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Wealth bias shows up in the strangest places — including, according to new research, PurpleAir sensor data.
Tesla has dealt with quality control issues before — but never with a robotaxi on the horizon.
The first Quilt units will be available to San Franciscans in just a few weeks.
On Ukraine aid, a solar geoengineering test, and California snowpack
With a total solar eclipse on its way — the last one visible from the U.S. in the next 20 years — millions are asking: What will the weather be?
On carmakers’ quarterly reports, Shell’s climate case, and solar panel fences
Tesla Superchargers are — finally — coming to some of our most remote National Parks.
The closest I came to battery oblivion happened in Bryce Canyon City, Utah.
Up above 7,600 feet, the December evening temperatures dipped to 10 below zero Fahrenheit as I pulled my Tesla Model 3 into Ruby’s Inn. Tesla’s website listed the hotel as a place with destination chargers that could refill the battery overnight. That guarantee did little good, since other EVs had snagged the few working plugs by the time we arrived. My car’s remaining range, suffering in the bitter cold, dropped below 20 miles as I scoured the sprawling hotel campus for other EV hookups the receptionist had marked on a paper map of the premises.
Finally, out in the middle of the snow, I saw the plug that was promised: a post with a single 120-volt outlet meant for the RVs that visit in sunnier months. My extension cord reached, barely. My battery would live through the night.
If you drive an electric vehicle to see the eerie hoodoos of Bryce Canyon National Park next year, you’ll have a far less anxious time than I did. The area recently won a Tesla contest in which drivers could vote for future Supercharger locations. Its prize was a promise that a fast-charging station would come to Bryce Canyon City. Last Sunday, a website that tracks permits and public records to discover the location of future Superchargers indicated one will be built right there at Ruby’s Inn, the site of my struggle.
Bryce isn’t alone. As charging stops fill in the map of the U.S., Tesla is racing to build fast chargers near the remote National Parks of the West. Because just about every automaker is starting to use Tesla’s NACS plug, EVs of all sorts will be able to stop there. It’s about to become realistic to visit some of America’s most jaw-dropping scenery in an electric car.
When I started electric road-tripping in 2019 and 2020, only the superstars of the National Park System were truly accessible. High-speed charging stations existed in the tourist trap towns of Tusayan, Arizona, and West Yellowstone, Montana, giving Tesla drivers access to the Grand Canyon and to Yellowstone with little range anxiety. A site in Fish Camp, California, provided enough electrons to gaze upon El Capitan in Yosemite, while the baby Supercharger in Moab, Utah, powered you toward the Delicate Arch trail. Parks that happened to be located near an Interstate highway, like Petrified Forest and Zion, lay within reach for an EV.
Yet striking out for America’s more isolated wonders was a dicey proposition, one that relied upon hoping the slower chargers at hotels and visitor’s centers would be operational and unoccupied. Let me tell you: This is not a safe assumption.
To reach Crater Lake in 2022, we stayed 55 miles away in Klamath Falls, site of the nearest Supercharger. I pulled into the gift shop near the park’s entrance, hoping to add some safety juice for the day with the available Level 2 destination charger, but it was busted. No matter. Thanks to driving slowly around the lake and minding the speed limit back to Klamath (through a cloud of specific local midges that entirely glazed the front of the car in gelatinous bug guts), I completed the round trip back to the Supercharger station — only to find that the busted charger I tried to tap earlier in the day had bent a prong inside my Tesla port, rendering it unusable. We happened to be in the parking lot of a Fred Meyer home store at the time of this disastrous realization. In the moments before closing, I ran inside and procured the necessary hand tool to bend my metal back into shape. (Note to readers: Do not do this.) The DIY fix worked; the trip was saved.
You won’t need to resort to such extreme measures, however, because reliable and fast chargers are coming. Tesla has a permit to build a Supercharger at a highway junction within 25 miles of Crater Lake, and given the park’s soaring popularity, that surely won’t be the last. Nor will you need to retreat from the heart of Death Valley to recharge in remote Beatty, Nevada because you couldn’t snag a plug at the park’s luxury hotel (though if you do go to Beatty, get the BBQ at Smokin’ J’s.). A Supercharger is coming to the closer town of Pahrump, and surely more are on their way.
