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He promised to protect almost a third of the U.S. So far he’s nowhere close.
Over the course of a presidential term, a mature ironwood tree will add only about four inches to its height. Unless you happen to see one during the 10 or 12 days in May that pale pink flowers cover its branches, it’s not a shrub you’re likely to call one of the Sonoran Desert’s most attractive flora — gnarled and hunched, the ironwood lacks both the alien charm of the Joshua tree and the iconic flamboyance of the Saguaro cactus. It makes up for this with its longevity: Some ironwoods growing in the hills east of the Coachella Valley have clung there 400 years longer than California has been a state. Adequately protected, those very same trees could plausibly still be standing for our successors to marvel at in the year 2724 — 175 presidential terms from now.
Who knows if they’ll still talk about President Joe Biden then — in 700 years, he’ll be as deep in the past as Edward II of England is now. But if those ironwood trees are still standing, it could be because of him. Biden has called the fight against climate change the defining cause of his presidency, and he views conservation and the preservation of biodiversity as part and parcel of that legacy. His 30x30 executive order — which aims to set aside 30% of America’s lands and waters for conservation by 2030 — was a week-one priority once he took office.
Among his best remaining opportunities to add to his tally would be the designation of Chuckwalla National Monument, a 660,000-acre stretch of desert south of Joshua Tree National Park that is home to one-fifth of the ironwood trees left in the world. The same goes for a sacred and culturally significant region in the southwest corner of California called Kw’tsán; about Sáttítla, a vulnerable volcanic landscape near Mt. Shasta; about the Owyhee, a million-acre Oregon watershed that sits in the crosshairs of mining and energy development; and about the homestead in Maine that belonged to Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the U.S. cabinet. The list goes on.
But with less than two months until Biden’s move-out day, environmental advocates are starting to wonder whether he’ll ever get around to fulfilling his promise.
“There are still several national monument campaigns that are ready to go and awaiting the president’s signature, and those are the sorts of things that could cement President Biden’s legacy as one of the great conservation presidents of all time — if he takes those steps here in the last few weeks,” Aaron Weiss, the deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation advocacy group, told me.
When Biden took office in 2021, roughly 293 million acres of the United States fell under the protection of various federal laws, about 12% of his 30% goal. Since then, Biden has set aside another 1%, or 37 million acres, for protection, including about 1.6 million acres of new monuments under the Antiquities Act. So far, Biden has protected slightly less land than President Bill Clinton did in his first term, per the Center for Western Priorities’ accounting. And every day that passes matters; the Center for American Progress has found that the U.S. loses a football field’s worth of natural area every 30 seconds.
Still, conservationists have celebrated Biden’s moves to set aside the National Petroleum Reserve and the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, and to expand Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument and San Gabriel Mountains National Monument in California. “When you look at it from a traditional land protection perspective, I think [the Biden administration has] a strong record,” Chris Wood, the president and chief executive officer of the conservation group Trout Unlimited, told me.
And Mustafa Santiago Ali, the executive vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, also told me not to discount Biden’s designation of the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument in Illinois, the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Illinois and Mississippi, and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona, even though they don’t add substantial acreage to his totals. “Folks may not pay attention to how important those monuments are — honoring folks who have sacrificed in the past,” Ali said. Weiss, likewise, commended Biden and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland for “acknowledging that you need Indigenous stewardship to lead and be central to all public land management decisions.”
As the remaining weeks of Biden’s tenure quietly tick by, there is increasing anxiety about whether and when the president will reach for the Antiquities Act again. Kristen Brengel, the senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, told me she hopes Biden will announce at least two more national monuments between now and January 20.
Ultimately, though, when it comes to the question of how much land Biden will choose to set aside in the waning days of his administration, “the limiting factor is time,” Ryan Houston, the executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, which has campaigned extensively for the designation of an Owyhee National Monument, told me. “If we don't take action before Inauguration Day in January, then we’re entering at least a two-, four-, or six-year period where there won’t be opportunities to follow through and protect the Owyhee,” Houston went on. “And that sets us back a long way.”
Organizers don’t get a tip-off ahead of time about where or what the Biden administration is considering. Chuckwalla, with its ironwood trees, rare reptiles, cultural sites, and Joshua Tree-adjacent wildlife corridors, seems likely — Haaland visited it this spring, a portentous sign according to advocates. Other would-be monuments like the Owyhee in Oregon are less certain and may attract executive attention only if Congress fails to roll it into a public lands omnibus bill expected by the end of the year.
The clock has already run out for other key components of Biden’s conservation legacy. “In the first month of his presidency, it seemed like it would be great,” Brendan Cummings, the conservation director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit focused on endangered species protections, told me. With the president’s 30x30 executive order and his pause on federal fossil fuel leasing, it’d “seemed like he was going to live up to his promises.”
Then came the Willow Project approval, new LNG export terminal sign-offs, and so many new oil and gas permits that Biden surpassed even Trump. “One of the few areas where Biden has actually been excellent is national monuments,” Cummings conceded. “But everything else is sort of this mix of muddled middle or profoundly disappointing.” He added, “Trump took us two steps back, and Biden took us one step forward — so we’re still behind at the end of the day.”
