Shift Key with Robinson Meyer

Shift Key Classic: What Is a Watt?

As we catch up from summer vacation, we’re bringing you a favorite from the Shift Key archive. We’ll be back in your feed with more fresh episodes starting next week. Wh

How to Understand America’s Gigantic Natural Gas Buildout

The United States is staring down a natural gas buildout of gigantic proportions. Amazon wants to build what would be the country’s largest power plant in Texas — and ru

Trump’s Clean Energy Repeal Was Even More Costly Than We Thought

Two years ago, Donald Trump made an outlandish campaign promise: He would cut Americans’ power bills in half. It was a ridiculous, impossible pledge — but even so, the a

Who Pays for Wildfire Prevention? If You’re in California, You Do — in Your Power Bill.

California now has the most expensive electricity in the continental United States. It also has expensive housing … and an increasingly broken home insurance market. Are

Why This El Niño Looks Like a Monster

Every few years, the Pacific Ocean’s surface waters become especially warm near the equator, a climatic phenomenon known as El Niño. El Niño is a normal part of the clim

The Big — But Fixable! — Problems in America’s R&D Ecosystem

At this point, when you hear “venture capitalist,” you probably think of … software. Or artificial intelligence. Or cryptocurrency. The Engine Ventures, which spun out o

Permitting Reform, Data Centers, and More With Senator Heinrich and Secretary Granholm

The Democratic Party’s climate and energy policy is at a difficult moment. Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has attacked solar and wind energy, sta

What a Permitting Reform Deal Could Look Like

There’s really one one good thing that could happen this year in Congress for clean energy: permitting reform. If lawmakers reached a bipartisan deal on the country’s per

What Barbecue Sauce Has in Common With Carbon Removal

Charm Industrial is a climate tech company that takes biomass and converts it into a heavy, carbon-rich oil that can be injected underground, transmuting and storing the

The Company That’s Raised $60 Million to Geoengineer the Planet

For more than 30 years, a heterodox group of scientists have proposed injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth, thereby coolin

The New Paper Arguing Biden’s Power Sector Emissions Cuts Are Largely Intact — Even Under Trump

Wait, is the climate policy landscape … in better shape than it looks? Just over a year ago, President Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It repealed many of t

Why Meta’s Longtime CTO Is Investing in Climate Tech

It has been a hard few years for climate tech. But we recently got a bright spot: Earlier this month, Gigascale Capital announced it had raised $250 million to build the

How China Saved the World From Trump’s Energy Crisis

When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year, experts projected oil prices would go to $200 a barrel. But then… they didn’t. In fact, while gasoline prices ros

Anthropic and the Future of the Buzzy Carbon Removal Buyer's Club

One of the most interesting projects in carbon removal is doubling down on the industry. Frontier — a coalition of tech, finance, and fashion firms that buy carbon remova

The Other, Other Big Race in Georgia This Year

Last year, progressives pulled off their biggest state-level win in Georgia in 20 years when voters elected two Democrats to the state’s Public Service Commission, which

Affordability Politics Took On New York’s Climate Law — and Won

When New York passed its first major climate law in 2019, climate advocates hailed the work as a milestone: The Empire State vowed to cut its carbon emissions by 40% by 2

Nvidia’s Case for Why AI Will Cut Emissions

From Heatmap: Exclusive: Local Opposition to Data Centers Explodes in 2026America’s tech companies are transforming the electricity system — building entirely new fleets

How Los Angeles Cleaned Up the World’s Air Pollution

We live in a time of unheralded environmental victories. Dolphins and whales swim in New York and San Francisco harbors. Lead has been eliminated globally in gasoline for

This Year’s Beijing Auto Show Has a Lesson for Trump

The Beijing Auto Show is now the world’s largest auto show — and its most important. It’s where China’s automakers show off their new innovations and newest models to a h

What’s Truly Baffling About the Strait of Hormuz Energy Crisis

he Strait of Hormuz has been closed for months. Yet oil is trading — at least as of late Tuesday — at under $110 a barrel. Why haven’t the markets responded more to the b