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It’s not just emissions rules. Fuel economy regulations are changing, too, and investments are massive. It may just work.
Two summers ago, the Biden Administration announced a somewhat daunting goal for America’s car industry at the time: to make sure that 50% of all new vehicles sold in 2030 would be zero-emission vehicles.
Evidently, that wasn’t enough of a stunner. With the Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement today of vastly more stringent proposed new emissions standards — the strictest ones America has ever seen — the adoption of new all-electric vehicles specifically could be as high as 67% by 2032.
To be fair, a lot has changed in less than two years. Countless new EV models have rolled out since and many more are coming soon. America’s charging network is rapidly expanding, thanks to federal and state investments as well as billions of dollars in grants for private companies. And last year’s Inflation Reduction Act mapped out a robust domestic battery manufacturing supply chain, as well as a modernized tax credit scheme to incentive EV adoption.
But besides seeing more EVs and chargers around, it may not be readily apparent to most people how quickly things are changing. Make no mistake: between those actions, what the EPA is proposing today, and broader global industry trends, the groundwork is being laid right now to transform the car industry into a mostly battery-electric one. Today’s EPA announcement could be seen as the “It’s happening” moment for the wide-scale shift away from gasoline vehicles.
“I think it’s one of the most pivotal climate regulations this administration has rolled out,” said Leilani Gonzalez, the policy director for the nonprofit Zero Emission Transportation Association.
The EPA’s announcement isn’t all that is happening. More changes are expected soon to American fuel economy standards as well that should drive automakers even faster toward an electrified future.
Moreover, some experts say today’s rules could even spur the growth of hybrid cars, specifically plug-in hybrids since the EPA will require automakers to lower emissions but it doesn’t stipulate which powertrain must be used.
Broader industry trends, tough regulations in Europe and China, and the global nature of the car business meant things were likely headed in this direction anyway. But in America, they just feel more official now.
Today’s EPA proposal deals specifically with tailpipe emissions for light, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles — in other words, cars, trucks, vans, buses, and large work vehicles. Passenger cars will be the most visible and meaningful example for most people, but these new regulations hit across the board.
According to the proposed rules, vehicles made from 2027 through 2032 will face vastly stricter emissions regulations such that it’s going to be easier for automakers to be in compliance if they mostly sell EVs instead. The EPA even projects as much in its announcement today.
That isn’t all that’s happening. What’s gotten less attention so far are reports that the U.S. Department of Energy is also due to revise how it defines “MPGe” — a somewhat obscure and ill-understood measurement that means the “miles per gallon equivalent” for electric and plug-in hybrid cars. It basically gauges an EV’s energy consumption compared to internal combustion vehicles; you see it on any EV’s spec sheet at the dealership. The rules are about 20 years old.
Without getting too deep into the weeds, MPGe calculations could soon be revised downward to meet a more modern, realistic standard in line with their actual behavior. According to Reuters, this means a Ford F-150 Lighting’s MPGe could drop from 237.1 to 67.1 MPGe, and a Chrysler Pacifica PHEV’s rating will go from 88.2 to 59.5 MPGe.
Fuel economy for automakers is measured in averages for their entire fleets. (You may have heard of Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE.) So by revising MPGe to be more realistic, it keeps automakers from meeting their fuel economy average requirements by sandbagging things with a couple of EVs, like the one person in a group project who does all of the work for everyone. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club have asked for this change for years.
Furthermore, another American auto regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is due to release revised CAFE rules soon as well. Those are expected to get much more strict as well, Reuters reports, even more so than were released last year when the agency reversed the Trump administration’s rollback.
Taken altogether, this means new cars of the late 2020s into the 2030s and beyond must be cleaner, and more fuel efficient, and automakers will not be able to rely on a handful of EVs to carry the weight of their whole fleets. They will have to produce more efficient vehicles with cleaner emissions soon — or no emissions at all. That this is all happening at once does not feel like a coincidence.
Again, the zero-emission car revolution has been in the works for many years. Automakers are largely global enterprises now that don’t like to sell multiple types of vehicles in different markets for cost reasons (though Americans specifically do love their big trucks) and they’re staring down an all-EV market in China and outright ICE bans in Europe. These rules now put America on the same trajectory as other nations and regions — or even some of its own states, like California. They also seem to limit the number of America-specific cars that could be out of compliance with strict global standards.
But it all begs the question: Can it be done? Even Loren McDonald, the head of EV marketing and research firm EVAdoption, said he has his doubts.
“When I looked at the 50% target, I think that was actually achievable,” McDonald said. “Sixty-seven percent by 2032 is a whole other level.”
