← Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
Shift Key Live: The 2025 Elections, the Gates Memo, and More
00:50:46
Rob goes to Yale with Heatmap staff writers Emily Pontecorvo and Matthew Zeitlin.
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- [00:00]
Host/Producer
This is a special episode of Shift Key Heat Map's weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show, we go to Yale's annual Clean Energy Conference, where I was joined by heatmap staff writers Matthew Zeitlin and Emily Pontecorvo to discuss the Democratic Sweep in the 2025 elections. What do the Virginia and New Jersey governors races mean for climate policy? Why did Zoran Mamdani stop talking about climate change? And was the biggest climate election of.
- [00:28]
Robinson Meyer
The year actually in Georgia?
- [00:30]
Host/Producer
All that plus a discussion of Bill Gates controversial new climate memo. It's all coming up on this episode of Shift Key, recorded live in person in New Haven, Connecticut on November 7, 2025. America's future depends on reliable power provided where and when it's needed. It depends, in other words, on long duration energy storage. Hydrostor's advanced compressed air energy storage technology is helping build the grid of tomorrow. With secure, reliable power and thousands of American jobs with bipartisan support and a flexible supply chain, long duration energy storage is the missing puzzle piece to scale energy independence. Learn more about Hydrostor's Willow Rock Project and the future of energy storage at Hydrostore CA. Electricity demand is growing faster than ever, creating an unprecedented opportunity to meet load growth with customer owned distributed energy resources. Uplight is a clean energy technology company that unlocks grid capacity by activating energy customers and their devices to generate shift and save energy. The uplight demand stack integrates energy efficiency rates and virtual power plant programs into a cohesive portfolio to meet surging demand while improving grid resilience, accelerating decarbonization and reducing costs for energy providers and customers. Learn how uplight can help your utility harness existing customer assets to meet the moment. At uplight.com heatmap.
- [02:13]
Robinson Meyer
You are listening to a live recording of Shift Key heatmaps weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. I'm Robinson Meyer, the founding Executive editor at Heat Map News. I'm joined today by my colleagues Emily Pannikorvo and Matthew Zeitlin, both journalists here at heatmap, to discuss what has been, I think, a big month for climate and clean energy and energy politics generally. Both because we're going to talk about two big things today. The series of elections we've just seen along the east coast and across the country, and then also this quite controversial memo that Bill Gates, who I would say is the world's largest philanthropist in climate causes and biggest funder of climate companies, put out just last month calling For I think, as it's often been euphemized, a pragmatic turn in climate politics, climate philanthropy and climate advocacy. So we're excited to discuss all of that today. Emily and Matt, it's so good to have you here on stage, even though you already were.
- [03:17]
Emily Pontecorvo
Great to be here, Rob.
- [03:18]
Matthew Zeitlin
Yeah, thank you.
- [03:19]
Robinson Meyer
Matt, I want to start with you. So you've been tracking for Heat Map, you were tracking the New Jersey governor's race, a race that it's an interesting election. It's Democrats trying to win the governor's mansion in New Jersey for the third time in a row. And although it didn't start out as an energy race, it kind of became one over the course of the election. So you just describe what happened and how electricity politics and the politics of energy wound up becoming so important to it.
- [03:49]
Matthew Zeitlin
Yeah. So I think this story kind of starts earlier this year, this summer, when the effect of the capacity auction in pjm, the large electricity market that New Jersey is a part of, there, the J in PJM happened and there's this huge increase in the price that utilities had to pay to to these generators for them to stay on for reliability of over $12 billion, I think. And that translated in New Jersey especially, which is kind of an energy short, electron short state, into a 20% increase, up to 20% increase in utility bills in the state this past summer. And this, I think, very quickly became, you know, besides the national stuff with Trump, and then kind of perennial New Jersey issues like property taxes quickly became like the number one issue in the race. And I personally thought, Cheryl Mikey Sherrill, the New Jersey congressman from northern New Jersey who is the Democratic nominee, I thought she'd be vulnerable because New Jersey had the current governor Murphy is a Democrat, served for two terms. He had really made renewable and clean energy one of his big issues. And then you saw this electricity price spike under his leadership. And I thought she'd be vulnerable to that because obviously Biden had lost in large part because of cost of living concerns. But what she did is she kind of jujitsued this issue around and she adopted this very bold and clear and simple sounding policy of initiating declaring a state of emergency and initiating a freeze on utility rates. And this then became like the main thing she was talking about on the trail when people started asking questions about electricity. It was a way to kind of bat away questions about New Jersey's kind of offshore wind debacle that's resulted in zero offshore wind. And offshore wind is quite expensive in New York as well. And it was kind of a way to get back on the Republican opponent who was running a very traditional, anti offshore wind, anti renewable, pro natural gas kind of just Republican standard campaign on electricity prices. And she was like, no, I'm going to do this specific thing.
