Shift Key with Robinson Meyer5 Feb 2025

The U.S. Auto Industry Wasn’t Built for Tariffs

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. automaking industry has transformed how it builds cars and trucks, constructing a continent-sized network of factories, machine shops, and warehouses that some call “Factory North America.” President Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports will disrupt and transform those supply chains. What will that mean for the automaking industry and the transition to EVs?

Ellen Hughes-Cromwick is the former chief economist at Ford Motor Company, where she worked from 1996 to 2014, as well as the former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Commerce. She is now a senior visiting fellow at Third Way and a senior advisor at MacroPolicy Perspective LLC.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat with Ellen about how automakers build cars today, why this system isn’t built for trade barriers, and whether Trump’s tariffs could counterintuitively help electric vehicles. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.

Mentioned:

Trump’s Tariffs are a Warning

Rob’s downshift; Jesse’s up-ish-shift.

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …

Download Heatmap Labs and Hydrostor’s free report to discover the crucial role of long duration energy storage in ensuring a reliable, clean future and stable grid. Learn more about Hydrostor here.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(145)

Why This El Niño Looks Like a Monster

Every few years, the Pacific Ocean’s surface waters become especially warm near the equator, a climatic phenomenon known as El Niño.El Niño is a normal part of the climate system, but even in a normal...

12 Aug 47min

The Big — But Fixable! — Problems in America’s R&D Ecosystem

At this point, when you hear “venture capitalist,” you probably think of … software. Or artificial intelligence. Or cryptocurrency.The Engine Ventures, which spun out of MIT a few years ago, is differ...

6 Aug 57min

Permitting Reform, Data Centers, and More With Senator Heinrich and Secretary Granholm

The Democratic Party’s climate and energy policy is at a difficult moment. Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has attacked solar and wind energy, started an inflationary war, and ...

3 Aug 33min

What a Permitting Reform Deal Could Look Like

There’s really one one good thing that could happen this year in Congress for clean energy: permitting reform. If lawmakers reached a bipartisan deal on the country’s permitting system, they could mak...

29 Jul 1h 18min

What Barbecue Sauce Has in Common With Carbon Removal

Charm Industrial is a climate tech company that takes biomass and converts it into a heavy, carbon-rich oil that can be injected underground, transmuting and storing the greenhouse gas far from the at...

24 Jul 1h 3min

The Company That’s Raised $60 Million to Geoengineer the Planet

For more than 30 years, a heterodox group of scientists have proposed injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth, thereby cooling the atmosphere and reversing...

15 Jul 1h 1min

The New Paper Arguing Biden’s Power Sector Emissions Cuts Are Largely Intact — Even Under Trump

Wait, is the climate policy landscape … in better shape than it looks?Just over a year ago, President Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It repealed many of the Biden administration’s most a...

6 Jul 49min

Why Meta’s Longtime CTO Is Investing in Climate Tech

It has been a hard few years for climate tech. But we recently got a bright spot: Earlier this month, Gigascale Capital announced it had raised $250 million to build the physical infrastructure drivin...

30 Jun 54min