He said that hitting this goal would require 80%-90% zero-emission vehicle adoption in some of the most populous U.S. states like California. For these reasons and more, including income, various cultural factors and the scarcity of charging, he sees this as a tougher ask in more rural states.
Among his concerns are the still-high cost of EVs, which need to be brought down considerably; the obvious need to grow the public charging infrastructure; the fact that many of the ICE cars on the road now could stay on the road for decades to come; and the ongoing lack of charging options for people in multi-family homes.
On the upside, McDonald said he thinks these new rules could spur some novel innovations that we haven’t seen yet.
“The best thing about this is they haven’t dictated the powertrain,” McDonald said. Future zero- or lower-emission cars could mean a variety of things, although battery EVs remain the most likely long-term solution for passenger cars.
“That will help the GOP [critics of Biden], the automakers, the lobbying groups and so on,” he said. “They’ve said these cars don’t have to be EVs. They recognize that’s probably the way to get there, but it does encourage innovation — maybe long-range hybrids or even other types of fuels.”
Typically, automakers throw a fit whenever they are faced with strict new standards, before developing new technologies to meet these challenges. But switching from a century of gasoline-powered car infrastructure to a battery-centric one does have legitimate, realistic challenges.
These are the concerns expressed by one of the auto industry’s largest lobbying groups, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation — but not without a surprising degree of optimism too.
“The question isn’t can this be done, it’s how fast can it be done, and how fast will depend almost exclusively on having the right policies and market conditions in place to achieve the shared goal of a net zero carbon automotive future,” said the alliance’s president and CEO John Bozzella in a blog post after today’s news.
Many of Bozzella’s concerns show what a long-game approach this will require, from ramping up EV production to increasing chargers to bringing all involved costs down. Taken altogether, it feels almost like the Biden Administration’s equivalent of President Kennedy ordering a moon landing by the end of the decade in 1961.
But Gonzalez, of Zero Emission Transportation Association, said she views today’s news on a much more positive note. She said that the eventual goal is to build an infrastructure where batteries can be recycled over and over again, their minerals repurposed for new uses, so that they cannot be depleted the way gasoline eventually will be.
Gonzalez added that even if Biden loses the White House in 2024 or the Republicans gain power over the Senate, these proposed EPA rules could go into effect in 2027. That means the earliest a new administration could make changes is by 2026, and by then, the auto industry will have already spent years moving toward these aggressive goals. At the same time, she thinks significant growth in charging, battery manufacturing, and more is needed to support zero-emission transportation.
“I think we’re going to get there,” Gonzalez said. “I think folks are doing everything they possibly can to get there.”
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From the notebooks of Heatmap’s reporters and editors.
The three letter acronym I heard the most during New York Climate Week wasn’t EPA, COP, NDC, or GHG. It was PJM. The country’s largest electricity market — the PJM Interconnection, which reaches into 13 states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Michigan — has become the poster child for data center growth, clogged interconnection queues, and political backlash to rising electricity prices. Nearly every conversation I have about PJM includes a preamble about how nerdy and impenetrable the whole field of wholesale electricity markets is. Even so, it’s quickly becoming a central preoccupation of the political system, especially in states like New Jersey, where electricity prices have become a central issue in the gubernatorial campaign. — Matthew Zeitlin
As expected, this climate week featured lots of chatter about artificial intelligence — both the pros and the cons. On Tuesday, I attended an actual debate on the topic hosted by Deloitte, titled “AI for Sustainability: Friend of Foe,” which asked four participants to argue for or against a strongly worded motion: “AI is humanity’s best hope for tackling climate change.” To be frank, I disagreed with the premise before either side launched into their arguments, as did many others in attendance. When the audience was polled ahead of time, 49% disagreed, 36% were undecided, and 15% agreed.
The AI advocates — Riaz Raihan of Trane Technologies and Jen Huffstetler, HP’s chief sustainability officer — did share a few striking figures. Raihan, for instance, noted that Trane’s AI platform can make HVAC systems up to 25% more efficient. If that tech were deployed worldwide, it would save significantly more power than all the world’s data centers currently consume. But it was ultimately David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times who expressed the sentiment that I found most compelling when he cited the very human problems that keep renewable energy projects stuck in interminably long interconnection queues for years.