- [05:54]
Robinson Meyer
So New Jersey is interesting because heat map we've written about why electricity prices are going up. I think at this point, almost since July, it's become this meme and a real story that electricity has become quite expensive, that it's growing over the past year twice as fast as inflation overall. And in most of the country, electricity is not getting more expensive because of data centers. Even though data centers and the rise in demand for electricity is, I think in the public's mind, like fully associated with the increase in electricity prices in most of the country. They have nothing to do with each other. Electricity so far has gotten expensive because basically transformers, poles and wires, the distribution grid, the local distribution grid, the last mile of electricity. Transportation has like gotten really expensive, both the raw equipment and the labor input. And then in addition to that, large swaths of the transmission grid in the Appalachian Southeast and also in California either burned down or were destroyed by a storm, causing then the utilities to have to go in and fully rebuild the grid with now much more expensive equipment, driving up rates on average, kind of across the country. In most of the country, electricity prices have been a distribution story. But in New Jersey, like it is actually a data center story, or at least it's a load growth story entirely through this like capacity auction channel where one of the ancillary markets in the PJM electricity grid is the capacity market and like trying to anticipate future load growth and that's begun to feed into rates. Did you see in New Jersey like a populism around data centers and load growth that you might have anticipated or were people more focused on, let's say please just stop electricity rates from going up. And we don't care why they're going up, but just stop it.
- [07:41]
Matthew Zeitlin
Yeah, I mean, New Jersey is not the PJM state that has seen the largest amount of data center actual construction. That's Virginia, that's Ohio, that's Indiana, parts of Pennsylvania. No, I mean in New Jersey it was kind of anger at the utility was the really big thing that people, you know, faith in public and quasi public institutions in New Jersey is not the highest. So people are willing to accept the idea that an institution is kind of screwing them over. And Cheryl, I think really smartly played into that. And as our own heat map pro polling has Shown nationally, people attribute high electricity prices to their utility, which makes a lot of sense. That's literally who's charging the prices. And then to the state government, which also makes a lot of sense because they're regulating the utility. So I think the voters are actually quite sensible on this question in that.
- [08:33]
Robinson Meyer
They, like, understand what, like, the two big things that drive electricity. I was surprised by that polling, too, because it's like they seem to actually understand, like, what policies, or at least like the entities generating the policies that feed into their prices.
- [08:46]
Matthew Zeitlin
Another thing Sheryl tried to do was associate her Republican opponent, Citarelli, with the Trump administration and kind of being like, oh, the Trump administration is trying to make it harder to build cheaper generation wind and solar, solar especially. And New Jersey has made big efforts in deployments of solar and storage is a big thing. And like, when I was talking to, say, environmental groups after the election, they were like, look, this is great. We won. This shows that clean is cheap, cheap is clean. Messaging really, really works. I understand why they can say that. And when you can win, you want to take credit for it. But I really do think this utility story is really more key to what happened. I mean, by the end of the race, there was Fox News polling showing that Sheryl was more trusted by 10 points on energy prices, which I found quite surprising, but I think speaks to the strength of the strategy.
- [09:40]
Robinson Meyer
I think New Jersey's also interesting. Then we're going to bring in Emily. But I think there's another interesting story in New Jersey that I was picking up, which is that often we talk about the kind of fractious politics of climate change and climate activism around the Democratic Party. Dave Roberts, the climate journalist, has observed, and I'm simply going to quote his observation, that basically, if you care about climate change, often the rule is just vote for Democrats. Because the more Democrats you have in a state government or the federal government, just generally that means more things are going to happen on climate change. And his rule is like, just vote for Democrats. But often climate groups are also in a position of antagonizing Democrats. Like the sunrise movement, we see do this aspects of the Sierra Club. We also see local environmental groups sometimes resisting energy development that Democrats, at least state or national level, want to see. Like specifically clean energy development. You'll. You'll see a local Sierra Club chapter resist, say, a transmission line or a solar project that like state or, or federal level Democratic policy would like, otherwise really like to see in a rural area. What was interesting about the New Jersey race is that the League of Conservation Voters ran like a huge number of the kind of Cheryl adjacent TV ads that for all the gruff that I think we give some parts of the climate movement about, like look, Democrats are doing all these things for you. Do you want to say thanks to them or not? LCV was actually a major component of the Sherrill ad strategy and like Sheryl campaign.
- [11:14]
Matthew Zeitlin
Yeah. And I think that's because Republicans thought they were going to be able to polarize this race around offshore wind and around renewables. I think Ocean county, you know, it's a coastal county in New Jersey, is the most Republican county in New Jersey in terms of vote margin and intense, intense local opposition to offshore wind there. But in New Jersey, this has become like a fully partisan issue how you relate to renewables, offshore wind specifically. And so I think that has made it so that everyone kind of the broad left of center, broad environmental community understands that this opposition to offshore wind is like a thing Republicans do. As Democrats, they should be on the team.
- [11:57]
Robinson Meyer
There's also something funny about New Jersey and you're going to have to forgive me here.
- [12:00]
Matthew Zeitlin
Yes, yes, there's, there is something funny about New Jersey.
