Want to Decarbonize Your Life? Here’s How.

You are listening to ShiftKey, a climate podcast from Heatmap News. EV or e-bike, heat pump or rooftop solar. What are the biggest actions you can take to fight climate change in your daily life? And how do you even rank or prioritize?

This week we are talking about Heatmap's new effort to think through these questions and to do just that. It's called the Decarbonize Your Life Project. We rank them in an order you can follow. We talk with the authors and editors who wrote it. It's all coming up on ship. ShiftKey this week is brought to you by Watershed. Building a sustainable business starts with having the right data. Watershed helps companies like Airbnb and Yeti to measure and reduce their emissions.

Watershed's climate data engine turns the data you already have into an audit ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. It also helps you get ready for the growing number of financial reporting regulations around the globe. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months, with Watershed. You can learn more at watershed.com. That's watershed.com.

ShiftKey this week is also sponsored by Sun Grow. Did you know that inverters are an essential component of the clean energy transition, converting the electricity generated by every single solar photovoltaic system into a usable form? Well, Sun Grow As the world's leading supplier of inverters, has deployed over three hundred seventy five gigawatts of photovoltaic inverters to date, powering tens of thousands of renewable energy projects worldwide.

Discover why Sun Grow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting Sungrow Power.com. Hi, I'm Robinson Meyer, the executive editor of Heatmap D. And I'm Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. And you are listening to Shift Key, Heatmaps podcast about decarbonisation and the shift away from fossil fuels.

This week we are talking about a giant new project that Heatmap released just at the end of last month. It's called Decarbonize Your Life. It is a big special report. Aims to help you make decisions in your life that are better for the climate, better for you, and better for the world we all live in. And we also wanted to kind of use our expertise here as To help the about how they could do the most Exert leverage on the systems that they're in in order to push.

I think you've taken a different spin here than a lot of the previous, you know, guides around reducing your carbon footprint as You know, it's much more focused on how do you maximize your impact rather And that may be subtle, but I think it's an important distinction and it's a useful guide to you know think about, you know, here's a few big decisions that you should be thinking about that don't come up every day. So before we bring in our guests, I just want to

tell people first of all you can find Decarbonize Your Life on heatmap dot news. You can search Heatmap Decarbonize Your Life. It will of course be in the show notes. And then you'll see six big recommendations from And for each recommendation you'll see when you go to heatmap.news. Our explanation of why we chose this, why this decision matters so much, and then a guide to how to make this decision in your life.

Whether it's how to shop for an E V or how to put solar panels on your roof or which e bike

I think let's bring in the guests, right? Here here to talk about those recommendations. Joining us today are Heatmaps owned Gillian Goodman, our deputy editor of Heatmap News and in fact loyal producer of this show, and Emily Panakorvo, founding staff writer for Heatmap News. Gillian and Emily, welcome to the show. I'm excited to be back. The funny thing about having Jillian in particular on Shift Key is that Jillian, although invisible to listeners, is in fact present for most shift.

She's lurking in the background. I've always... And now on the Now on the other side of the digital recording booth we are joined by Gillian Goodwill. And I I think Emily I think Emily wins the distinction of being first repeat guest on shift key. Wow. I'm honored. We are here to talk about a big project that he In some ways like one of the projects that I think we've been building Mm-hmm.

We have always been talking about this project and now it's out in the world. It's one of those projects that I feel like we all I mean, first of all, it will of course be in the show notes, but second of all, Jillian, you edited the bulk of In fact, I think every piece in the project. Can you give us an introduction to what it is?

Yeah, so decarbonize your life. The idea is that And it also means that as a participant To make a defection. Utility? Do still maybe I won't even do anything. corporations problem or government's problem and I think it's, you know, we want to like right size the expectations. Mm. But also sort of say like there are And so the list of explanations. At the top of it was if you drive. To help the climate crisis after that. Giving your home an energy efficiency renovation, basically like preparing.

