Ford May Ditch its Electric F-150

Current conditions: Typhoon Kalmaegi is slamming into Vietnam after leaving more than 110 dead in the Philippines • Temperatures are plunging 15 degrees Fahrenheit on average across the eastern half of the United States, bringing the season’s first snowfall in many places • A barrage of autumn storms are set to deluge parts of the Pacific Northwest with up to 8 inches of rain.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Ford swerves on the electric F-150

Ford may be veering away from the zero-emissions model of the pickup that spent nearly a half-century as America’s most popular passenger vehicle. Executives at the Detroit giant “are in active discussions about scrapping the electric version of its F-150 pickup,” The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, declaring the discontinuation “America’s first major EV casualty.” When Ford first unveiled the truck in 2022, the company compared the Lightning to its Model T. But with $13 billion in losses since 2023, and overall electric vehicles sales falling since Congress ended the federal credit in September, the sleek Space Age-looking pickup has looked less likely to take off. “The demand is just not there” for F-150 Lightning and other full-size trucks, Adam Kraushaar, owner of Lester Glenn Auto Group in New Jersey, told the newspaper. “We don’t order a lot of them because we don’t sell them.”

The mood is rosier over at the nation’s electric vehicle champion. Despite slipping market share and plunging profits, Tesla shareholders overwhelmingly approved a new pay package for chief executive Elon Musk worth upward of $1 trillion over 10 years if the company manages to hit certain benchmarks, such as selling 1 million humanoid robots.

2. Interior Department pauses layoffs

The Department of the Interior has halted plans to “imminently” pink slip as many as 2,000 agency staffers for the duration of the federal government shutdown, court documents E&E News published Thursday revealed. In a statement to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the agency’s chief human resources official said Interior “has no plans” for imminent layoffs.

White House budget chief Russ Vought has sought to use the shutdown as a tool to slash funding or personnel in vast swaths of the federal bureaucracy, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote. But unions sued and, last month, a federal judge temporarily blocked the cuts from beginning.

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3. Trump names coal a critical mineral

Take a look at this Google Trends graph charting out the popularity of “critical minerals.” The term historically applied to the metals such as lithium, rare earths, and cobalt that were needed for modern energy and weapons manufacturing shot up in usage after 2023.

A chart showing the popularity of "critical minerals" as a Google search term. Google Trends

Now, the Trump administration wants to broaden its definition to include a commodity that, unlike those other rocks, plays a necessarily vanishing role in the transition to cleaner energy. The U.S. Geological Survey added metallurgical coal along with potash, rhenium, silicon, and lead to the federal government’s list of critical minerals, alongside more predictable additions such as uranium, copper, and silver. The list, as Bloomberg noted, “dictates what commodities are included” in trade probes the Trump administration is carrying out. The administration has taken an aggressive approach toward securing new sources of minerals China controls, including signing a landmark deal with Australia last month.

4. Michigan approves its first new tariffs on data centers

The Michigan Public Service Commission greenlit new levies on data centers to avoid saddling ratepayers with the cost of supplying energy-thirsty server farms with enough electricity. The ruling came in response to a petition from the utility Consumers Energy requesting permission to implement tariffs on large-load customers such as the server farms providing the computing for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining. Environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, argued on behalf of stronger protections for consumers against paying for tech giants’ computing centers. It’s part of what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman described as “the techlash,” blowback to tech infrastructure that’s so widespread at the moment, polling Heatmap’s Pro service conducted found more than half the country considered data centers unwelcome near their homes.

5. Redwood Materials starts up production

Redwood Materials has started up its $3.5 billion South Carolina factory capable of recycling 20,000 metric tons of critical minerals (not coal, though) from old electric vehicle batteries, Bloomberg reported. The move comes as the company, founded by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, opened a recycling plant in Sparks, Nevada, which collects 60,000 tons of minerals annually, including rare metals such as cobalt.

THE KICKER

Three new species of an unusual group of African toads skip the tadpole phase and give birth to live, squirming babies. “It’s common knowledge that frogs grow from tadpoles — it’s one of the classic metamorphosis paradigms in biology. But the nearly 8,000 frog species actually have a wide variety of reproductive modes, many of which don’t closely resemble that famous story,” said Mark D. Scherz, an associate professor and co-author of the study from Natural History Museum Denmark, a coauthor on the study.