- [12:02]
Robinson Meyer
I know there's something. This is the only moment in the four year cycle where as a New Jersey native I get to express like any indigenous knowledge, get to like pull a card that's I actually know something about this state. There is like a rural urban divide in the energy politics of New Jersey in that if you look at the map of blue versus red New Jersey, who voted for Mikey and who voted for Jack Ciatarelli, the people who live in the blue parts. There are people who live in the blue parts of the state who then go vacation in the red parts of the state. And it's the red parts of the state that resist the offshore wind, who live where the offshore wind would be built anyway. There's just like an interesting urban world right there.
- [12:43]
Host/Producer
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- [13:25]
Robinson Meyer
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- [13:27]
Host/Producer
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- [13:30]
Robinson Meyer
In utility scale storage.
- [13:32]
Host/Producer
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- [13:49]
Robinson Meyer
Let's talk about Georgia. So tell us what the story was in Georgia, because I think of all the races, this is maybe the most important for clean energy policy and climate policy, but also maybe the least it got the least national attention.
- [14:02]
Emily Pontecorvo
It's actually pretty amazing how much national attention it got considering this was a race for the Public Service Commission of Georgia. If you don't know what a public service commission is, it is the body of regulators who oversee utilities. So gas, electric, water, often telecommunications, there's one in every state. And in most states, the governor appoints these commissioners. But in just 10 states in the country, and Georgia is one of them, the commissioners are elected. And so this was a huge election year for the Georgia Commission because the election had actually been delayed by several years. There hadn't been one since 2020 because of a lawsuit that basically just pushed it off. And so the current commissioners hadn't been put to a vote in that many years. And during that time, during that kind of extended period of time of them staying on the Commission, they oversaw six rate increases. Rates went up by like 30%. There was an average of like 500 increases on people's bills annually. Georgia became, it had like kind of the fastest growing rates in the country for electricity. And that was partly because of the nuclear power plant that was under construction there, Plant Vogel, which went billions and billions of dollars over budget. But the commission, ultimately, they're the ones when the utilities come to them and with these cost overruns and the commission gives them permission to put those costs on ratepayers. And so I think what happened in Georgia is that a few Democrats challenged two of the Republican commissioners that were up for election. And it was sort of like, what's going to happen? Because like most people don't know what the Public Service Commission is. They don't know what it does. You know, it's like this.
- [15:57]
Robinson Meyer
It's often, first of all, there are very few states, there's only 10 states where voters elect the Public Service Commission directly. And number two, even if you're like, aware of the Public Service Commission as an institution, which we're talking about whole single digit percentages of voters who are probably Aware of it as an institution. Like, you then have to remember to go out for it during what was otherwise like a mega off cycle year in Georgia. But in most states even, it's even kind of more invisible because it operates as this like quasi legislative body appointed by the governor and confirmed by the legislature.
- [16:32]
Emily Pontecorvo
Yeah, exactly. And so what happened in Georgia, there was a huge on the ground campaign. The Georgia conservation voters spent like 2 million trying to bring awareness to this race, trying to elect those Democrats Georgia Power. And like Southern Company, which is their parent company, they also spent millions of dollars trying to keep the Republicans on the commission. I think another kind of background piece to this is that I think a lot of the criticism of the current commissioners is that they basically give Georgia power anything it wants. Anytime it comes asking for a rate increase for new natural gas plants to put the costs on ratepayers, that they're saying yes. And so ultimately what happened, ultimately the Democrats won by a landslide. It was like 60, 40. And this race, like New Jersey and also sort of Virginia, was totally about electricity prices. People were really mad about their bills going up. And like New Jersey, I think there's been kind of a post election narrative about the kind of turnout shows that that Democrats can win on affordability. The Democrats campaigned on clean energy and affordability. There's another factor here in this race, which is that this was the only statewide race on the ballot and the other kind of major races were all in blue cities. And so it's somewhat predictable that a lot of the turnout would be in blue cities and those people would vote for Democrats. So, you know, figuring out what played the bigger role is a little hard.
- [18:11]
Robinson Meyer
So I have two questions here. The first is part of the story here that not only were there already elections, other elections in blue cities, and so Atlanta and the kind of blue parts around Atlanta turned out is also the story here that, like, look, this is a mega off cycle year election. It's a highly technocratic election. You have to really be a government nerd to even understand what's happening in this election. It's not like governor or president, where you know what those people do if you're a fairly tuned out voter. And then also we know the other big fact we know, and that's been the case increasingly since like 2017 or 2018, is Democrats love to vote. Like, they love to vote. They will turn out for anything, especially if that thing has been aligned in their head as a way to stick it to Donald Trump or anyone who had a conversation with Donald Trump at any point in the past nine years and this race became a partisan election. That was kind of the closest thing a set of very tuned in Democratic voters in Georgia had as their chance to like really stick it to Donald Trump and preview the senate elections that are coming up. How much of this is like clean energy and affordability1 and how much of this is like, listen, you like let Democrats elect, I don't know, you put a dog catcher and like middle aged, college educated Democratic voters living in the first ring suburbs around Atlanta are going to be like, hell yeah, we gotta like go out there and like vote blue no matter who. Like how much of that is the story here?
