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“I am increasingly becoming irrelevant in the public conversation,” says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist who until recently worked at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “And I love it.”
For years, such an exalted state was denied to Marvel. Every week, it seemed, someone — a high-profile politician, maybe, or a CEO — would say something idiotic about climate science. Journalists would dutifully call her to get a rebuttal: Yes, climate change is real, she would say, yes, we’re really certain. The media would print the story. Rinse, repeat.
A few years ago, she told a panel, half as a joke, that her highest professional ambition was not fame or a Nobel Prize but total irrelevance — a moment when climate scientists would no longer have anything useful to tell the public.
That 2020 dream is now her 2023 reality. “It’s incredible,” she told me last week. “Science is no longer even a dominant part of the climate story anymore, and I think that’s great. I think that represents just shattering progress.”
We were talking about a question, a private heresy, I’ve been musing about for some time. Because it’s not just the scientists who have faded into the background — over the past few years, the role of climate science itself has shifted. Gradually, then suddenly, a field once defined by urgent questions and dire warnings has become practical and specialized. So for the past few weeks, I’ve started to ask researchers my big question: Have we reached the end of climate science?
“Science is never done,” Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton, told me. “There’s always things that we thought we knew that we didn’t.”
“Your title is provocative, but not without basis,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and one of the lead authors of the National Climate Assessment, said.
Not necessarily no, then. My question, I always clarified, had a few layers.
Since it first took shape, climate science has sought to answer a handful of big questions: Why does Earth’s temperature change so much across millennia? What role do specific gases play in regulating that temperature? If we keep burning fossil fuels, how bad could it be — and how hot could it get?
The field has now answered those questions to any useful degree. But what’s more, scientists have advocated and won widespread acceptance of the idea that inevitably follows from those answers, which is that humanity must decarbonize its economy as fast as it reasonably can. Climate science, in other words, didn’t just end. It reached its end — its ultimate state, its Really Big Important Point.
In the past few years, the world has begun to accept that Really Big Important Point. Since 2020, the world’s three largest climate polluters — China, the United States, and the European Union — have adopted more aggressive climate policies. Last year, the global clean-energy market cracked $1 trillion in annual investment for the first time; one of every seven new cars sold worldwide is now an electric vehicle. In other words, serious decarbonization — the end of climate science — has begun.
At the same time, climate science has resolved some of its niggling mysteries. When I became a climate reporter in 2015, questions still lingered about just how bad climate change would be. Researchers struggled to understand how clouds or melting permafrost fed back into the climate system; in 2016, a major paper argued that some Antarctic glaciers could collapse by the end of the century, leading to hyper-accelerated sea-level rise within my lifetime.
Today, not all of those questions have been completely put aside. But scientists now have a better grasp of how clouds work, and some of the most catastrophic Antarctic scenarios have been pushed into the next century. In 2020, researchers even made progress on one of the oldest mysteries in climate science — a variable called “climate sensitivity” — for the first time in 41 years.
Does the field have any mysteries left? “I wouldn’t go quite so far as angels dancing on the head of a pin” to describe them, Hayhoe told me. “But in order to act, we already know what we need.”
“I think at the macro level, what we discover [next] is not necessarily going to change policymakers’ decisions, but you could argue that’s been true since the late 90s,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, agreed.
“Physics didn’t end when we figured out how to do engineering, and now they are both incredibly important,” Marvel said.
Yet across the discipline, you can see research switching their focus from learning to building — from physics, as it were, to engineering. Marvel herself left NASA last year to join Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that focuses on emissions reduction. Hausfather now works at Frontier, a tech-industry consortium that studies carbon-removal technology. Even Hayhoe — who trained as a climate scientist — joined a political-science department a decade ago. “I concluded that the biggest barriers to action were not more science,” she said this week.
To fully understand whether climate science has ended, it might help to go back to the very beginning of the field.
By the late 19th century, scientists knew that Earth was incredibly ancient. They also knew that over long enough timescales, the weather in one place changed dramatically. (Even the ancient Greeks and Chinese had noticed misplaced seashores or fossilized bamboo and figured out what they meant.) But only slowly did questions from chemistry, physics, and meteorology congeal into a new field of study.