Though the other advocates I spoke with for this story weren’t as sour on Biden’s record as Cummings, many had a wishlist of items they’d hoped Biden would address. Brengel of the NPCA had hoped there’d be more climate resiliency funding for the National Parks, which have “been on the frontlines of dealing with some of the most dramatic effects of climate change.” Wood, at Trout Unlimited, was holding out for the creation of a federal fund to deal with the legacy of abandoned mines via a royalty on hard rock metals, the only commodity produced from public lands that doesn’t have a surcharge or tax. Weiss of Western Priorities wanted to see action on livestock grazing reforms.
It’s hard to feel too frustrated with the Biden administration, though. Much of 2021 and 2022 were spent addressing Trump administration policies and roll-backs, including restoring protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. Biden’s executive powers had their limits, too. While one of his administration’s conservation wins had been blocking the culturally significant lands around New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon from new oil and gas leasing, Trump will have a relatively straightforward path to reopening it to drilling if he so chooses. “I think with the cards that we had in our hands, Deb Haaland and Biden have done everything they could do to protect this area,” Paul F. Reed, a preservation archaeologist with Archaeology Southwest, which campaigned to protect Chaco Canyon, told me. But “short of congressional action, this area will continue to be a political football.” The same may again be true for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
There is better Trump-proofing elsewhere. Jenny Rowland-Shea, the director of public lands at the left-leaning advocacy group the Center for American Progress, told me that for Trump to unwind Biden’s protections in the Arctic, which were established via a lengthier rule-making process, the incoming president would have to prove that the science behind the ecology subsistence isn’t valid — a bigger lift. It’s part of why she feels comfortable calling Biden’s actions in the Arctic one of the more significant pieces of his conservation legacy.
Others pointed to the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, which put conservation on equal footing with other land uses like drilling this past spring, as the real gift that Biden leaves behind. Wood, of Trout Unlimited, told me that what he hopes will outlast the 46th president is Biden’s approach to looking at conservation as a part of natural resiliency, the effort to “make our lands more resistant to floods, fires, and drought.” Meanwhile, Ali of NWF told me his wish is that future presidents will use Biden’s accomplishments as a “north star” to measure themselves against and surpass.
But Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity believes there is only one way for Biden to cement his legacy in the remaining weeks he has in office. “Almost everything the president does gets forgotten,” he said. “But the land that a president protects is forever.”
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Businesses were already bracing for a crash. Then came another 50% tariff on Chinese goods.
When I wrote Heatmap’s guide to driving less last year, I didn’t anticipate that a good motivation for doing so would be that every car in America was about to get a lot more expensive.
Then again, no one saw the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s tariffs coming. “We would characterize this slate of tariffs as ‘worse than the worst case scenario,’” one group of veteran securities analysts wrote in a note to investors last week, a sentiment echoed across Wall Street and reflected in four days of stock market turmoil so far.
But if the economic downturn has renewed your interest in purchasing a bike or e-bike, you’ll want to act fast — and it may already be too late. Because Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs stack on top of his other tariffs and duties, the U.S. bicycle trade association PeopleForBikes calculated that beginning on April 9, the day the newest tariffs come into effect, the duty on e-bikes from China would be 79%, up from nothing at all under President Biden. The tariff on most non-electric bikes from China, meanwhile, would spike to 90%, up from 11% on January 1 of this year. Then on Tuesday, the White House announced that it would add another 50% tariff on China on top of that whole tariff stack, starting Wednesday, in retaliation for Beijing’s counter-tariffs.
Prior to the latest announcement, Jay Townley, a founding partner of the cycling industry consulting firm Human Powered Solutions, had told me that if the Trump administration actually followed through on a retaliatory 50% tariff on top of those duties, then “we’re out of business because nobody can afford to bring in a bicycle product at 100% or more in tariffs.”
It’s difficult to overstate how existential the tariffs are for the bicycle industry. Imports account for 97% of the bikes purchased in the United States, of which 87% come from China, making it “one of the most import-dependent and China-dependent industries in the U.S.,” according to a 2021 analysis by the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates for trade-protectionist policies.
Many U.S. cycling brands have grumbled for years about America’s relatively generous de minimis exemption, a policy of waiving duties on items valued at less than $800. The loophole — which is what enables shoppers to buy dirt-cheap clothes from brands like Temu, Shein, and Alibaba — has also allowed for uncertified helmets and non-compliant e-bikes and e-bike batteries to flood the U.S. market. These batteries, which are often falsely marketed as meeting international safety standards, have been responsible for deadly e-bike fires in places like New York City. “A going retail for a good lithium-ion replacement battery for an e-bike is $800 to $1,000,” Townley said. “You look online, and you’ll see batteries at $350, $400, that come direct to you from China under the de minimis exemption.”