- [19:42]
Emily Pontecorvo
I don't think we know. I, I don't know that anyone's really done the exit poll analysis to get that. I mean the numbers I think are impressive. That it was 60, 40, like I.
- [19:55]
Robinson Meyer
In Georgia.
- [19:56]
Emily Pontecorvo
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [19:57]
Robinson Meyer
Can I ask one more question, which is when you talk to clean energy people about this race, how did they explain the stakes? Because one thing I've wondered is that back during the Biden administration when you talked to Biden energy officials about nuclear and about why nuclear was often unsuccessful, those officials who are Democrats would say, oh, you got to do what they did in Georgia. Like look what they did in Georgia. That plant ran mega over budget and, and they just kept rate basing it and those ratepayers could absorb it. And that's how you should do nuclear is find a sufficiently big electricity market where you can just begin pushing costs into the electricity market. I'd also hear, to be fair, Biden energy officials basically saying, like, we have to Authorize as many AP1000 as we can, which is a nuclear reactor that was built around Vogel, that was built in Georgia. We have to authorize and like get as many of these started as we can before the rate increases start hitting Georgia ratepayers. Because once they do, people are going to turn on the politics of nuclear in a way that like maybe we're not anticipating anyway. How did clean energy people think about this? Because the reason one of the biggest drivers of rate increases in Georgia is the Georgia PUC's total willingness to just keep taking costs from the 247 clean electricity giants that are nuclear plants and like shoving them on ratepayers.
- [21:27]
Emily Pontecorvo
I actually think that the clean energy folks were thinking about this more in terms of the risks around the natural gas build out in Georgia because Georgia Power, the biggest electricity utility in the state, has recently, in their most recent resource plan, proposed building five nuclear power plants worth of new natural gas in the state to essentially power data centers, the data center build out that they're anticipating. And like I said before, like the commission has been known to basically just give them what they ask for and say yes and not ask questions and not ask for alternatives. And also I think the commission has been accused of really stunting the growth of like rooftop solar, facilitating more utility scale solar, but kind of stunting rooftop solar. And so the Democrats really campaigned on saying, we're going to look at that resource plan and we're going to ask questions and we're going to ask to see what an alternative scenario with more renewable energy would look like. So I think those were the stakes. Now, whether they're going to get anywhere is another question because because of the lawsuits and the strange timeline for this election, one of the candidates will only serve for one year before having to be reelected. They also are only two out of five seats on the commission. The other three are Republicans. And so it's a little bit unclear where they're going to find points of agreement with the other folks on the commission.
- [22:53]
Robinson Meyer
So looking at both of these elections, do you think. And we can talk about the elephant in the room for this word that I'm about to say in a second, but one of the themes that has emerged from the aftermath of these sets of elections is that Democrats have solved their political problems around the entire Trump second era. All they need to do is run on affordability. And affordability, cost of living is going to solve all their political problems and allows the party's various factions and coalitions to kind of come together, coalesce around this one word. And it allows, you know, Democratic politicians to promise voters this one thing. Were these elections about affordability in your mind, or were they about other dynamics that are much larger and more structural than this one word that has emerged as the lesson from these races?
- [23:47]
Matthew Zeitlin
I mean, I think most elections now are about Donald Trump. And so that's what this one was about. And then because of the dynamic you were speaking to earlier, you know, Donald Trump was not on the ballot, so it changed the composition of who turned out. But about this kind of affordability question, I do think Democrats not being in power benefits them because they can just attack, you know, you can just say, like, prices are too high. Yeah, it's your responsibility to do something about. I mean, so Trump did so effectively in 2024. But I do think there's definitely landmines here. So Lawrence Livermore released this report looking at electricity prices from 2019 to 2024 and how they changed and what factors and what states were associated with the change. They found that load growth was not associated with higher prices, which you mentioned earlier, robust. One thing they did find that was associated with higher prices was these kind of public benefit charges and renewable portfolio standards that you see largely in blue states. I think precisely because the renewable penetration has gone up, meeting the kind of marginal percentage point of a renewable portfolio standard actually gets more and more expensive over time and requires more grid and network costs. Also, rooftop solar is another thing that almost mechanically dries up electricity bills for the people who don't have it. And so I think a world say in 2028 where Gavin Newsom is a Democratic presidential nominee and he has to defend the highest electricity price increases in the country, the richest Rostov solar program, the strictest rules around electric vehicles, which are more expensive than gas vehicles, California's attempt to ban gas powered cars, ban sales of new gas powered cars, which this Congress has overturned. That debate I think would be much more difficult for Democrats. And right now they can say like you are obstructing the cheapest marginal form of energy because you hate the offshore wind turbines in your golf course in Scotland. That's an easy debate to win. Defending the whole laundry list of environmentally inflected electricity policy is much harder.
- [25:57]
Robinson Meyer
In fact, in that Lawrence Livermore National Lab study, the number one variable for are your electricity prices high? They roll it out, right? And variable is like locally higher gas prices or something or more public benefit charges. The number one variable for are your electricity prices high in that study was do you live in California? They just break it out and they call the variable California. And that's partially because California suffered like terrible grid and disasters and natural disasters in that a huge swath of its rural grid network has burned down. But like, that is a driver too. Emily, what was your.