The first climate scientist, we now know, was Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur inventor and feminist. In 1856, she observed that glass jars filled with carbon dioxide or water vapor trapped more of the sun’s heat than a jar containing dry air. “An atmosphere of that gas,” she wrote of CO₂, “would give to our earth a high temperature.”
But due to her gender and nationality, her work was lost. So the field began instead with the contributions of two Europeans: John Tyndall, an Irish physicist who in 1859 first identified which gases cause the greenhouse effect; and Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist who in 1896 first described Earth’s climate sensitivity, perhaps the discipline’s most important number.
Arrhenius asked: If the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere were to double, how much would the planet warm? Somewhere from five to six degrees Celsius, he concluded. Although he knew that humanity’s coal consumption was causing carbon pollution, his calculation was a purely academic exercise: We would not double atmospheric CO₂for another 3,000 years.
In fact, it might take only two centuries. Atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels are now 50 percent higher than they were when the Industrial Revolution began — we are halfway to doubling.
Not until after World War II did climate science become an urgent field, as nuclear war, the space race, and the birth of environmentalism forced scientists to think about the whole Earth system for the first time — and computers made such a daring thing possible. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the physicists Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald produced the first computer models of the atmosphere, confirming that climate sensitivity was real. (Last year, Manabe won the Nobel Prize in Physics for that work.) Half a hemisphere away, the oceanographer Charles Keeling used data collected from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory to show that fossil-fuel use was rapidly increasing the atmosphere’s carbon concentration.
Suddenly, the greenhouse effect — and climate sensitivity — were no longer theoretical. “If the human race survives into the 21st century,” Keeling warned, “the people living then … may also face the threat of climatic change brought about by an uncontrolled increase in atmospheric CO₂ from fossil fuels.”
Faced with a near-term threat, climate science took shape. An ever-growing group of scientists sketched what human-caused climate change might mean for droughts, storms, floods, glaciers, and sea levels. Even oil companies opened climate-research divisions — although they would later hide this fact and fund efforts to discredit the science. In 1979, the MIT meteorologist Jules Charney led a national report concluding that global warming was essentially inevitable. He also estimated climate sensitivity at 1.5 to 4 degrees Celsius, a range that would stand for the next four decades.
“In one sense, we’ve already known enough for over 50 years to do what we have to do,” Hayhoe, the Texas Tech professor, told me. “Some parts of climate science have been simply crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s since then.”
Crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s—such an idea would have made sense to the historian Thomas Kuhn. In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that science doesn’t progress in a dependable and linear way, but through spasmodic “paradigm shifts,” when a new theory supplants an older one and casts everything that scientists once knew in doubt. These revolutions are followed by happy doldrums that he called “normal science,” where researchers work to fit their observations of the world into the moment’s dominant paradigm.
By 1988, climate science had advanced to the degree that James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, could confidently warn the Senate that global warming had begun. A few months later, the United Nations convened the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an expert body of scientists asked to report on current scientific consensus.
Yet core scientific questions remained. In the 1990s, the federal scientist Ben Santer and his colleagues provided the first evidence of climate change’s “fingerprint” in the atmosphere — key observations that showed the lower atmosphere was warming in such a way as to implicate carbon dioxide.
By this point, any major scientific questions about climate change were effectively resolved. Paul N. Edwards, a Stanford historian and IPCC author, remembers musing in the early 2000s about whether the IPCC’s physical-science team should pack it up: They had done the job and shown that climate change was real.
Yet climate science had not yet won politically. Santer was harassed over his research; fossil-fuel companies continued to seed lies and doubt about the science for years. Across the West, only some politicians acted as if climate change was real; even the new U.S. president, Barack Obama, could not get a climate law through a liberal Congress in 2010.
It took one final slog for climate science to win. Through the 2010s, scientists ironed out remaining questions around clouds, glaciers, and other runaway feedbacks. “It’s become harder in the last decade to make a publicly skeptical case against mainstream climate science,” Hausfather said. “Part of that is climate science advancing one funeral at a time. But it’s also become so clear and self-evident — and so much of the scientific community supports it — that it’s harder to argue against with any credibility.”