Cyclingnews reported recently that Robert Margevicius, the executive vice president of the American bicycle giant Specialized, had filed a complaint with the Trump administration over losing “billions in collectable tariffs” through the loophole. A spokesperson for Specialized defended Margevicius’ comment by calling it an “industry-wide position that is aligned with PeopleForBikes.” (Specialized did not respond to a request for clarification from Heatmap, though a spokesperson told Cyclingnews that de minimis imports permit “unsafe products and intellectual property violation.” PeopleForBikes’ general and policy counsel Matt Moore told me in an email that “we have supported reforming the way the U.S. treats low-value de minimis imports for several years.”)
Trump indeed axed China’s de minimis exemption as part of his April 2 tariffs — a small win for the U.S. bicycle brands. But any protection afforded by duties on cheap imported bikes and e-bikes will be erased by the damage from high tariffs imposed on China and other Asian countries. Fewer than 500,000 bicycles in a 10 million-unit market are even assembled in the United States, and essentially none is entirely manufactured here. “We do not know how to make a bike,” Townley told me flatly. Though a number of major U.S. brands employ engineers to design their bikes, when it comes to home-shoring manufacturing, “all of that knowledge resides in Taiwan, China, Vietnam. It isn’t here.”
In recent years, Chinese factories had become “very proficient at shipping goods from third-party countries” in order to avoid European anti-dumping duties, as well as leftover tariffs from Trump’s first term, Rick Vosper, an industry veteran and columnist at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, told me. “Many Chinese companies built bicycle assembly plants in Vietnam specifically so the sourcing sticker would not say ‘made in China,’” he added. Of course, those bikes and component parts are now also subject to Trump’s tariffs, which are as high as 57% for Vietnam, 60% for Cambodia, and 43% for Taiwan for most bikes. (A potential added tariff on countries that import oil from Venezuela could bump them even higher.)
The tariffs could not come at a worse time for the industry. 2019 marked one of the slowest years for the U.S. specialty retail bike business in two decades, so when COVID hit — and suddenly everyone wanted a bicycle as a way of exercising and getting around — there was “no inventory to be had, but a huge influx of customers,” Vosper told me. In response, “major players put in huge increases in their orders.”
But by 2023, the COVID-induced demand had evaporated, leaving suppliers with hundreds of millions of dollars in inventory that they couldn’t move. Even by discounting wholesale prices below their own cost to make the product and offering buy-one-get-one deals, dealers couldn’t get the bikes off their hands. “All the people who wanted to buy a bike during COVID have bought a bike and are not ready to buy another one anytime soon,” Vosper said.
Going into 2025, many retailers were still dealing with the COVID-induced bicycle glut; Mike Blok, the founder of Brooklyn Carbon Bike Company in New York City, told me he could think of three or four tristate-area shops off the top of his head that have closed in recent months because they were sitting on inventory.
Blok, however, was cautiously optimistic about his own position. While he stressed that he isn’t a fan of the tariffs, he also largely sells pre-owned bikes. On the low end of the market, the tariffs will likely raise prices no more than about $15 or $20, which might not make much of a difference to consumer behavior. But for something like a higher-end carbon fiber bike, which can run $2,700 or higher and is almost entirely produced in Taiwan, the tariffs could mean an increase of hundreds of dollars for customers. “I think what that will mean for me is that more folks will be open to the pre-owned option,” Blok said, although he also anticipates his input costs for repairs and tuning will go up.
But there’s a bigger, and perhaps even more obvious, problem for bike retailers beyond their products becoming more expensive. “What I sell is not a staple good; people don’t need a bike,” Blok reminded me. “So as folks’ discretionary income diminishes because other things become more expensive, they’ll have less to spend on discretionary items.”
Townley, the industry consultant, confirmed that many major cycling brands had already seen the writing on the wall before Trump announced his tariffs and begun to pivot to re-sale. Bicycling Magazine, a hobbyist publication, is even promoting “buying used” as one of its “tips to help you save” under Trump’s tariffs. Savvy retailers might be able to pivot and rely on their service, customer loyalty, and re-sale businesses to stay afloat during the hard days ahead; Moore of PeopleForBikes also noted that “repair services may increase” as people look to fix what they already have.
And if you don’t have a bike or e-bike but were thinking about getting one as a way to lighten your car dependency, decarbonize your life, or just because they’re cool, “there are still good values to be found,” Moore went on. “Now is a great time to avoid a likely increase in prices.” Townley anticipated that depending on inventory, we’re likely 30 to 40 days away from seeing prices go up.
In the meantime, cycling organizations are scrambling to keep their members abreast of the coming changes. “PeopleForBikes is encouraging our members to contact their elected representatives about the very real impacts these tariffs will have on their companies and our industry,” Moore told me. The National Bicycle Dealers Association, a nonprofit supporting specialty bicycle retailers, has teamed up with the D.C.-based League of American Bicyclists, a ridership organization, to explore lobbying lawmakers for the first time in decades in the hopes that some might oppose the tariffs or explore carve-outs for the industry.
But Townley, whose firm Human Powered Solutions is assisting in NBDA’s effort, shared a grim conversation he had at a recent trade show in Las Vegas, where a new board member at a cycling organization had asked him “what can we do” about Trump’s tariffs.
“I said, ‘You’re out of time,” Townley recalled. “There isn’t much that can be done. All we can do is react.”
Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.