2025 has been a rough year for climate and energy news. But enough about that. Let’s start looking at 2026!
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by some of Heatmap’s writers and editors to discuss our biggest stories and predictions for 2026 — what we’re tracking, what could surprise us, and what could happen next. We also discuss a recent op-ed in The New York Times arguing that Democrats should work more closely with the U.S. oil and gas industry. Today’s panel includes Heatmap’s founding staff writer Emily Pontecorvo, staff writer Matthew Zeitlin, and deputy editor Jillian Goodman.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I was thinking when Matt was talking about how different the current moment is from 2020 that back then, here was this idea that there was some risk, maybe, that some costs would go up a little. But inflation had been out of the picture for so long that we were in an environment where unemployment was the concern and not the price level, and so the idea that prices might go up a tiny bit in exchange for economic activity seemed like an okay trade.
And I would actually say, this is where I think there’s some potential for a comeback for more traditional types of environmental and climate activism in 2026, which is, the unemployment rate is currently 4.6%, as of a release last week, which historically, it hasn’t been above 4.6% very much in the past several decades. And when it is above 4.6% usually means unemployment’s about to spike.
And I think in a world where we switch from talking about affordability to talking about unemployment and a lack of general economic activity — especially in a world where AI is a big deal and people are very worried about job loss from AI, suddenly all the ideas about generating economic activity by doing kind of pro-social decarbonization activities are going to swing right back into the conversation.
And we know what a Donald Trump administration is like when prices are increasing by 3% a year, and that is, he’s not very popular. We don’t know what a Donald Trump administration is like when unemployment’s at 5%, or 5.5%. And if that were to happen, the floor could really drop out, and we could see a huge swing back to the type of policies that we were talking about not so long ago.
Mentioned:
Trump Uses ‘National Security’ to Freeze Offshore Wind Work
Matthew Yglesias’ op-ed: Obama Supported It. The Left in Canada and Norway Does. Why Don’t Democrats?
Emily on California cities’ new heat pump rules
The House Just Passed Permitting Reform. Now Comes the Hard Part.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
