginning of the end” of the fossil-fuel era, while the climate journalist and activist Bill McKibben has argued that the phrase can become  a useful tool for activists, who can now beat it across the head of the Biden administration.

But a separate phrase in the agreement caught my attention. Immediately after calling for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the text makes a different point: that the world must accelerate the development of “zero- and low-emission technologies, including,  inter alia, renewables, nuclear, abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilization and storage, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors, and low-carbon hydrogen production.”

This language may rankle some readers because it seems to give pride of place to carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, which would allow fossil fuel-burning plants to catch emissions before they enter the atmosphere. (It also seems to conflate CCS with carbon removal technology, even though they are different.) But I believe that the overarching demand — the call for accelerating climate-friendly technologies — represents a crucial insight, one that I could not stop thinking about at the COP itself, and one that is linked to any realistic demand to phase out fossil fuels. Here is that insight: The world will only be able to decarbonize when it develops abundant energy technologies that emit little carbon and that are price-competitive if not  cheaper than their fossil-fueled alternatives.

A MESSAGE FROM DOMINI IMPACT INVESTMENTS

You care about the planet. Does your money?

Just as COP28 began, the Rhodium Group, an energy research firm, published a new study looking at how carbon pollution will rise and fall through the end of the century. Unlike other such studies — which ask either how the planet will fare if no new climate policy passes, or what the world must do to avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — this new study tried to look at what was  likely to happen. Given what we know about how countries’ emissions rise and fall with their economies, and when and how they tend to pass climate policy, how much warming can we expect by the end of the century?

As the report’s authors put it, the study was aimed not at policymakers, but at policy takers — the officials, executives, engineers, and local leaders who are starting to plan for the world of 2100.

Here’s the good news: Global greenhouse gas emissions are likely to peak this decade, the report found. Sometime during the 2020s, humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other climate pollution will reach an all-time high and begin to fall. (Right now, we emit  the equivalent of 50.6 billion tons of the stuff every year.) This will represent a world-historic turning point in our species’ effort to govern the global climate system, and it will probably happen before Morocco, Portugal, and Spain  host the 2030 World Cup.

And that is roughly where the good news ends. Because unlike in rosy net-zero studies where humanity’s carbon emissions peak and then rapidly fall to zero, the report does  not project any near-term pollution plunge. Instead, global emissions waver and plateau through the 2030s and 2040s, falling in some years, rising slightly in others, cutting an unmistakably downward trend while failing to get anywhere close to zero. By 2060, annual emissions will have fallen to 39 gigatons, only 22% below today’s levels.

And — worse news, now — that is as low as emissions will ever get this century, the report projects. Driven by explosive economic growth in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, global emissions begin to rise — slowly but inexorably — starting in the 2060s. They keep rising in the 2070s, 2080s, and 2090s. By the year 2090, emissions will have reached 44 gigatons, only 13% below today’s levels and roughly where emissions stood in 2003.

How Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Fall — Then Rise — in the 21st Century

In other words, after a century of work to fight climate change, humanity will find itself roughly where it began. But now, with several thousand additional gigatons of emissions in the atmosphere, the planet will be about 2.8 degrees Celsius warmer (or about 5 degrees Fahrenheit). At its high end estimate, temperatures could rise as much as 4 degrees Celsius, or more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit.

This temperature rise will be caused by legacy emissions from polluters like the United States and China, but as the century goes on, it will increasingly come from Asian and African countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, and others. Why? It’s not like these countries, say, reject renewables or electric vehicles: In fact, Rhodium anticipates that renewables will have grown up to 22-fold by the end of the century.

Instead, emissions rise because fossil fuels are cheap and globally abundant — they remain one of the easiest ways to power an explosively growing society — and because of the growth of the so-called hard-to-abate sectors in these countries are slated to grow just as quickly as the economies themselves. Indonesia, Nigeria, and Vietnam will demand many megatons of new steel, cement, and chemicals to furnish their growing societies; right now, the only economical way to make those materials requires releasing immense amounts of carbon pollution into the atmosphere.

Let’s be clear: Rhodium’s report is a projection, not a prophecy. It should not provoke despair, I think, but determination. Many of the so-called hard-to-abate activities, such as steel or petrochemical making, should more aptly be called activities-that-we-haven’t-tried-very-hard-to-abate yet; people will likely find a way to do them by the middle of the century. (When I  asked Bill Gates what he thought about the Rhodium Group’s findings, he replied that predicting the carbon intensity of certain activities in 2060 was all but impossible: We might have safe, cheap, and abundant nuclear fission by then, or even nuclear fusion.)

Yet it heralds a shift in climate geopolitics that, while it has not yet happened, is not so far away. Since the modern era of global climate politics began in 1990, most carbon emissions have come from just a handful of countries: China, the United States, and the 37 other rich, developed democracies that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD. These countries have emitted 55% of climate pollution since 1990, while the rest of the world — the remaining low- and middle-income countries — have emitted only 45%.

But from now to 2100, that relationship is set to reverse. Through the end of the century, China and the OECD countries emit only 40% of total global emissions, according to Rhodium’s projections. The rest of the world, meanwhile, will emit 60% of global emissions.

In other words, decarbonization will soon become a challenge for  middle-income countries. These countries will not be able to spend extra to buy climate-friendly technologies, but they are simply too populous for rich countries to subsidize. At the same time, these countries lack an existing fleet of fossil-fuel-consuming equipment, so they will not need to transition  away from fossil fuels in the first place. Unlike in the United States, where we will have to shut down our oil-and-gas economy as we build a new one to replace it, Kenya or Indonesia can more or less build a climate-friendly middle-class economy  de novo, much in the same way that in the 2000s countries  “leapfrogged” landline telephones and adopted cell phones. Yet countries will only be able to leapfrog the fossil-fuel era if the climate equivalent of cell phones exist: if climate-friendly technologies are plentiful, useful, and price-competitive.

That’s not all it will take, of course. The world will have to phase down the production and consumption of fossil fuels, because the existence of climate-friendly technologies will not guarantee their use. Humanity may also have to create and enforce a strong moral taboo around burning fossil fuels, much in the same way that it has created a taboo around, say, child labor. But none of that can happen unless climate-friendly alternatives exist: Otherwise countries will ensure that they gain access to the energy that their development requires.