“What is it that’s stopping that renewable power from getting online. Is it a lack of intelligence? Is it too limited, too scarce intelligence? Or is it the human challenges, the concrete, real-world challenges? How do we deal with politics? How do we deal with land use? How do we prioritize what we’re doing in this world?” Ultimately, the audience appeared persuaded by his arguments, too — as well as those of his co-debater, Sarah Myers of the AI Now Institute. When the debate was over, 78% of the audience disagreed with the motion, 16% agreed, and 6% remained undecided. — Katie Brigham
At this point, I think we’re used to the idea that the artificial intelligence boom is creating more demand for electricity — and that this higher demand is helping renewable developers during what would otherwise be a tough moment. One theme that stuck out to me at New York Climate Week, though, is how much the surge in Big Tech investment is harmonizing what used to be otherwise regional markets.
Because a relatively small number of companies are driving such a large share of electricity capex, utilities across the country — who would normally do business with residential developers or small-to-medium-sized industrials — are now working with the same few tech firms. Those firms have the same sorts of demands everywhere. And because those tech firms are so flush with cash (and so far from achieving their climate goals), they are becoming important buyers for early-stage climate tech products. In that way, the AI boom — whose first-order labor effects have been quite concentrated in the San Fransisco area — is already transforming the U.S. economy. — Robinson Meyer
Here at Heatmap, we promise to bring you the “inside story of the race to fix the planet.” I’m biased, of course, but I think we tend to deliver, and my colleague Emily Pontecorvo certainly did this week with her story on the obscure accounting debate that has the potential to reshape our emissions future for years to come. We’re talking specifically about the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the primary standard-setting body for corporate carbon accounting, which is in the process of revising its guidelines for how companies should report the emissions from the electricity they consumer, otherwise known as scope 2 emissions.
While it hasn’t cracked the headlines in many places, Amazon Director Sustainability Policy told the crowd at our Heatmap House event on Wednesday that it was on everyone’s minds all week — and indeed, it came up over and over again during our “Up Next in Tech” session. I’ll spare you the details of the debate (though you should definitely read Emily’s story), but suffice it to say that it comes down to some pretty profound questions about why we count emissions in the first place. Is it to help consumers make informed choices? Or is it to help decarbonize the global economy? — Jillian Goodman
The administration argued in the name of national defense — but Orsted had receipts.
When the Trump administration ordered work on Orsted’s Revolution Wind offshore wind project to shut down in late August, it cited national security concerns as the reason for the delay.
Within weeks, a federal judge had lifted the stop work order, allowing construction to proceed.
What happened in between matters. In its rush to stop a wind project, the Trump administration exposed the first cracks in its anti-wind policy agenda — a loss that may embolden companies targeted by the crackdown on renewable energy development to fight back.
Orsted, the Danish wind giant, was more than halfway done building Revolution Wind by August 22, the day the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ordered an immediate stop to construction. In a one-page letter explaining the order, the agency dedicated a single paragraph to the rationale behind its decision: “BOEM is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas,” it said.
Orsted filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government within days and asked for a preliminary injunction against the stop-work order. The Trump administration had acted arbitrarily when it halted construction on Revolution Wind, the company argued, a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, which forces the government to have at least some sensible reason for its decision-making.
There were urgent financial stakes to the court’s decision, the company said. On top of strict timelines for completing the project that were laid out in power purchase agreements, the cable installation company working on Revolution Wind has just a brief window before it is booked for other projects through mid-2028. Unless the judge acted quickly, according to Orsted, Revolution Wind could face “project cancellation and termination of the enterprise,” at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion.
After Orsted filed its suit, the attorneys general of Connecticut and Rhode Island — two of the three states designated to receive electricity from Revolution Wind — soon followed course. The Trump administration responded by doubling down on its claims related to national defense. Revolution Wind, officials argued, would negatively impact radar detection and result in dangerous electromagnetic emissions. They also asserted that Defense Department officials were overruled or ignored when they raised concerns about this matter in the review process for the project, which received its final permits in 2023. (It’s worth noting the Trump administration’s legal filings refer to the military as the Department of War, or DOW.)
The Department of the Interior’s acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, Adam Suess, told the court on September 12 in a sworn declaration that Revolution Wind had not fully addressed a host of concerns. Suess elaborated on the stop work order, asserting that it concerned the project’s “continued inability to reach certain mitigation agreements” with the military and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Suess stated Revolution Wind was not in full compliance with the terms of its construction and operations plan, which are subject to government approval. He also said there were outstanding issues with Revolution Wind’s coordination with military operators at sea, and that there was still “risk from distributed optical fiber sensing and acoustic monitoring equipment.
“The Department has been in touch with NOAA and the DOW to gather more information,” the filing said, somewhat cryptically.