To you. Whatever. Then we have if you don't have to Not driving is better than driving even an E V. So we're talking about biking, we're talking about e biking, we're talking about scooters, like all And then finally there are a couple little things. Which was actually the kind of thing. Yeah. Sending c signals back to the right. I think you called it. Which I liked because it's very memorable. Which are eat eat less beef, waste less food. Yeah, exactly.

Which is nice'cause I think it's you can Thank you. Were we we recommended steps that would reduce the They were very discreet, but Driving less really mm. Largely is make high leverage change. What I wrote in the introduction was like your carbon footprint emerges from your If you leave the house

No, I think that that's a a a s maybe subtle but I think really important shift in the framing of how to think about the role of individual action because there's for a long time been this sort of framing that the goal is to sort of reduce your impact, right? Your negative impact. And you know, I think about the example of someone who just like goes and lives Right, just like unplug from the system, live fully off the grid. Right. Okay. So you have eliminated your

But you've also eliminated any ability to leverage change for the system as a whole. So, you know, good for you. You're you've you're off the grid, you're not contributing personally to the climate crisis. maybe you don't need to feel any guilt or whatever about that. But it's sort of like a guilt based mentality. It's like, let me, you know, minimize the harm that I'm causing. But I think that's a perfect example of where that strategy really has no impact because it's also not a scalable

hole. And so what you're looking at with this project is like, what are the things that you can envision everyone doing? right, that would actually leverage change of the system that we all engage with on a regular basis. And so then it's not about minimizing harm, it's about maximizing impact or leverage. And I think that aligns just personally with

how I've thought about my career as well. You know, it's like what is the biggest lever I can grab and, you know, and put my weight That's so much more important than that. With the consumer Like you don't have to be an energy systems professor to have an You don't have to change your own. Or a policy maker. reinvent yourself as a person, you can do some pretty discret

So c can I ask a little bit more about how you decided on these specific six steps? Mm-hmm. Well that's Emily's department. Emily did a lot of work. Okay, I'll jump in here. It started with me and Rob sitting down and having on this sort of quantitative and qualitative scale. high leverage act actions. And so I started by after these kind of initial brainstorming.

I and I feel like in those conversations we had a lot of like, how do we even go about thinking through this? Because we know as reporters, like we knew what a high leverage action was. We knew that for switching to an e bike or getting a heat pump. That's actually like by an eB you're getting a a heat pump are like And then like recycling. Then recycling, exactly. Yeah, so one of the first things I did after these kind of brainstorming

do try to do like a literature review, like just get into Google Scholar and see um, you know, how other people had approached this question. Also just looking at, you know, lots of other media And I think like the most complicated greatest question that I could find was this study from twenty twenty.

And the name of it is Quantifying the Potential for Climate Change Mitigation of Consumption Options. And it's like a huge effort. These authors pulled together research from 53 different studies. Many of those studies were also reviewed. And they use they kind of comb through all the findings of all these other studies and try to get all these different consumption options like taking less flights or eating a vegan diet or things like that.

Quantify. And then basically And funny enough, like their list we didn't end up using this study really, but there's Different from ours. It's like the number one action is live car free. And then the number two is get a nee. So it's interesting that I think you can approach this question from a level. But I'll say that like when I was looking at this study Does getting rooftop solar reduce emissions? And so one of the first things I did was I looked into all the citations.

in this big review paper for renewable energy to find out like, okay, how did they And it just really left me with more questions. Like some of the studies I couldn't find. There was one from like 2014. you know, solar panels have gotten a lot more efficient since then so that doesn't Should use those numbers. There was one that was like just looking at a single European country, and we were really focused on the US, so that also didn't seem

And then then also there was just like this all the studies that were in this big review paper just used like wildly different methods, different assumptions. And I think the authors had really Bring them all bring all these apples and oranges to become apples and make them comparable. But And so how did you do that? Yeah.

Because of that rooftop solar question, that this was also around the time I connected with Gavin McCormick who runs this organization called Watt Time. And when we got into talking This is what we founded, what time to do, like this is amazing, we'd love to help you guys. And so And what is Watt Time? It's like uh So Jillian, can you explain it? Yeah. I feel like we discovered this language.

