2025 has been incredibly eventful for decarbonization — and not necessarily in a good way. The return of Donald Trump, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the rise of data centers and artificial intelligence led to more changes for climate policy and the clean energy sector than we’ve seen in years. Some of those we saw coming. Others we really did not.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse look back at the year’s biggest energy and decarbonization stories and examine what they got right — and what they got wrong. What’s been most surprising about the Trump administration? Why didn’t the Inflation Reduction Act’s policies help prevent the law’s partial repeal? And why have AI and the data center boom become a much bigger driver of power growth than we once thought?
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.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: I think what I’m saying on the organizing side is that all of the organizing and comms effort was going in, as you pointed out, to a base-building and turnout strategy, not a constituency-expanding, coalition-building strategy, right? The effort was to go deep, not wide.
I think that was the fundamental mistake because there wasn’t a lot of depth there. There wasn’t this big, untapped pool of youth voters waiting to be turned out. And it meant we put basically no effort into expanding the broad set of constituencies that, for various ideological backgrounds and various motivations, could have all agreed that hey, bringing manufacturing jobs back to America finally after 20 years of politicians talking about it is maybe a good thing we want to sustain. Hey, lowering energy prices by building new energy supplies at a time when demand is growing, that’s a good idea, maybe we should sustain that, right? Creating tax bases in rural areas through investment in solar farms and wind farms — maybe that’s a good thing we should sustain.
Politics isn’t about getting everybody to agree on motivation, right? It’s about getting people to agree on what we’re going to do as a body politic. And unfortunately, that’s what I guess I’m getting at by this hyperpartisan, ideologically-driven world is, now it is all about getting everybody to agree on motivations, and —
Robinson Meyer: That’s what I was going to say. I actually think it’s —
Jenkins: And that’s just a terrible way to make policy. And I guess it makes this all that much harder.
Meyer: I think for me, I fear we’ve run the climate base experiment so well now that people have gotten this message, and people are starting to understand these policies in terms of energy affordability or clean energy policy. And that means lots of good things for clean energy. I think people should keep making the argument because it seems to me to be true that, for instance, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s termination of the wind and solar tax credits is going to mean bad things for American electricity customers. It’s going to raise rates.
But I do think that we should take the full lesson of the IRA experience and say, look, if people care about affordability and you tell them you’re working for affordability, you actually do need to put affordability at the center of your policies. And you need to be willing to understand that there is a tradeoff between affordability and emissions, but unfortunately, the electorate might care about affordability.
Mentioned:
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Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s sorta upshift.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