- [26:33]
Emily Pontecorvo
Yeah, I was just going to say, I think, you know, whether or not what brought people to the polls and what caused people to vote for Democrats was the backlash to Donald Trump or was responding to this message of affordability. I think that now that on the other side of it, what people will remember is the message of affordability and the promise of it. And I think that is going to be really hard, if not impossible to deliver on. And I think that if anything, a lesson from this election should be that is there a more nuanced message that candidates could give on affordability that doesn't promise the moon?
- [27:13]
Robinson Meyer
Well, can I ask, do we think affordability politics is Bad for climate change and bad for decarbonization. Because story I've come to share with the class about this election is about the New York City election where Zora Mambani won just barely a majority of in the general. He like blew out the primary back earlier this year that most people will have heard of by now. What's interesting is that unlike elections in the rest of the country, the New York election was a very high turnout election. This was not a story of Democrats voting just because they could vote and it was a way to stick it to Trump. This is a story about like massive turnout across axes and demographics and party outside of Staten island in New Jersey where Mamdani won more votes winning 51%. Think about this. So Mamdani won a bear majority, just over 51% of the votes in the New York election, but he won more votes in a gross way than any candidate had in New York since the 1960s. And that's because he seems to have a like in the New York electorate, what I would describe as a Trump or Obama like power to get people to come out and vote for him and also get his opponents to come out and vote against him while still getting more people to vote for him. And the way that the actual electorate in both the general election and the primary election did not resemble how the electorate was modeled to look, how like pollster studying the electorate thought it would look. It was a very big difference. Anyway, what was so striking about this is that Mamdani, so he was elected to the New York state legislature in 2020, the early half of his career was like all about climate change. It was, I would say, one of the two defining issues of his time in the New York State Legislature. He called himself a proud ecosocialist. He like called for there to be special sessions of the New York State assembly during heat waves so that the state legislature would like pass the various climate legislation he wanted to see passed. He was all about climate change. And then he started campaign, he started his campaign for mayor. And at the beginning of his campaign for mayor like in November of last year, he's still talking in this term, which is like the way we can stick it to Donald Trump as people who want to see the government do things that Trump doesn't want to see it do is by building renewable infrastructure like he gives. He is at a rally at the New York State Power Authority in late November of last year being like, the working class doesn't trust us because we don't do any of the things that we say because the air is polluted. And the way we can stick it to Trump and make the working class trust us again is by building a lot of renewable infrastructure as like, by building renewable energy, basically. But as his star begins to rise, and I think as it begins to occur to him that he might actually win this thing, he stops talking about climate policy to the degree that he has not given a long form interview about climate policy since Earth Day, since April of this year. He did not roll out a climate policy other than his green schools proposal, which is frankly a very, very moderate proposal. That's like, we're going to turn 500 schoolyards into like green spaces, which is going to be really cool. And like, sure, but this is a candidate who used to say the reason New York doesn't build enough wind and solar infrastructure is because of capitalism. And we have to take on capitalism and we have to take on monopoly utilities in order to like, actually decarbonize. And New York should be leading the way on decarbonization. And now as mayor, he's like, let's start with the schools and like putting trees in the back of the schools. As he started to, like, get serious about winning the election, he stopped talking about climate change and he started talking about the cost of living and affordability. And in polling that I should say a somewhat climate policy skeptical think tank called the Searchlight Institute, that's still Democrat aligned, did of New York voters after the election, they like asked New York voters, what issues do you care about and what issues do you think Mamdani cares about? And like, cost of living voters cared about it. They, like, thought Mamdani cared about it a lot. And like climate change, they didn't really care about it and they didn't think Mamdani really cared about it at all. Even though Mamdani used to, like, put climate change so much at the center of his politics that he described himself not just as a socialist, but as a proud ecosocialist. My question is like, is there a bit of a trap here for like, listen, Democrats want to see the Trump administration's hanky panky around offshore wind and all this renewable stuff stop. But is there a trap here where, like, leaning into the politics of affordability is going to instantly hurt climate policies when Democrats oversee them? Because the way you do affordability politics is you, like in New Jersey, for instance, take all those public benefit charges off the bill. Maybe you say New Jersey's not going to adhere to the electricity only carbon exchange that it's been in for a decade at this point or half a decade, in order to keep costs down for utilities.
- [32:22]
Matthew Zeitlin
I guess what I would say is that precisely because American, maybe outside of California, climate policy has been so modest. It's like kind of how they do things anyway. So like in Canada when there was this general election and they switch, the Liberal Party switches in a new candidate. And the person they pick is also someone that Mark Carney, whose career had been devoted to climate change, he had been in charge of all these initiatives about net zero investing. And he's working at Brookfield, big renewable developer. And he'd never been elected politics before. Like the second he becomes the leader of the Liberal Party.
