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The West loves its wide open spaces. Utah, though, is something else.
Every state would like to think itself singular but, truly, there is no place like Utah. The Beehive State has long fascinated outsiders; today, that attention is largely trained on Netflix exposés about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ballerina farmers, and Crumbl cookies, but historically, the obsession has been with its land. Utah has the nation’s highest density of National Parks; its rivers, canyons, mountains, and deserts have stirred Mark Twain, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, and Edward Abbey. To quote a more contemporary literary conduit, Post Malone: “It’s a free country out there. You can buy suppressors in Utah. You can … walk into the grocery store with a handgun on your hip. Cowboy shit.”
More recently, Utah has sought out a different source of outsider attention — that of the United States Supreme Court. Two lawsuits that originated in the state are currently under consideration by the justices. The first, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, concerns the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act with regard to the construction of a railroad spur that would link Utah’s oil fields to the national rail lines. (Though the tracks would be in Utah, the connection would ultimately increase hazardous waxy crude oil shipments through the Colorado county in the case citation.) The second lawsuit, Utah v. the United States — which the court has yet to decide whether or not it will hear — involves the state suing the federal government over its allegedly unconstitutional control of “unused” lands by the Bureau of Land Management. If Utah prevails in the case, it could mean the vast reshaping of the American West, about 47% of which is federal land.
“Utah is all crazy, all the time right now,” Stephen Bloch, the legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a conservation nonprofit opposing Utah v. the U.S., told me.
While not immediately apparent, there is nevertheless a strange logic to the two lawsuits that otherwise appear to have little to do with one another beyond the fact of their geography. At their core, both cases are ultimately about who gets to decide to do what with Utah’s land.
To anyone familiar with land use issues in the Mountain West, all of this is fairly routine. A strain of libertarianism and anti-government individualism runs through the more conservative inland Western states, coloring everything from the gun ownership policies so colorfully observed by Post Malone to whom the states back for president. Yet in the extent to which it is willing to pursue this common ideal, Utah is still an outlier.
“Westerners revere their public lands,” Betsy Gaines Quammen, a historian and author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West, told me. “This is what makes the West the West — that you can come out and just go hiking, and you’re not trespassing.” Take the recent Montana Senate race, in which incumbent Democrat Jon Tester wielded his opponent Tim Sheehy’s comparatively mild comments about privatizing public lands as a cudgel in a deep red state. (Tester, it must be added, lost his reelection bid.) But in Utah, instead of celebrating federal land as the embodiment of this Western inheritance, its politicians are trying to eliminate them.
In the case of Utah, this goal is immediate and obvious. State officials claim that the 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” BLM land in the state — that is, public lands not already designated as national parks, monuments, wilderness areas, national forests and conservation areas, or Tribal lands — are held in violation of the U.S. Constitution, which doesn’t explicitly authorize the federal government to hold land indefinitely. “Utah deserves priority when it comes to managing this land,” the state’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox said at a news conference in August, adding, “Utah is in the best position to understand and respond to the unique needs of our environment and communities.”
While Utah’s crown jewel, its “Mighty Five” National Parks, would remain under federal management, the state of Wyoming — which has backed Utah’s lawsuit in an amicus brief along with Idaho, Alaska, and the Arizona legislature — wants even more. “In Wyoming’s filing, they’re like, ‘Oh no, we’re in for everything,” Bloch said. “‘There shouldn’t be any federal land in Wyoming’ — including national parks.” More than 95% of Yellowstone National Park — the nation’s first national park, designated in 1872 — sits within Wyoming’s borders.
It seems doubtful that the Supreme Court will take up this case. For one thing, Utah is attempting to leapfrog the lower courts by taking its complaints directly to SCOTUS, a shortcut it says is justified by its concerns being “of profound importance not just to Utah, but to all the States in the Nation.” For another, President Biden’s Department of Justice has pointed out that what Utah seeks is outside the powers vested in the judicial branch; only Congress has decision-making authority over public lands. On the other hand, “Anyone right now, I think, would hesitate to say definitively, ‘Here’s what the Supreme Court will do,’” Aaron Weiss, the deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation advocacy group, told me.