Okay, great. Yeah. So Wattime is a nonprofit organization. I believe they're actually headquartered under RMI now, but they are collecting data from a variety of sources that allow you to track the short-term at the moment, short-run marginal emissions impact. different locations around the world and at different times. And so that allows you to quantify, you know, if I plug in my EV right now or I turn on the lights or turn off the lights, what is the impact on the operations?

So which power plants turn up, you know. And they're working on measures to think about how to measure that similar impact on emissions in the longer term, which is really important. And and you tried to tried to do a bit of that here, looking forward to potential future emissions. Which I thought was really.

But they um provide services for a variety of companies and and other I think we can even s give an example to listeners because Heatmap was the first to report this, you know, iPhones recently have this feature where they only charge or they charge more during period That feature is powered by WattTime. Yeah. And so the short-run marginal emissions are just that. They're measuring what changes in the operations of the grid right now for small marginal emissions.

Which is like me plugging in an EV, right? That's a few kilowatts of demand in a giant system. It's not gonna single handedly drive changes in people's investment behavior, the retirement or additions to the grid. It's just gonna drive small But if you think about it in aggregate, right, if what we're trying to do is leverage collective action, right, of everybody getting an EV or everybody adopting a solar panel or everybody And therefore investments in the grid at different times of the year.

is that that consequential impact of, you know, changes in investment decisions is very important and can change the sign, can change the math. So for example, we have a paper that we're trying to finalize now and submit from my group that was published initially as a senior thesis. Bondekar, who graduated a couple of years ago, looking at, you know, if you use short run marginal emissions measures of EV impact versus you use the long run.

We get a very different picture. Basically, the emissions impact of charging your EV, if you think about it in terms of its aggregate impact of everybody. near term, short term measure because most of the places around

That's the resource that has the highest fuel costs. So we dispatch it later and it can ramp its power up and down. And so it generally looks like, you know, if I'm charging most of the time, I'm charging on a natural But if I'm charging during the middle of the day in a place that hasn't reached huge solar saturation, I'm driving demand for power at exactly the time that is you know most competitive for solar panels to be

And so that incremental demand that, you know, we might add in aggregate because millions of people are would be basically emissions free, right? Because all of that demand And so you kind of split the difference on this, right? You looked at the near-term emissions impact and then also kind of look used some data from the National Renewable Energy Lab about how the grid might evolve over time to think through this and and try. Can you explain a little bit more about how you did that?

Yeah, that and that was sort of something that we decided to do towards the end of the the process when we were we had kind of gotten to the end of all the reporting. We had what time had kind of calculated. short run marginal emissions of a lot of the actions And try. And when you looked at just the short run emissions, getting rooftop solar was by far the most thing that you could do. And then I think But then when you switch the calculation and Long term.

That changed, I mean the whole list changed. And so that just really left us feeling a little bit or left me. Effective. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that left me feeling a little bit confused. How should we rank these? And then I think I mean Rob Riddle. Sorted it out for me at least.

Well I think this is to some degree what we're getting at. was why we did it, which is that there's like three different sources you have to consult, right? You have to consult short run emissions, you have to think about how individual actions Long run.

And then finally I think the third thing you have to bring in here is some degree of expert judgment. And I think that that is to some degree how we reconciled Is that as compared to say Or as compared to the electricity system, going zero power at home EVs as far as we can see. Will are always going to be. So like heat pumps obviously all these appliances do too, but there's different Based on the I mean there's just like a lot of built in Lock it.

That with E Vs is going to have to be driven entirely. EPA has placed. we know from how those rules have worked in the past that they are ultimately going to rest on What I wrote about Why we ultimately. Econometric understanding of the system that you can Any of those three things. You don't need to know how many tons because all three of them are important. Number one is when you buy an EV. are taking every marginal dollar, every dollar that you have spent And maintenance of the fossil fuels.