Three years ago, a team of more than two dozen researchers — including Hausfather and Marvel — finally made progress on solving climate science’s biggest outstanding mystery, cutting our uncertainty around climate sensitivity in half. Since 1979, Charney’s estimate had remained essentially unchanged; it was quoted nearly verbatim in the 2013 IPCC report. Now, scientists know that if atmospheric CO₂ were to double, Earth’s temperature would rise 2.6 to 3.9 degrees Celsius.
That’s about as much specificity as we’ll ever need, Hayhoe told me. Now, “we know that climate sensitivity is either bad, really bad, or catastrophic.”
So isn’t climate science over, then? It’s resolved the big uncertainties; it’s even cleared up climate sensitivity. Not quite, Marvel said. She and other researchers described a few areas where science is still vital.
The first — and perhaps most important — is the object that covers two-thirds of Earth’s surface area: the ocean, Edwards told me. Since the 1990s, it has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gases, but we still don’t understand how it formed, much less how it will change over the next century.
Researchers also know some theories need to be revisited. “Antarctica is melting way faster than in the models,” Marvel said, which could change the climate much more quickly than previously imagined. And though the runaway collapse of Antarctica now seems less likely, we could be wrong, Oppenheimer reminded me. “The money that we put into understanding Antarctica is a pittance compared to what you would need to truly understand such a big object,” he said.
And these, mind you, are the known unknowns. There’s still the chance that we discover some huge new climatic process out there — at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, perhaps, or at the base of an Antarctic glacier — that has so far eluded us.
Yet in the wildfires of the old climate science, a new field is being born. The scientists who I spoke with see three big projects.
First, in the past decade, researchers have gotten much better at attributing individual weather events to climate change. They now know that the Lower 48 states are three times more likely to see a warm February than they would without human-caused climate change, for instance, or that Oregon and Washington’s record-breaking 2021 heat wave was “virtually impossible” without warming. This work will keep improving, Marvel said, and it will help us understand where climate models fail to predict the actual experience of climate change.
Second, scientists want to make the tools of climate science more useful to people at the scales where they live, work, and play. “We just don’t yet have the ability to understand in a detailed way and at a small-enough scale” what climate impacts will look like, Oppenheimer told me. Cities should be able to predict how drought or sea-level rise will affect their bridges or infrastructure. Members of Congress should know what a once-in-a-decade heat wave will look like in their district five, 10, or 20 years hence.
“It’s not so much that we don’t need science anymore; it’s that we need science focused on the questions that are going to save lives,” Oppenheimer said. The task before climate science is to steward humanity through the “treacherous next decades where we are likely to warm through the danger zone of 1.5 degrees.”
That brings us to the third project: That climatologists must create a “smoother interface between physical science and social science,” he said. The Yale economist Richard Nordhaus recently won a Nobel Prize for linking climate science with economics, “but other aspects of the human system are still totally undone.” Edwards wanted to get beyond economics altogether: “We need an anthropology and sociology of climate adaptation,” he said. Marvel, meanwhile, wanted to zoom the lens beyond just people. “We don’t really understand ... what the hell plants do,” she told me. Plants and plankton have absorbed half of all carbon pollution, but it’s unclear if they’ll keep doing so or how all that extra carbon has changed how they might respond to warming.
Economics, sociology, botany, politics — you can begin to see a new field taking shape here, a kind of climate post-science. Rooted in climatology’s theories and ideas, it stretches to embrace the breadth of the Earth system. The climate is everything, after all, and in order to survive an era when human desire has altered the planet’s geology, this new field of study must encompass humanity itself — and all the rest of the Earthly mess.
Nearly a century ago, the philosopher Alexander Kojéve concluded it was possible for political philosophy to gain a level of absolute knowledge about the world and, second, that it had done so. In the wake of the French Revolution, some fusion of socialism or capitalism would win the day, he concluded, meaning that much of the remaining “work to do” in society lay not in large-scale philosophizing about human nature, but in essentially bureaucratic questions of economic and social governance. So he became a technocrat, and helped design the market entity that later became the European Union.
Is this climate science’s Kojéve era? It just may be — but it won’t last forever, Oppenheimer reminded me.
“Generations in the future will still be dealing with this problem,” he said. “Even if we get off fossil fuels, some future idiot genius will invent some other climate altering substance. We can never put climate aside — it’s part of the responsibility we inherited when we started being clever enough to invent problems like this in future.”
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.