- [32:56]
Robinson Meyer
And not only that, he is in 2021 when we're covering like finance and its big pro climate turn. Mark Carney is the guy. He is like the international face of climate finance. Climate finance, yeah.
- [33:08]
Matthew Zeitlin
And he's working with Bloomberg and he is very much associated, as I'd say, very European approach to climate policy, where you kind of choke off investment into fossil fuels and really promote investment into renewables. There's carbon taxes in Europe as well. He gets into elected politics and he's like, crap, I have to win an election and we're behind. And he's like, we have this carbon tax. We're ditching half of it. We're not doing it. It's one of the first things he does. He wins pretty easily. There doesn't really seem to be any backsliding. They're not going back to this carbon taxation approach. But with Democrats in America, we don't have a carbon tax. We tried and failed to do that. So I do think this kind of clean is cheap, cheap is clean mantra is kind of the comfort zone for elected officials. What I think is more noteworthy is that the kind of researchers, the groups, the advocates, have kind of also gotten the message now. Have they changed their mind about anything? I don't think so. But like, if you talk to them, they're like, we support cheap energy.
- [34:10]
Robinson Meyer
And it's been the biggest gift, I think the clean energy advocates that the Trump administration is shutting down all this energy generation, obviously it's been terrible for clean energy companies and anyone working in the clean energy industry, like many people in this room. But it's been a big political gift because it has allowed Democrats to kind of retake the mantle of we just want more energy. Donald Trump is not building all this stuff and we are.
- [34:36]
Matthew Zeitlin
Yeah. I mean, if the president right now were like a Spencer Cox or a Brian Kemp or a Trump one where when they did lease sales for offshore wind during the first Trump administration, the Secretary of the Interior would be like this is part of our energy dominance strategy. They didn't build any offshore wind, but they were like oh energy is good. I think Democrats be in a much tougher position but that entire space and national politics has been ceded to them and they're actually, I think have gotten quite lucky.
- [35:07]
Host/Producer
This episode of Shift Key is brought to you by Uplight Power demand is growing at unprecedented rates, creating a critical moment to meet load growth with customer owned distributed energy resources to ensure a reliable, affordable and sustainable energy future. Uplight is a clean energy technology company that unlocks grid capacity by activating customers and their connected devices to generate SHIFT and save energy. Uplight combines personalized customer experiences with an AI driven flexible load management platform that harnesses customer ders at scale to maximize program value. Uplight integrates energy efficiency, time varying rates and virtual power plant programs into a single cohesive portfolio. These solutions help meet surging demand while improving grid resilience, accelerating decarbonization and reducing costs for energy providers and their customers. Uplight serves over 80 energy providers, including eight of the 10 largest North American utilities. Learn how Uplight solutions can help your utility meet the moment with existing customer assets@uplight.com heatmap that's uplight.com heatmap or look in the show notes.
- [36:20]
Robinson Meyer
Let'S talk about a related topic, which is last month before the election, Bill Gates, biggest climate donor in the world, I would say, and biggest funder of climate companies in the world, puts out this memo calling for a pragmatic turn in climate politics. He basically says, I'm not going to read from the memo up here because I think it's annoying when people read from but you know what it says. You've read some of the coverage. Surely it is interpreted in kind of two ways by climate people. It is interpreted as a giant betrayal and a message that Gates is basically saying climate change is not as important and is not going to be the end of the world. It's not an existential moment and there's some backlash to that among the right and among the Republican Party and among the Trump administration. It's interpreted as like, look, Bill Gates has come around to our position. He himself says that climate change according to Trump isn't real. Or something like Bill Gates has backed off of this. We've won. What was like what most surprised you about this memo? I would say let's not talk about the response to it yet. But let's talk about the what surprised you or stuck out to you about this memo? Because I think it is an important document in its own right simply because nobody funds this stuff more than Bill Gates. And if Bill Gates is trying to signal a change in his thinking, then soon enough there will be organizations that will be dancing to the music he set. And so what, what stuck out to you about it?
- [37:50]
Matthew Zeitlin
I would say what stuck out to me wasn't so much any of the specific things he said about climate change. He's always had this very technology first approach, very friendly to economic growth, very interested in reducing the green premium, especially in these kind of hard to abate areas. That's been consistent the entire time. What I thought was most surprising was that he was really, really stark that he views it. I think personally that there's a trade off between spending time, money, influence, energy on climate change versus global public health. Which is the issue he is most personally devoted to is health, especially in poor parts of the world like sub Saharan Africa. And I think since those areas for government funding have been so hammered and international donations, things like vaccines have been fallen so short, he like personally really, I think, feels a really big personal responsibility to fund those areas. And it's interesting because if you were to ask, I'm sure anyone in this room, anyone who spends time on climate change, if you ask them, should we spend more time and money than we do right now in global public health? Every single person I think in this room would say yes. And they would very much object to the idea that there's a trade off. Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, he literally thinks there is. And he's been super, super clear that to the extent there's any dollars, you're trading off dollars and cents, he will pick global public health over climate change. And I think it was also noteworthy that he really explained his thinking on this because you ask a lot of.