All those dollars. out of the gasoline ecosystem and you're using Number two, you're directing demand toward manufacturing of EVs, right? So instead of You are provided. And the third is of course the So it's more than just the carbon impact. beyond just, you know, reducing emissions, which is important, how is that actually having some The global capitalist system, right? Right. Anyway, Jillian. I was just gonna add you know and again.

raising you. It's every time you drive, you know, you Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's you know, it's it's a marginal impact like every single time you use the device. Like, not only are you emitting less in the short term, you're As the grid gets cleaner, like every time you drive your EV, your EV will get cleaner as Yeah, I think one other thing that we were thinking about a little bit

Thinking about these actions in terms of like which ones are you as an individual? You're literally the one who's burning the fossil fuels. Like when you drive your car, you are burning the gas. When you're lighting And not to put it all on the individual, but you're the one who has the power to say, okay, I'm not gonna burn.

And whereas with a few other actions like with rooftop solar, with efficiency improvements, like those are extremely important and those are very high on our list for other reasons, but like they're more indirect, right? When you make efficiency improvements. third order effects that you're initiating.

Can I ask about one thing that is not on your list that often is on Yeah. So if you're used to these sort of carbon footprint type framings and You know, unquestionably if you fly several times a year, it's a huge part of Contribution I have to the ton side of the equation. So it's not on your list, and I assume that's because you'd think it doesn't have an opportunity for leverage in the same. But I wanted to hear your logic there, because I think it's important. Yeah, so to some degree.

I think half of this is an ideological choice on our part and half of this is part of the framework. Yeah. part of the framing of Decarbonize Your Life was to say we want To help you live something like a normal life number one, a normal life. And number two, as an American. We really did write this guide for Americans and that matters a lot because the American Transportation Extremely dependent on driving and flying. And so and we I I say this in the introduction.

I think our instructions around flying. Someone who lived in the United Kingdom or Europe where rail networks So anyway, with all that, so we we wanted to focus on things that would let you live a normal life. Is that American number two? We wanted to focus on things where there was a reliable substance. And that really gets out of it. So flying makes up a relatively specific Both global and US emissions, it's Global emissions a two percent.

And it's gonna rise as a share of those emissions and of course it's gonna rise overall as well, but it's partially gonna rise as a share because other emissions It's also a activity where, as you said, there's not really a high leverage action you can do and a high leverage substitute. So if you're going

You're in New York, you're in DC, you want to go to Boston, yes, you should take the train. You want to go to Richmond, Virginia, yes, you should take the train. But as you start to get outside of the Northeast corridor, There just is not great substitutes for flying. And what there is no substitutes I I think the thing for me about flying is that it is the true fossil fueled miracle. Like it it does facilitate a level of global connectedness. international communication that earlier

I'm I think we shouldn't have eventually sustainably fueled aircraft or better international transit, you know, options. Maybe it's time to bring back Climate-friendly, fast ocean liner across the Atlantic Ocean or across the Pacific. I don't know. But right now, there's no substitute that exists. And so if you want to travel in

So I mean I think that gets back again to my sort of example of the like off-grid, you know, household person. Like what you're looking for in your list are areas where there is a viable substitute that is part of what a net zero emissions world. And you can take your dollars and you can take them away from the fossil.

And unfortunately today we don't have in Broadly scalable useful alternative, but because you know the broad focus of your list is like the high scalable solutions, it just doesn't it doesn't work for most Americans to do that.

You could have a whole nother list about ways in which you can use your political power to maybe change that solution set and make sure we do build out high speed rail and, you know, be a YMB for infrastructure improvements that allow for alternatives, things like that. But Yes, there you go. But it's not something that's sort of in your individual control right now. And while you could abstain from flying, or you could buy negative emissions certificates, maybe that would be

Or more commonly by carbon offsets of questionable quality to try to net out your impact. That's just not Carbon credit or net zero we don't have any kind of carbon credit or negative emission certificate on here, which is that we're looking for change. In fact, if there's any theme here it's not a good thing. And it's not a very productive feeling. The more direct. Avoid. Right, and that because a disproportionate Take up a take off an ascent. They have total larger total.

