Joel Kirkland

About

Joel Kirkland is a deputy energy editor for POLITICO's E&E News. He shepherds a reporting team that is now focused on the Trump presidency and the return to U.S. policies favoring fossil fuels. The team is covering the changes in the economy driving up electricity demand, including the AI revolution. In recent years, Kirkland has edited groundbreaking pieces on OSHA’s failures to protect workers from extreme heat, health inequities in polluted cities and towns, and climate politics. In 2022, he helped develop the POLITICO climate and energy newsletter Power Switch and continues to edit and write for it.As a reporter, Kirkland covered the U.N. Paris climate negotiations and reported from China's major economic hubs. Before helping to launch Energywire at E&E News, Kirkland was a business reporter focused on climate change; and he earlier covered Congress and federal agencies, including the Department of Energy.Kirkland started his journalism career at Little Rock's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. There, he chronicled the state's fast-growing immigrant population, tussled with quarrelsome county officials, and was a business reporter in Northwest Arkansas, where Wal-Mart is headquartered. Later, he covered the economic transformation of Central and Eastern Europe as a reporter and editor for the Prague Business Journal. His stories have appeared in online editions of The New York Times and Scientific American and in the Chicago Tribune. The Overseas Press Club in 2011 recognized his reporting from Beijing and western China on U.S.-China relations and China's hunt for new energy sources. The Society of American Business Editors and Writers awarded his reporting on the U.S. natural gas boom.A Chicago-area native, Kirkland holds degrees in history and journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He lives in Silver Spring, Md., with his wife Annie, a reporter at Politico.