As founding executive editor of Heatmap News, Meyer analyzes how legislation and markets drive decarbonization. His reporting synthesizes policy minutiae into compelling narratives about America’s energy transition, with recent scoops on DOE reactor siting strategies and IRA labor provisions.
“The 2025 tax code negotiations will determine whether America builds enough batteries to power its EVs and enough transformers to connect its solar farms.”
Meyer prioritizes stories that reveal:
His award-winning work combines document forensics with macroeconomic analysis, making him essential reading for policymakers and investors alike.
Meyer began his journalism career at The Atlantic in 2011, where he co-founded the publication’s climate vertical, Planet, and launched its flagship newsletter The Weekly Planet. His 2020 pivot to co-found the COVID Tracking Project – cited in over 1,000 academic papers – revealed his ability to transform complex data into public goods. In 2023, he brought this systems-thinking approach to Heatmap News as founding executive editor, creating a platform that analyzes climate change as the central organizing principle of 21st-century economics and culture.
This prescient 2025 analysis dissects how concurrent policies targeting OPEC production and implementing historic trade levies created unintended consequences for U.S. energy security. Meyer traces the tariff’s ripple effects through futures markets, drilling permits, and strategic petroleum reserve calculations, demonstrating how geopolitical decisions accelerate energy transition timelines. His sourcing of proprietary DOE documents (later verified by Reuters) revealed how agency economists predicted but downplayed the policy’s volatility risks.
Meyer’s 2022 deep dive into EU energy infrastructure combined on-the-ground reporting from Baltic LNG terminals with sharp analysis of intercontinental supply chains. The piece popularized the concept of “energy entanglement” – how fossil fuel dependencies create geopolitical vulnerabilities that persist through price shocks. His interviews with German manufacturers and Hungarian policymakers showed how energy systems resist rapid transformation, even amid existential threats.
This 2021 policy analysis broke down the $2 trillion infrastructure bill’s labor provisions and tax credit structures, highlighting how the legislation incentivized unionized clean energy jobs. Meyer’s flowchart explaining the 45X advanced manufacturing tax credit became required reading in energy investment circles. The piece’s lasting impact lies in its demonstration of how industrial policy can accelerate decarbonization while reshaping regional economies.
Meyer prioritizes how climate commitments translate (or fail to translate) into on-the-ground projects. His Heatmap piece on DOE’s advanced reactor siting strategy exemplifies this, combining FOIA-obtained site lists with interviews about community resistance. Pitches should highlight regulatory hurdles, funding allocation challenges, or labor market impacts rather than restating net-zero targets.
A signature of Meyer’s work is monetizing climate impacts through inventive data journalism. His analysis of hurricane intensification’s effect on property insurance markets created a new framework for pricing climate risk. Successful pitches will propose methodologies to measure previously abstract climate costs – think supply chain vulnerabilities or bond rating implications.
From tracking IRA tax credit allocations to exposing fossil fuel companies’ renewable energy accounting practices, Meyer consistently exposes how capital flows shape decarbonization. A recent scoop on Middletown Works’ $500 million steel plant retrofit demonstrated how green subsidies revive legacy industries. Pitches should connect financial mechanisms to tangible outcomes, whether in venture capital trends or municipal bond markets.
While many climate outlets emphasize individual actions, Meyer’s work focuses on systemic interventions. His critique of carbon footprint calculators as “personal responsibility theater” illustrates this orientation. Pitches about eco-products or behavior-change apps rarely resonate unless tied to industrial policy or infrastructure investments.
Meyer excels at tracing policy impacts through adjacent sectors. His reporting on how EV tax credits affected critical mineral mining in Nevada revealed environmental justice issues at lithium extraction sites. The most successful pitches will identify unexpected beneficiaries or casualties of climate initiatives across energy, agriculture, or manufacturing ecosystems.
“The climate crisis isn’t a story about polar bears – it’s a story about pension funds, pipeline permits, and the physics of grid storage.”
At PressContact, we aim to help you discover the most relevant journalists for your PR efforts. If you're looking to pitch to more journalists who write on Climate, here are some other real estate journalist profiles you may find relevant:
