Shift Key with Robinson Meyer

In the past few years, something surprising has happened in American energy policy: States and utilities have started trying to build new nuclear plants. A new kind of company — the nuclear developer — is now trying to...

America has some of the world’s best data about its own internal energy, industrial economy, and carbon emissions. That’s thanks to a federal agency called the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which painstakingly...

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. What is the difference between energy and power? How...

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 run it entirely on natural gas. Not to be outdone...

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 affordability problem didn’t need to get this bad...

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 the three phenomena linked? They might be. Due to...

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 climate system, but even in a normal year, it can...

At this point, when you hear “venture capitalist,” you probably think of … software. Or artificial intelligence. Or cryptocurrency. The Engine Ventures , which spun out of MIT a few years ago, is different. It tries to...

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the past year and a half, the Trump administration has attacked solar and wind energy, started an inflationary war, and repealed key parts...

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 permitting system, they could make it easier to...

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 greenhouse gas far from the atmosphere. They’re...

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 cooling the atmosphere and reversing climate change...

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 the Biden administration’s most aggressive climate...

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 physical infrastructure driving decarbonization...

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 rose in the United States, and Europe and Asia...