- [39:18]
Robinson Meyer
People in climate change to be like.
- [39:19]
Matthew Zeitlin
Look, how are you going to work on global public health if you have these areas where there's terrible weather and it's getting really, really hot and that affects public health. So you have to address climate change to address public health. Bill Gates is like, when it comes down to it, you really should just focus on public health. And also economic growth makes it easier to deal with the effects of climate change. And that's a discussion I think a lot of climate change people don't like having.
- [39:46]
Robinson Meyer
Emily, what surprised you?
- [39:48]
Emily Pontecorvo
Okay, I can't separate, like my reading of the memo from the general discussion about the memo, because I read the memo after all of the blowback and everything. But so I think in that context, what surprised me was I didn't really take away what most people seem to take away. Like, to me, it didn't really seem like he was saying we should be spending less on emissions and more on addressing poverty and health. It seemed like he was saying those were the three pillars and that addressing poverty and health were just as important, if not more than trying to lower emissions. And I think my kind of, like, big takeaway from the piece is he frames it in the context of we're going into COP30 in Brazil and. And for the past decade, we've been talking about climate change in terms of setting a temperature goal and trying to hit that goal. And he was really advocating for shifting away from that, from framing climate change as let's limit temperature rise to X degrees, and trying to advocate for some kind of new framework where we are moving towards goals around safety and adaptation and human prosperity and not around some specific degree of climate change.
- [41:10]
Robinson Meyer
It was interesting hearing him. I was part of a small group of reporters invited to have a roundtable with him before this memo came out that was on the record. And about the memo and one of the things, it's always funny at these things because Bill Gates, if you read our coverage of him, or if you read a read coverage of Bill Gates going back to, I would say, 10 years ago when he started climate stuff, he has to be quoted in like, two paragraph chunks because the way these things work, and I mean this, if you're listening and you work at Breakthrough, we love you and we thank you for inviting heatmap to this. But I will just tell you, the way these things work is like, you sit down and Bill Gates just like, starts talking about what's on his mind, and then you get a chance to, like, throw questions into the pot 30 minutes in, and then he kind of responds to your questions, but then he like, just points his monologue more in the direction of what you were saying. Anyway, one thing he was talking about was that he's like, we always do this thing in the run up to COP and in the run up to countries putting together national commitments where we're like, how ambitious will the countries be? He's like, because we have these temperature targets and because of the structure of Paris, we, like, backtrack to these national commitments being really important. And he's like. And so there's all this kind of drama about how surprising, how ambitious these country Commitments will be. And he's like, you would never actually want to be surprised by a country commitment. Like, you would never like, we should never ever be surprised by these things. Because every country like has a demographic forecast and then every country. There's not different ways in the world to do the things we care about for climate change. There is. No country has a different way of making fertilizer. No country has a different way of making cement. No country has a different way at scale of making saf of sustainable aviation fuel. Like, all of these things are exactly the same in every country. And the only thing that countries really control is their power grid. And then it's a question of what is their local domestic policy mix. That's like pushing electrification forward in their and carbon out of their power grid. But there's no surprise here about how ambitious can these countries be. Because it's not like, you know, Belgium has figured out a way to make green cement that Germany isn't aware of. Like, Germany knows all the things that are happening in Belgium. I think his more buried point was like, building up drama around these national pledges is a little silly. And because that means you're structurally going to be let down because we're already computing like, we're already assuming that countries are going to pursue the cheapest options available to them in our economic forecasts and countries just aren't going to deviate from that very spectacularly in a way where you'd find out about it in their Paris pledge.
- [44:03]
Matthew Zeitlin
I mean, yeah. I think it also explains why he spent so much of the memoir talking about these hard to abate sectors. Because I think the way he sees is that once we figure out a green cement or something like that, or low carbon emitting fertilizer production that's cheap, the entire world will essentially adopt it all at once. Or the rich world will adopt it all at once. Middle income countries will adopt it a little later. But no national pledge to deliver to COP is going to make green cement happen.
- [44:35]
Robinson Meyer
I haven't warned them. I'm asking this question, so we're going to see how they do. This memo was called Three Tough Truths on Climate or something. And I will say a little bit, it turned out to be the three tough truths that Bill Gates has been talking about since 2015. But if you had to write a memo that was called One Tough Truth on climate, what would you put in that memo?
- [44:54]
Emily Pontecorvo
Rob?
- [44:56]
Matthew Zeitlin
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I would put no one wants to pay anything to abate climate change. Your assumption should be when asking Dollars that a normal person wants to pay to make climate change not as bad as it will be. Your baseline should be zero. You can kind of work from there. That would be my tough truth, which.
- [45:15]
Robinson Meyer
Is actually one of the gates tough truths too, in that he's like, climate comes entirely down to middle income countries and they're too big to ever subsidize enough as you would need to get clean energy across. And so it's all going to be technology because they're not going to pay anything extra for their development.