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Can we talk about e bikes? I I've been waiting, you know, this whole time or now we gotta talk about e-bikes. Um So Yeah, but you want to talk about e bike. No, so we recomm I mean I think well what I was gonna say is I think in these this vein You know, when you one thing I'm proud of We both our number one recommendation is if you f have to drive, if you need a car get an EV.

That's n our number one recommendation. But of course we say if you need a car and then our fifth recommendation is still drive less, bike or walk or scoot more, and then as part of that other social networks as the most helpful guide to e bikes Jesse, I understand. Shout out to Giva Lang again, truly. Staff writer Giva Lang. Jesse, I understand that you're quite knee-bike.

Yeah. Yeah, so about a year ago my family purchased a cargo e-bike after lots of research on similar guides, although I'm sure yours would have been quite handy to have. Yeah. That's exactly right. And the idea, you know, I have a my our family has a a three year old and a soon-to-be seven year old, and we spend a lot of time ferrying them around across Princeton to And drop-offs. And it's not a very large town. We, you know, it's like a three-mile journey from our house. Our son's preschool.

You know, but still that six miles round trip. There's only really one north south route through town and it's highly congested most of the time. rush hour periods. And so it's not a particularly pleasant part of our day, you're like driving the kid back and forth, even though it's in our EV. And so we had friends that started to, you know, purchase e-bikes, cargo e-bikes that can fit both children of that And we thought it'd be worth trying as an alternative.

And beautiful bike ride through Princeton's campus and cross some back roads to get there in back. The kids love it. I love it. I'm in a much better mood when I get to work in the morning after taking an e-bike commute rather than sitting in, you know, stop and go traffic. stop light and turn left downtown Princeton. And we put nearly a thousand miles And so about two weeks ago we just ordered an upgraded one. We had kind of come in with sort of an entry level.

And because it's become our default option for any travel around town, we've decided to put, you know, m a bigger investment in it and to buy a higher quality model, including one that has a basket in the front. sort of Dutch style or long john bikes with the basket in the front for the children and any goods you know you're traveling with groceries or whatever, you can just plop them in there. Probably because that is a lower center of gravity, which makes it a little bit easier

To keep upright. But I just it's a game changer. And I think I was talking uh on the commute to my friend, my son's elementary school with one of our neighbors who also writes. about what it is about the e bike that just changes everything. And what he he described, which I thought was really apt, is it it's just that much easier.

You know, just a little bit easier. Like we've we already had bikes, we had burly trailers, like we could have put the kids in the back and taken them around town, and sometimes we did. But it the e-bike makes it just that much easier, that much effortless, more effortless, that it becomes your default choice instead of the alternative.

And those default effects are really powerful in so many different, you know, fields. The kind of rough rule of thumb is like when it becomes the default, you do it 80% of the time. And maybe you think about the alternative and you do that alternative, you get the burly hitched up and you sweat it out and bike across town.

twenty percent of the time, you know, if you're really focused on that. But when the activity becomes the default because it's the easier, more pleasurable, better service, right, then you're doing that eighty percent of the time. And I really have to make the choice to not e-bike because You know, we have too much stuff to carry.

Because that's my preference. I'd much rather take the e-bike around. And I think that's a maybe a broader frame for thinking about these individual actions, is like when something becomes just that much better, just that much higher performant, just that much easier, just that much cheaper. all of a sudden it flips from being the kind of like I have to really put a lot of effort in to opt out of the default to becoming the default choice for most people. And and then you get these really big

I I completely agree with that, Jesse. And I will say that like I I live in New York City now. I moved back here about two years ago and when I came back was kind of shortly after they introduced the And become the default. And so Yeah. Neither here nor there, but just the convenience of it being able to go e exactly how I want to. And but I will say what you were saying at the end of that.

When it becomes a default choice, when it becomes like that much easier. I think one thing on our list that is not at that point yet is heat pumps. I think. I wish that that wasn't the case, but there are still so many All over the country. Like I was just listening to an older episode of This American Life this morning and the host the one of the stories a guy who was trying to get a heat pump and he was trying to get the two thousand dollar IRA tax credit for his heat pump.