Look at the map and you’ll see many more examples. The arid expanses of southeastern New Mexico are charging desert now, but a planned Supercharger in Alamogordo will send EV drivers on their way to White Sands. Terlingua, Texas will provide a way to reach previously unreachable Big Bend along the Rio Grande River. Kalispell, Montana; Ely, Nevada; and Vernal, Utah will help electric drivers reach Glacier National Park, Great Basin National Park, and Dinosaur National Monument, respectively. More sites may come if the third-party charging companies or the automakers building their own chargers expand their offerings beyond the country’s most well-traveled highways.
It is a cruel twist of fate that traveling to some of the planet’s most majestic spots has, for so long, meant spewing carbon dioxide into its atmosphere. National parks, monuments, and forests are, by their very nature, far from population centers, and thus far from where most charging infrastructure grew up in the early years of this EV era. The treasures of the American West, especially, may be hours from the freeway and hundreds of miles from the nearest big city.
At last, the proposition of zero-emissions driving to America’s best idea is about to shift from fraught to ordinary. With longer driving ranges in new EVs and new fast chargers available en route to the parks, you won’t need to sit down with a map and a calculator, meticulously charting a strategy to see Wizard Island without running out of miles. You’ll just pack the car and go.
On methane emissions, an extreme heat summit, and endangered species
Current conditions: Cyclone Gamane killed at least 18 people in Madagascar • A Saharan dust storm is choking tourist hot spots in the Mediterranean • It’ll be wet and stormy across large parts of California for Easter weekend.
A new study suggests America’s landfills are releasing 40% more methane than what’s being reported. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas responsible for about one-third of global warming since pre-industrial times. It spews from landfills as organic waste breaks down. Most U.S. landfills have to measure their methane emissions, but this new study suggests current monitoring methods – which usually involve sending a worker to check for emissions by walking around the landfill armed with a sensor – are falling short. The research, published in the journal Science, utilized aerial surveys to identify emissions from more than 200 active landfills in 18 states between 2018 and 2022. The researchers detected methane plumes at 52% of the landfills and found most releases went on for months if not years. “If we’re going to hit our climate targets, reductions in methane emissions can’t come from oil and gas alone,” Daniel Cusworth, the study’s lead author and scientist with the non-profit Carbon Mapper, told CNN. “Landfills should be garnering a similar type of attention as oil and gas.”
Starting next week, Ford will begin cutting the workforce at its F-150 Lightning plant in Michigan. Only about 700 of 2,100 workers will remain at the facility. The rest will either be transferred, reassigned, or take a retirement package. Demand for Ford’s electric pickup truck has been “slower than expected,” the company said in January. “The workforce reduction comes as Ford shifts plans from larger EVs to smaller, more affordable ones,” noted Peter Johnson at Electrek, adding that the company faces mounting pressure from competing pickup manufacturers like Tesla, Rivian, and Chevy.
The Biden administration yesterday reinstated regulations in the Endangered Species Act that protect threatened species and their habitats. Under the Trump administration, the regulations were weakened to protect “endangered” but not “threatened” species. The new rules also say agencies can no longer consider economic impacts when deciding whether to list a species as threatened or endangered. “As species face new and daunting challenges, including climate change, degraded and fragmented habitat, invasive species, and wildlife disease, the Endangered Species Act is more important than ever to conserve and recover imperiled species now and for generations to come,” said Martha Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The first ever Global Summit on Extreme Heat took place yesterday. The virtual event, co-hosted by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), aimed to highlight the growing dangers of extreme heat and encourage commitments from governments to develop heat action plans. “At a time when some have grown numb with increasingly familiar headlines about ‘hottest days on record,’ we absolutely need to resolve never to get used to the scale of this problem, never to get used to the threat it poses to human life,” said USAID administrator Samantha Power. The summit ended with the launch of an online Heat Action Hub “where people can share experiences and best practice when it comes to tackling extreme heat.”
In case you missed it: Oregon finalized its right-to-repair law this week. It’s the fourth state to enact Right to Repair rules for consumer electronics, but the new law, SB 1596, is the first in the nation to ban manufacturers from “parts pairing,” a gatekeeping practice in which a device’s software must “pair” with a replacement part in order for that part to work. Banning such practices will make it easier for consumers to fix their devices rather than throw them away. “Electronic waste is growing five times faster than our electronics recycling capacity,” said Nathan Proctor, director of the PIRG Right to Repair Campaign. “We need to cut down the insane cycle of churning through personal electronics — and that starts by empowering repair.” The law will take effect next year.
America's largest banks and asset managers enable substantial greenhouse gas emissions with their investments. If these emissions were to be compared to those of other nations, they would represent the third-largest emitting country in the world, behind China and the U.S.
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