- [45:32]
Matthew Zeitlin
In a way, middle income countries, like middle income countries. Kent County, Connecticut. I mean, come on, look around. I mean, I guess I'm biased. I'm from California, where we have a strange group of people that actively do want to pay more to make climate change. Not as bad. But one thing I've learned in my life not living in California is that not everyone is like that.
- [45:57]
Robinson Meyer
I put you totally on the spot.
- [45:58]
Emily Pontecorvo
I know. And, well, and before Matt started talking, I was like, oh, well, I think it's just the cost. I don't know, I think it's just the cost. I think that actually making progress on climate change is very expensive and we do not know how we're going to pay for, for it. Like, I just think that makes me think about, I've been reporting a lot on building electrification and how are we going to, especially in New England, transition off of these miles and miles of gas lines that run through our communities and electrify all these old, you know, 20th century buildings? 20th century or you know, I was.
- [46:42]
Matthew Zeitlin
Taking the train in here. Where are these 20th century buildings you speak of?
- [46:46]
Emily Pontecorvo
And when I talk to you about this, one of the things that's happening right now is people are looking at how do we, every time the gas company wants to replace one little bit of pipeline that's like leaky or old, like, instead of replacing it, let's just get rid of it and electrify those buildings. And that's like a great idea, but everyone's like, okay, but then how are we going to pay for it? Like, where does the money come from? And it can come from ratepayers. I mean, in some cases that project might be cheaper than the gas replacement. But yeah, I just think about like, then there's that problem multiplied by every single thing that we're doing.
- [47:25]
Matthew Zeitlin
Like, I live in a co op in New York City and I now think the entire world works this way. I use the co op governance model to understand everything.
- [47:33]
Robinson Meyer
And it's like, it probably does give you a decent sense of how things are going also.
- [47:37]
Matthew Zeitlin
So building electrification is a great example. If you want to electrify all buildings, what you're saying is you have to replace your boiler today and it works.
- [47:46]
Emily Pontecorvo
Fine, you don't have to do it today. But like I think that's a huge.
- [47:49]
Matthew Zeitlin
Replacing it conceptually before the end of its natural life.
- [47:53]
Emily Pontecorvo
Not necessarily, but then, then you're delaying.
- [47:56]
Matthew Zeitlin
The transition by like a really long time.
- [47:59]
Emily Pontecorvo
I think nobody is expecting you to replace your boiler before.
- [48:02]
Matthew Zeitlin
But like I'm talking like as a.
- [48:03]
Robinson Meyer
Global economy, this kind of thing is that then when your boiler does fail, you need to delay. Right. Because there's delaying the transition. But then it's when your boiler does fail, you need to delay replacing it by X number of days, however long it takes, however long it takes to get the electrified boiler in there or to get whatever you're going to use to replace your boiler in there. Because it's probably not going to be the, at least right now it's not the option off the shelf. And this is why people come back to like, you actually do have to pinch off investment in fossil fuels and in fossil fuel burning infrastructure because there's no other way to make sure it's the default option when you get there. Do you think this means. This might be my tough truth. Climate advocates often say this is an easy technical problem and a hard social problem. Do you think that's wrong and climate decarbonization is actually a very hard technical problem?
- [48:56]
Emily Pontecorvo
I think it's a hard technical problem, but I think it's a much harder social and political problem.
- [49:01]
Matthew Zeitlin
Well, also it's like that logic is so strange because like technical problems can be solved. Technical problems get solved all the time. Social problems never get solved. It's like, okay, really screw. I mean, yeah, if it's just inventing a new type of thing, that's kind of what Bill Gates thinks.
- [49:21]
Robinson Meyer
Yeah, I mean then you're back to the Gates world. But like that would be great.
- [49:23]
Matthew Zeitlin
If he's right about how this will all work, then the problem has been solved.
- [49:28]
Robinson Meyer
Yeah, I thought it was. We published the rebuttal from the climate scientist and climate researcher and thinker Zeke House father. And he made I think a very, very great point, one that's often overlooked, which is it's not only climate technology that is getting like more innovative and more effective and cheaper over time. We've gotten way, way, way, way, way, way better at extracting fossil fuels cheaply and, but with better technology too. And the entire story of American energy over the past 25 years has been a massive productivity leap and massive technological investments in our skill at extracting fossil fuels. And that has to go into the mix, too. You've been listening to a special episode of Shift Key, recorded live on the.
- [50:10]
Host/Producer
Yale campus at Yale's annual Clean Energy Conference.
- [50:14]
Robinson Meyer
Thanks so much to Yale and their Clean Energy program for hosting us this year.
- [50:17]
Host/Producer
They've been big supporters of Heat Map.
- [50:19]
Robinson Meyer
Adafshifke and we always love to appear there.
- [50:22]
Host/Producer
Shift Key is a production of heatmap News.
- [50:24]
Robinson Meyer
We'll be back next week at the usual time with a new episode recorded live in studio of Shift Key. Our editors are Gillian Goodman and Nico Lauricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by.
- [50:33]
Host/Producer
Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury.
- [50:35]
Robinson Meyer
Our music, as always, is by Adam Komalow. Thanks so much for listening and see you next.