Suess also acknowledged that the Trump administration is reconsidering its prior green lights for Revolution Wind, including its approval of the construction and operations plan, linking this to a broader all-of-government review of the offshore wind industry Trump ordered on Day One via executive order.
In response, Orsted called the government’s bluff. The company submitted sworn declarations from top company officials who had worked on Revolution Wind, attesting to the fact that before Trump came into office, the military and NOAA were saying everything looked A-OK.
“Mr. Suess’ declaration makes new allegations against Revolution Wind that were not mentioned in the stop work order,” Orsted’s attorneys wrote in their reply. “These new allegations are factually inaccurate and controverted by Revolution Wind’s compliance with project requirements.”
One of Orsted’s declarations was from Melanie Gearon, the company’s head of northeast permitting. Suess had claimed that Revolution Wind was far from reaching a critical agreement with NOAA’s Fisheries division, known as the National Marine Fisheries Service, to mitigate the effects of sea surveys on fishing vessels. But Gearon painted a completely different picture, detailing years of negotiations with NOAA and BOEM about how to handle the surveys.
These talks had apparently continued months into the Trump administration. Orsted submitted an email from BOEM to the company dated July 9, in which an official explicitly says that agency staff were discussing scenarios where Orsted could just “state that they are continuing to work with [the National Marine Fisheries Service] on a Survey Mitigation agreement, which could still be submitted at a later date.” Gearon said the company had received “updated cost modeling” from the agency as recently as September 9, days before Suess’ comments were submitted in court.
Then came the comments from Orsted’s head of marine affairs, Edward LeBlanc, who served in the military for decades and worked on offshore energy oversight. He told the court that the Navy had never once raised any issues with the project’s export cable and that as recently as July 2025, no military officials had expressed lingering concerns about electromagnetic emissions, vessel collisions or other potential national security problems.
“To date, Revolution Wind has never received a notice or any indication that it has failed to coordinate with DOD regarding its offshore activities, or that the U.S. Navy or DOD has any concerns with the ongoing coordination,” LeBlanc stated.
It was after this filing that the justice overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, approved the preliminary injunction and lifted the stop-work order.
As long as offshore wind has existed there has been tension with the U.S. military over use of the sea, and it is true that turbines could hinder radar detection.
In 2011, the Defense Department established a “clearinghouse” to resolve any potential issues with ocean energy development of any kind, whether oil, gas, or wind power. The clearinghouse reviews more than 5,000 projects every year, and its activities include regular give and take with the Interior Department and Federal Aviation Administration. One of the many pieces of evidence Orsted submitted in the Revolution Wind case was a December 2024 letter from the clearinghouse stating the project “would not have adverse impacts to DOD missions in the area.”
Josh Kaplowitz, an environmental attorney who represents renewable energy companies including offshore wind developers, and who previously worked in the Interior Department solicitor’s office, told me: “There is not a single situation I am aware of where the Defense Department ever requested something and the approving agency said, ‘No, we’re going to do something else.’”
“There are some problems with coming in after the fact and coming up with post hoc national security rationalizations when the process of review was so rigorous,” Kaplowitz said.
Independent analysis has also cleared the military’s consultation with offshore wind permitting agencies of having any serious issues.
Earlier this year the Government Accountability Office — a quasi-independent watchdog under the control of Congress — released a detailed review of the offshore wind industry’s federal permitting process. The review was requested by one of the sector’s biggest adversaries in Congress, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, who has been heavily involved in fighting offshore wind development in his home state.
Smith, a Republican, ultimately celebrated the review’s publication because it pointed out certain ways offshore wind could impact radar detection and military readiness. In his public statements, however, the lawmaker left out a key detail of the report — that it raised no issues with interactions between the military and offices involved in greenlighting offshore wind projects. In fact, it went into great detail on the lengths researchers and government officials had gone toward solving these potential problems.
“We didn’t have any recommendations there,” Frank Russo, director of GAO’s natural resources department, told me in an interview. “It seemed like coordination was going well, that DOD was satisfied with what was going on, and if there were concerns they could be mitigated.”
Russo said that Defense officials had for years been involved in offshore wind leasing, meaning that military staff from the Navy and Coast Guard had already weighed in on potential safety and readiness problems before companies even knew where they were allowed to build, and certainly prior to the project-specific permitting stage.
“At the very start of it, they know where their main concerns are,” Russo said of the Defense Department’s role in offshore wind development.
The Interior Department normally declines to comment on pending litigation. But I still wanted to ask Interior to comment on the assertions from Russo that the Interior Department and military were properly handling the security implications of offshore wind. It felt especially important to ask them about this because Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last month explained the Revolution Wind stop work order on national TV by claiming radar interference would leave the country vulnerable to “swarm attacks” from underwater drones.
