Robinson Meyer

It’s the age of electricity and America isn’t ready. Virtually every goal that Americans care about requires big changes to the power grid. I’m in @nytopinion today on why power bills are going up, whether AI is to blame, & what we need to do about it: nytimes.com/interactive/20…

At the absolute peak of the water crisis in Flint, the city’s kids had average blood lead levels of 1.3 micrograms per deciliter. That was, obviously, a crisis — it was roughly 2x the average American child’s blood levels that year. But from 1976 to 1980, the *average* kid in Los Angeles had average blood levels of 15 micrograms — and that was seen as normal. And little wonder: In the era of leaded gasoline, lead levels in LA’s ambient air were 50 times higher than they are today. That’s one of many staggering facts I learned from Ann Carlson’s new book, “Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air.” She tells the story of how LA cleaned up its air pollution problem — and helped solve the entire world’s air pollution problem in the process. For instance, the global end of leaded gasoline was in some ways a happy byproduct of the quest to eliminate LA’s smog. The successful cleaning up of LA’s air is one of many environmental victories that have become so normal that we hardly notice them — even though much of the real progress behind that win actually happened in my lifetime (and the lifetime of my fellow Millennials). Listen and get the whole story at @heatmap_news: heatmap.news/podcast/shift-… or wherever you get your podcasts: shows.acast.com/65bac3af03341c…

BYD is accelerating talks to enter Formula 1 after a meeting with former Red Bull Racing chief Christian Horner in Cannes. ft.trib.al/VeYFzBx

The scale of the reduction in Chinese oil imports is increasingly difficult to explain with available data. On paper, Beijing is currently running its economy with ~1/4 less oil than pre-war. But demand destruction (or shift in petchem feedstock) can hardly explain *all* of it. So is China drawing hard on difficult-to-track commercial stocks of refined products? Has it tapped underground SPR sites? All of the above?

A few months after rooftop solar giant Sunnova Energy collapsed into bankruptcy following the Trump administration's rescission of a $3 billion loan, CEO John Berger decided to pursue the kind of company he always imagined the panel leasing and installation would lead to: A long-term repair business. Less than a year later, this new startup, Otovo, has 30,000 customers for its "AAA for home energy equipment" service. And with all the geopolitical strife and whipsawing policies particularly in the U.S., Berger is bullish on the future. New exclusive in @heatmap_news:

Chinese EVs are flipping Australia’s auto market, long dominated by Japanese brands. Further accelerated by higher fuel prices from the Iran war.

Scoop now free to read @politico: Key senators meet over dinner to discuss permitting deal politico.com/live-updates/2…

China notched another seasonal all-time high for coal-fired generation in April, according to official data. China burned ~3.1% more coal for electricity last month than a year earlier, the 4th consecutive month of y-on-y increases as the US-Iran war disrupts LNG shipments.

@kyleichan @jerometenk Thanks for listening!

@robinsonmeyer @jerometenk Great episode!

The Beijing Auto Show is the world’s biggest auto show — and, in recent years, its most important. It’s where BYD, Xiaomi, and other Chinese automakers show off their new models and technologies to a huge audience of domestic car buyers and global influencers. On a new episode of Shift Key, I’m joined by @jerometenk and @Kate_K_Logan, who attended the show in person a few weeks ago, right before the Trump-Xi summit. We discuss what they saw: the explosion of the Chinese luxury SUV segment, the sheer number and diversity of domestic automakers, and whether BYD and CATL’s new innovations — including flash charging, sub-zero charging, and battery swapping — are close to solving the EV charging problem for good. We also chat about what they didn’t see (autonomous vehicles) and about how US policymakers should think about the Chinese EV industry. You can listen at @heatmap_news: heatmap.news/podcast/shift-… Or wherever you get your podcasts: shows.acast.com/65bac3af03341c…

An important reminder, lest anyone mistakenly assume that the carbon simply gets transformed: "with coal-based chemical production, much less than half of the carbon in the coal ends up in the products and the rest ends up as process emissions" - @laurimyllyvirta. This and other opaque carbon accounting questions are making it difficult for analysts to even reconstruct the methodological basis behind China's retroactive revision to its emissions intensity data for recent years, a change that conveniently narrows the margin by which China needs to strive to meet Paris Agreement goals it was on track to miss, among other implications. Great @heatmap_news Shift Key episode to catch up on over the weekend, certainly recommend.

