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Electric Vehicles

Biden’s Plan to Jumpstart Offshore Wind

On the new auction schedule, Tesla earnings, and the Mercedes G-Class EV

Biden’s Plan to Jumpstart Offshore Wind
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A Saharan dust storm turned skies red in Greece • More heavy rain is expected in China’s flooded Guangdong province • Red Flag fire weather warnings are in place across much of New Mexico.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Key takeaways from Tesla’s quarterly earnings report

Tesla reported first quarter earnings yesterday. The electric car company’s profits fell 55%, and revenue fell 9%. But shares rose more than 10% in after-hours trading following the shareholder update and earnings call. Here are a few things we learned from the report:

  • CEO Elon Musk said Tesla “should be thought of as an AI/robotics company,” and that “if you value Tesla as an auto company, that’s the wrong framework.”
  • Plans for a sub-$30,000 EV haven’t been entirely scrapped, as previously reported. The company said it will “accelerate” the launch of new and more affordable models, but indicated “that any new, cheaper vehicle would not necessarily be entirely new nor unlock massive new savings through an all-new production process,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin. The robotaxi, however, will rely on a new platform.
  • Tesla’s energy business is growing faster than its car business. The company deployed just over 4 gigawatts of energy storage in the first quarter of the year, and its energy revenue was up 7% from a year ago. Profits from the business more than doubled.
  • Musk still wants to sell a “general purpose, bi-pedal, humanoid robot,” and said the Optimus robot would be in “limited production” in a factory doing “useful tasks” by the end of this year.

2. Biden administration plans to hold up to a dozen offshore wind auctions by 2028

The Interior Department today announced that it will hold up to 12 offshore wind auctions through 2028, with four of those auctions happening by the end of 2024. President Biden has a goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, but the industry has been blown off course thanks to inflation and disrupted supply chains. The Interior Department has held four offshore wind auctions so far during Biden’s presidency. The new schedule is an attempt to “jump-start the fledgling offshore wind sector” by expanding development potential, reportedBloomberg. “Our offshore wind leasing schedule will provide predictability to help developers and communities plan ahead and will provide the confidence needed to continue building on the tremendous offshore wind supply chain and manufacturing investments that we've already seen,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.

3. Poll: Few climate-concerned voters know about Biden’s climate policies

In the last month alone, $37 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act has gone toward climate projects. That amount “exceeds what the recent foreign aid bill will give to Israel, Taiwan, and humanitarian aid in Gaza, combined,” reported Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer. As the election approaches, the Biden administration is spending funds from the IRA much faster than it was last year. But it seems President Biden’s climate investments and emission-slashing initiatives aren’t getting through to Americans. A CBS News/YouGov poll out this week found that even the Americans who are most concerned about climate change are unlikely to be aware of the administration’s efforts to combat it. About 45% of respondents said climate change is a very important issue, but just 10% of those said they had heard or read “a lot” about Biden’s climate policies. And 42% said the administration hadn’t done enough on the issue.

More than half of respondents said the outcome of the November election would have no effect on climate change. A recent analysis from Carbon Brief found that a second Trump presidency would likely cause the U.S. to miss its 2030 climate pledges, could lead to an additional 4 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, and result in more than $900 billion in damages. “A second Trump term that successfully dismantles Biden’s climate legacy would likely end any global hopes of keeping global warming below 1.5 [degrees Celsius],” the report said.

4. Global plastic treaty talks start in Canada

Negotiations on a global plastics treaty kicked off yesterday in Ottawa, Canada. The UN-led session is the second-to-last meeting before the treaty on reducing plastic pollution has to be finalized later this year, so the stakes are high, as are tensions between oil-producing nations and other countries that want to see plastic production dramatically reduced. The negotiations run through April 29.

5. Mercedes shows off new electric G-Class SUV

Mercedes unveiled the new all-electric version of its luxury G-Class offroader yesterday. The G-Class is “in many ways, Mercedes’ most prestigious car,” said Tim Evans at TechCrunch, so making an electric version is “the biggest test yet for the company’s recently scaled back electrification plans.”

Mercedes

The Mercedes-Benz G 580 with EQ technology (critics hate the name, by the way) can do a tank turn, and has one motor for each wheel, offering serious control for offroading. And it has a fake engine noise, the “G-Roar.” It’s also just a beautiful vehicle that seems to stay true to its design roots. The range, at about 293 miles, is relatively low but the sticker price, at about $150,000, is very high. It’ll be on sale in the U.S. in the second half of 2024. Here are some early reactions:

  • “The electric G-Class sounds like an impressive package, enough to woo any true fan of performance away from the models with internal combustion.” –Tim Stevens at TechCrunch.
  • “Is it a car the world needs? Probably not. But that’s never stopped the G – in any of its army or AMG forms – being one of the enduring off-road icons.” –Ollie Kew at Top Gear.
  • “This is a car that has been defined in many ways by excess, with the gas version getting just 14 miles per gallon. And yet here it is, in electric trim, with a huge battery (but not out of line with other huge EVs), beating the gas version’s performance both on- and off-road.” –Jameson Dow at Electrek.

THE KICKER

America’s first commercial big-rig hydrogen fuel station opened this week in Oakland, California.

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Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

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The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
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The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

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Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
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Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

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