Tory Peabody, a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management spokesperson, provided the following statement to Heatmap: “As a result of the court’s decision, Revolution Wind will be able to resume construction as BOEM continues its investigation into possible impacts by the project to national security and prevention of other uses on the Outer Continental Shelf. The Department of the Interior remains committed to ensuring that prior decisions are legally and factually sound.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a statement from BOEM, and to remove an errant “not” in the second-to-last paragraph.
Packed hearings. Facebook organizing. Complaints about prime farmland and a disappearing way of life. Sound familiar?
Solar and wind companies cite the rise of artificial intelligence to make their business cases after the United States government slashed massive tax incentives for their projects.
But the data centers supposed to power the AI boom are now facing the sort of swift wave of rejections from local governments across the country eerily similar to what renewables developers have been dealing with on the ground over the last decade. The only difference is, this land use techlash feels even more sudden, intense, and culturally diffuse.
What’s happening is simple: Data centers are now routinely being denied by local governments in zoning and permitting decisions after local residents turn against them. These aggrieved denizens organize grassroots campaigns, many with associated Facebook groups, and then flood city council and county commission hearings.
Just take this past week. Last Thursday, Prince George’s County, Maryland, paused all data center permitting after a campaign against converting an abandoned mall into a data center gained traction online, with a petition garnering more than 20,000 signatures. On Monday, faced with a ferocious public outcry, Google rescinded a proposal to build what would’ve been its second data center in Indiana in Franklin Township, a community in southeastern Indianapolis – a withdrawal requested mere minutes before the township council was reportedly going to reject it.
That same day, the rural Illinois town of DeKalb denied a solar company’s request to build a “boutique data center” on the same site as a previously-permitted solar farm. And on Tuesday, the small city of Howell – located smack between Lansing and Detroit, Michigan – denied a data center proposed by an anonymous Fortune 100 company. Apparently, so many people showed up to voice their opposition to the project that the hearing was held in a high school gymnasium.
Opponents cite many things in their arguments against development, some unique to the sector like energy and water use, and others familiar to the solar and wind industry, like preserving prime farmland or maintaining a way of life.
These arguments are incredibly salient, as polling conducted by Heatmap News has revealed: less than half of Americans would ever support a data center coming near them, and this technology infrastructure is less popular than any form of renewable energy. Digging into the cross-tabs of that poll, data centers are unpopular with essentially all age demographics, and arguments against the facilities – like “they use too much water” or “they consume too much electricity” – get relatively similar agreement from registered Democrats and Republicans alike.
Ben Inskeep, a clean energy advocate in Indianapolis, told me he started fighting data centers last year after he became aware of the total power needed to fuel the rising number of projects in the state. His advocacy organization, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, previously weighed in on rate hikes and electricity generation decisions. Now, they’re tracking more than 40 data center projects they say are proposed in the state and getting involved in the fight on the ground against them.
Inskeep told me that, from his point of view, the primary support for data centers comes from local governments and municipally-funded works like schools and health facilities that are facing slashed budgets. In some cases the projects are being rejected despite representing millions – even billions – in capital investments and potential tax revenues so large that municipal governments are put between a rock and a hard place as they’re pressured by a weakening economy and state funding cuts.
That’s what happened in Indianapolis. Earlier this month the school district that would’ve been funded by the now-rejected Google data center came out in support of the project, declaring it would welcome new tax revenue, and said it would also lead to new educational partnerships with the tech giant. But none of that mattered. Some local officials even lambasted their colleagues' support as unwarranted, a lashing out that reminds me of what happens to pro-solar officials in Ohio.
Heatmap News has been tracking contested data center projects since the spring of this year and has found almost 100 projects under development across the country that are being actively fought by local organizers, citizens advocacy groups, and environmental organizations. The data is preliminary and likely an undercount.
Still, there’s lots to glean from it. Crucially, as we’ve seen with renewable energy development, data center opposition crops up most often in tandem with the number of projects proposed and constructed. This is only logical: the more of something that is built in a place, the more likely people are to say, “We’ve built enough of that.” This is why Virginia is the top state when it comes to data centers being opposed – it’s a hub that’s seen development spike for far longer than elsewhere in the United States.
I believe that as data center project proposals continue to rise across the country, we’ll see in parallel rising hostility to their development – potentially much larger than anything renewable energy has ever faced. It will undoubtedly also be a problem for anyone in solar or wind who is riding on an AI boom to add demand for their projects.