And he just he went to the IRS website. He went to the Energy Star website, and he could not for the life of him find what. for the tax credit. And that's just like one little thing that if heat pumps are gonna be the answer, like you have to be able to find out which models qualify for the rebates like or for the tax credit. Yeah. It's But it's both so important and also I appreciate this marriage. I wanted to ask you. Yeah.

I just wanted to ask like maybe Jillian and then Emily in the theme of continuing to connect. Like what did you learn that you didn't know before doing the project? So the thing that like jumps out In this episode. The metal. hope that people who engage with this package of stories will also take that message.

the actions that they can take that will be meaningful is If I you know, I I've definitely been that person who's like Because I couldn't find a recycling bin and sometimes gonna wind up there anyway.

But also if I'm at the grocery store, I'm like, man, that spinach looks great. I might actually think twice about it because And like you know, I think all of the things that we're doing climate gripes and climate questions and whatever and so this is the thing that I Two of my friends is If you're considering

Like consider a plugin hybrid, just like look at it. You know, like sure if you're in New York and you're parking on the street, you probably don't have access to a reliable access to a charger. But think about a plugin.

Emily, what did you learn? Um gosh, I learned so much. I think Yeah, definitely starting with the the last time I was on this podcast. Um you know, just unders better understanding But just to I you know, I wrote our guide uh to heat pumps and when Into it, even though I've done so much reporting on heat pumps over the years, is I just still did not understand if there was a s a definition for a cold. You can Google this and you know, you'll get

what it is. But I I just didn't know if it was like, did it come down to a specific efficiency rating? Yeah. If it was like on this list and not that list. And I learned that there really is not a uniform definition, unfortunately. There are a few different I think someone that I spoke to New England Energy. They're a energy efficiency organization that has a list of think a cold climate heat pump is and so you can go to their website and look at their list.

The EPA, the Energy STAR program has a slightly different definition, but ultimately I think what I Included from trying to understand that better is, and this is also something I didn't really understand before, is that So when you hear about these like amazing cold climate heat pumps that are very quiet, though they're usually referring to these variable

And there are also heat pumps that are single-speed or double-speed or multi-speed. And those ones, while there can be They just work differently. think that there should be more information out there that variable speed heat pumps are kind of the ones that we're talking about when we're talking about cold climate, quiet, the you know, ideal version of the technology.

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I think one thing I learned and I would actually commend among them that one of the other things that heat pumps do, which I did not realize, was that they actually do do the thing that people think they're is already doing, which is that they and then use small amounts of energy When you look at like how to set your air conditioner during the summer. your air conditioner or your furnace in the winter usually just And it kind of blasts air at a certain Lower the thermal.

It's just that your the thermostat controls how long Maybe instead of bur you know, if you set your AC at seventy five, it's bursting on every Six minutes. sixty one. That was not something that It also has implications for the dehumidification that heat pumps perform, which is a key feature, obviously, in the summer when you're worried. big part of the comfort isn't just the temperature, it's the humidity and, you know, air conditioning.

Help do humidify your your house. But if they run very rarely, right, if you have sort of a more powerful, oversized, non variable system. size for your winter heating needs but then is way over it won't run very often, right? It'll cycle on a little bit, big intense blast of air, like you said. Having a variable speed drive means it can't be a good thing.

This broad dichotomy. Fight climate change with your life or cut your carbon footprint. Many listeners will know the history of carbonation. Right. Yeah, we'd rather burn a little bit. So to speak, then Well an emissions. you know, shame and blame and just like, you know, insignificant Frame incorporate But there are And also just more accurate. The host really kept harping on how big the And kind of asking me like don't the small thing?

And I it was not a question I'd had be I'd I'd faced before in part. people understand that it's the big things that actually do matter. But it it was interesting number one first because it felt like the classic economic case where you can actually use up all For the big things when it is actually the big things that matter. But second of all, what I said was like look, climate change is a big problem. And if it was easy to fix. With small actions. Most people own in the US.