@InBrokenCountry We make a full transcription of the podcast available. It’s linked in the article. But it might be behind the paywall depending on how many Heatmap articles you’ve read this month.

@robinsonmeyer @JasonBordoff @ColumbiaUEnergy if you requite folks to give you their email address to access this article, you should transcribe the entire interview. - many of us absorb info & ideas faster and more comprehensively by, ya' know, *reading* it vs having to dedicate our time to *listening* to a podcast.....

We’re supposed to be eight weeks into the worst oil supply crunch in history. So: Why aren’t prices higher? I had a fantastic time discussing this and many other topics with @JasonBordoff, the head of Columbia’s @ColumbiaUEnergy and a senior energy & climate advisor in the Obama admin. We spoke about the current oil supply shortage, why the UAE left OPEC, and what we learned from the Biden era. You can listen on @heatmap_news: heatmap.news/podcast/shift-… Or wherever you get your podcasts: shows.acast.com/65bac3af03341c…

To set the racial vanity aside: On the contrary, what happened was that elite liberals were only too happy to embrace climate politics when they thought it would bring splittist voices like McKay on sides. When it manifestly failed to do so, they reluctantly recalibrated.

This was so fun! And I enjoyed @bendreyfuss’s “Would the climate bill in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT (1995) have smothered fracking?” counterfactual. Thanks to @jbarro @asymmetricinfo et al for having me on.

This week on Central Air: @robinsonmeyer on data center panic, why oil isn’t even more expensive right now, windmills, permitting reform and more. Plus: the continued decay of the social contract! open.substack.com/pub/centralair…

Tech crowd keeps leaning into this off grid is the only way thesis and I disagree with this notion. The exhibit A example of xAI colossus even overstates what’s actually happening at Colossus. xAI did not build a permanently “off-grid” AI campus because the grid was unusable. Colossus already has 300 MW of TVA interconnect approved across two substations xAI funded, plus contractual obligations to curtail during periods of grid stress. That is a grid-tied architecture with supplemental on-site generation, not an islanded power system. The turbines solved a time-to-power problem. They accelerated deployment while substations and transmission infrastructure were being built. That’s very different from “do this all off grid.” And economically, most large-scale AI load will still want to be grid tied long term. I have made this point several times but running your own generation fleet at hyperscale is expensive and operationally complex: fuel logistics, maintenance, N+1 redundancy, permitting, emissions compliance, balancing load/supply continuously, multi-year equipment lead times, etc. You don’t just figure that out or want to do that overnight. Amin Vahdat, chief technologist of Google AI straight up confirmed this on a podcast and they literally bought a hybrid/island power developer. BTM generation absolutely matters. It’s becoming a critical bridge solution during a period where utility interconnect timelines are badly lagging demand growth. But I’d strongly push back on the idea that the steady-state future is fully off-grid hyperscale campuses. The industry is converging toward hybrid architectures: grid interconnect + captive generation + storage + demand response.

Oh, cool — good to know

1/ New report from Roosevelt pushing back on "manufacturing doomerism." The sector data is important and underappreciated. But I think it also inadvertently makes a case it doesn't intend to make. rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/a…

@MattZeitlin something beautiful and tragic about UK politics reformers succeeding in making their system more presidential (with these faux “primaries”) at the same time that US politics reformers yearn for nothing less than paraliamentarism

party members picking a leader is one thing...but picking a prime minister....what democratic legitimacy do these people have...

@GreenPlusAnE Thanks for flagging it!

@robinsonmeyer Hey, thank you!

The Inflation Reduction Act was supposed to cut US carbon emissions by more than 40% by the mid-2030s. Then the One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed its most aggressive solar/wind/EV tax credits, but left other clean energy subsidies intact. So where does that put the US emissions trajectory today? And will the data center boom — which really got going after the IRA was passed — change it? I spoke to @JEBistline and @RynaCui about their new paper looking at the combined estimated effects of the IRA *and* OBBBA. We talk about whether US emissions will still fall, what estimates got right and wrong about the IRA, and what it means for future energy policy: heatmap.news/podcast/shift-…