Next to their house was Well right, exactly. The second most important, exactly. And so their house is the most important thing and that Made up that asset's made up of the fact that it heats and cools itself, right? All these things that it's hooked up to the power grid.

th climate change didn't originate from that scale of problem, then we would have solved it already, as we've solved many other environmental problems. It's that it's so big and so tied to The other thing that I think is consistent in your list and I think is really important is that most of the actions on the list are about large, capital intensive, durable

You know, a heat pump, it's gonna last for fifteen years, uh, versus a furnace. Buying your next car, you're gonna you know, it's gonna be on the road for twenty, thirty year asset as well. Most of these things are are large, discrete decisions that you don't make every day, but when you make them, they lock in your set of choices. and your role in the system for a decade. And so I find that to be kind of a freeing idea, right?

decisions, it's like great, there are only a few big decisions I have to think about. The rest of the time I can just enjoy my life. And I think that's a really nice feature of the list. And and it also is consistent with how we have to think about the broader systemic change, which is that we have these We only have so many product replacement cycles.

twenty fifty, right? Before we want to be at net zero, right? You know, you you got two more furnaces, that's it, right? Like between now and then. And so it is really important to think about those actions. It's much easier to make the right choice when you're choosing between two new options r rather than having to try to replace or rip out.

I think that's a good thing. Note of course they're an advocacy group, we're a media organization Yeah. event that I thought Yeah. Right. Give people a blueprint for example. Improvements they can make to their house, change the By saying you know if you need to drive get an E Volume Yeah. We're saying that the next time you would buy a car anyway, the next time you'd replace it. With that I think Emily and Jillian, thanks so much for joining Chiffkey today.

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And we are back. Now it's time for upshift, downshift. News items. Of course, an upship. Jesse, I'm gonna let you go first. I feel like I've been going first lately. I'm gonna let you go first. Okay. Uh I guess in keeping with the theme of decarbonize your life, I have a bit of a personal downshift, I guess. Maybe uh extrapolation from anecdote, but I'll share the

I'm fortunate enough with my E V to be able to charge at home most of the time. I know not everyone is. Most of the time it is far more convenient. Fuel up at home? So, you know, generally way better if you can charge I rarely end up using DC fast chargers, the sort of on the longer trip. But this weekend my family and I decided to take a fall trip up to the Catskill.

uh New York, which was lovely. And on our way home on Sunday evening, we decided we would give the Tesla supercharger a try for the first time with our new adapter that Ford Ford vehicle owners to allow us to tap. The nearest rapid charger was a bank of twelve superchargers. In New Palts, New York, and where we stopped. And of course, we weren't the only ones going home from a weekend or day trip, you know, out

six PM or six thirty. And so the station was full. All twelve of the banks were used. There were a couple of people waiting. And I waited my turn and then we pulled into an available slot and realized very quickly, as I'm sure many of others have experienced that.

Our charge ports are not all located in the same location on you know, different models of cars. Tesla are in the back left, I believe. For my vehicle it's in the front left. And so there's no way to really get into a slot where you use the Tesla superchargers with ver which have very short cables of only about three

And so you have to use the the stall next to you, which means you end up using two stalls. And you know, that's not ideal. It's obviously not great. Ford's instructions are to do exactly that. They state Tesla is aware of this. This is what you should do. And I was greeted by a very fine gentleman smoking his cigarette outside of his Model Y, who informed me that I was um being quite selfish for using two. Thank you.

stalls in order to charge my vehicle and you know laid in with a stream of very um hostile remarks and made sure to tell every other Tesla driver who showed up at the station that I was being a dick for using both of these stations. Not exactly the warm welcome that you would like to receive when trying to

And then of uh and then to top it off after the sort of this high stress uh interaction with folks around me, um the charger wouldn't work. And it turns out it I uh didn't work, I think, because our credit card that was tied to our Ford pass.

was expired and needed to be updated. And so it was rejecting our payment. But Tesla supercharges have no screen. There's no, you know, interface. There would nothing popped up on my Ford app or on my phone. You know, so there's no communication. It just finds And so we had no idea.

So not exactly a great first try. I think now that our payment scheme is updated, it'll be fine. I think in the future we will try to wait on the far right hand stall and pull in, you know, in a parking spot that next to it so we can only use one if possible. But we ended up having to drive to the next charging station away where we pulled in with about seven miles.

And had a typical Electrify America experience, which is one of the four stalls was broken. So there's only four stalls instead of 12. One of them was broken. There were several different cars waiting, and everybody had a very polite, wonderful time while we waited. You know, everyone was friendly. We were all chatting about different cars that we had. A nice uh couple of of of men on their way home to New York where they don't charge at home and so they're topping up at the rapid charger.

let a a lucid air with a family of small kids go ahead of them in line in order to charge so they could get home with their kids. You know, it's just a very congenital experience, quite an quite the opposite of the experience at the uh the Tesla station. So that's my saga. Um not all that important, but I do think it is evidence of the fact that we are still

the charger solution set is not really where we want it to be, right? Teslas are open technically, but of course Tesla designed their chargers for their vehicles and they don't really work with others and the varying places. You know, there are other options out there. We were able to get a charge and get home, but the options are limited and the stalls are

fewer in number and they tend to not all be working. And so we are still at this point where it's just, you know, as my wife said, this was not a great experience. And I can't argue with her on that one. It was not ideal. Well I like the uh sociological Faceless. Obelisk of charging and there's very clear social norms because everything fits together so well and if you break them Like a silently observed seemingly social code. Harshly penalized. Hippie World of Electrifination.

Diversity is welcome and not everything works but we all get along together. Exactly. We enjoy our half an hour chatting about how our weekends went with random strangers outside of a Walmart parking lot. Yeah. And everyone has a good time. Um We're gonna have to develop some new social norms here'cause times they are a change.

All right, Rob, how about you? What's your upshift, downshift today?

Yeah, well okay, so I I can't decide if this is an upshift or a downshift. I guess I'm gonna code it as an upshift, but I can see downshift like Uh there was a Great Wall Street Journal exclusive today about how several large fossil fuel companies, oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, Philip sixty six, and Occidental Petroleum are now lobbying Donald Trump not to repeal the Or at least and here's maybe the downshift part, not to repeal the parts of the IRS.

That benefit the large scale investors. which are largely in carbon capture, but also in alternative fuels, some hydrogen. to encourage him not to do this and to basically You repealing it. I think that fits into two interesting things. I mean I think first E two that found that about sixty percent of IRA funded. You know most although not by any means an overwhelming majority, but most of But second of all I think it does get to the political challenge.

Even before we knew Which is that number one, we we know any IRA repeal attempts Probably the best political approach for them would be to the the problems then become kind of twofold for them. So first they could keep the credits that oil companies And repeal the good Or repeal say the tech neutral tax credit policies that are not a good idea.

Solar. You can see them doing that, but I think it's very I I I think that would just be very easy to organize against and very easy for people to understand that they were basically But second of all, you know, when you think about the Senate, there's gonna be lots of different properties. And so as soon as they crack open the iron. Every one of those Hart, every one of those repealed taxes. And it just gets to be hard to imagine how you put

six fifty four, fifty-five Senate seats. Even then, where do you pull the fifty votes to begin to kind of pull apart? are just not gonna go along with the repeal effort. So anyway I'm gonna code it as an upshift, though I don't think it's entirely uplifting. The success of the IRA political strategy but also Necessary, you know. For the exact same reasons that it was able to pass, why it's might be a more durable.

Yeah. Good. Yeah. I don't think I should w let's let's call let's leave it there. Um Okay, great. Um well hey, thank you for listening to Shift Key. We'll be back With I think we can reveal this, right, Jesse? Yep. Yeah, I think it's been publicly announced. Yeah, exactly. We'll be back next week with an exclusive interview of White House national climate advisor Ali Zaidi in the run up to the November election. Hey, if you're in New Haven this week, we will be doing a live shift key podcast.

So if you're In the area. Um Shift Key is a production of Heat Map News. Our editors are Julian Goodman and Nico Loricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Jacob Lambert and Our music is by Adam Cromelau. Thank you, as always, for listening and see you next week.