Seven County Infrastructure Coalition is a different story. Opponents of the railway claim that the government’s environmental review took into account the remote economic benefits of the railway — including induced employment, a notoriously inexact projection — while not equally weighing the indirect health impacts of the rail line, such as the pollution of additional fracking wells in the Uinta Basin or frontline communities near the refineries on the Gulf, where the crude oil is ultimately headed. The Supreme Court (minus Neil Gorsuch, who recused himself at the 11th hour) heard oral arguments in the case this week, however, and appears on track to rule that the government’s NEPA review for the railroad was sufficient. That would ultimately be a win for the Uinta Basin Railway and the business coalition that brought the suit after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled there were flaws in the upstream and downstream analyses.
“I’m really worried that the court could end up inadvertently blessing this fundamentally arbitrary, imbalanced result, where an agency is allowed to talk about all the indirect benefits that they want — to go as far down the line, as far upstream, to the ends of the Earth chasing these indirect benefits — but not bother talking about the corresponding costs,” Jason Schwartz, the legal director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law, told me. “That undermines the very purpose of NEPA, which was to present the public and decision-makers with a full and balanced view of both the economic and environmental perspectives.” (Schwartz authored an amicus brief for the Institute of Policy Integrity against the government’s NEPA review.)
A ruling that reaffirms the current scope of NEPA wouldn’t be a shock — the court has always sided with the government in such cases, E&E News notes. What’s different this time is that the plaintiffs presented the court with a third option, an avenue that would severely limit the scope of the NEPA’s environmental review process going forward by restraining agency considerations only to what falls under their immediate purview. Chief Justice John Roberts has sounded skeptical of this pitch so far; it’s this third path, however, that the oil and gas producer Anschutz submitted an amicus brief to the court to support, drawing attention to the fact that “far more is at stake … than the 88-mile rail line in rural Utah.” (The company’s owner, Philip Anchutz, has close ties to Gorsuch.)
“There are so many ways to make NEPA more efficient without arbitrarily decreasing the sometimes crucial information related to indirect effects that NEPA currently provides,” Schwartz told me. Sam Sankar, the senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice, which is supporting the defense, added to me that his read on Seven County Infrastructure Coalition case is that it proves how this Supreme Court has “a pretty aggressive deregulatory, anti-environmental agenda.” The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition told Heatmap in a statement that with regards to the railroad, “we remain committed to advancing this critical infrastructure, which aims to unlock economic opportunities and support the region’s long-term development,” but that it could not comment further as the case remains under deliberation.
A threat to NEPA is also a challenge to who gets a say in what Utah does with its land, of course. Like Utah v. the U.S., the filing for Seven County Infrastructure Coalition bristles with indignation over the government’s determinations about how things should be done or what impacts should be considered, even if the Surface Transportation Board ultimately gave the railroad the green light. Utah, meanwhile, originated as a reaction to the BLM’s Public Lands Rule, in which the agency considers conservation as a land use on equal footing with those of energy development, mining, or grazing. (Specifically, Utah lawmakers were furious about the BLM closing some roads to motorized vehicles. “That’s something that Utah gets very worked up about,” Bloch, the legal director at SUWA, told me.)
There is always a risk of overascribing the state of Utah’s otherwise seemingly inexplicable actions to Mormonism — a religion that is far from monolithic and is often the subject of derision from outsiders. But Quammen, the historian, told me that you can’t separate today’s public land policies from the cultural and theological inheritances and beliefs reinforced over generations of Mormon tradition. “A lot of the people taking these stands [over public lands] come from families that have been in that area for generations, so they have stories and ideologies that have been passed down — as has their relationship with the land,” Quammen explained.
Weiss, of Western Priorities, concurred. “There are some folks in Utah who truly believe that this land belongs to them,” he said.
Quammen noted by way of example that Cliven Bundy, who led a standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 over the demand that the BLM cede its land to the states, told her his legal right to the public lands where he grazes his cattle in Nevada started when his ancestor’s horse drank from its Virgin River — although in fact it was a Southern Paiute river before that. (That’s not the only historically inaccurate ownership claim that might be at play in Utah; Bloch of SUWA noted that the lands within the exterior boundaries of the state were ceded to the federal government in 1848 through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the U.S.-Mexico War, and in that sense, “they’ve never been ‘Utah lands’ so there’s nothing to ‘give back’ to Utah.”)
Preservationists and conservationists during the settlement era saw Utah’s landscape as untrammeled (“also not true, because it was Indigenous land,” Quammen added) and in need of protection, but early church belief viewed it differently. “They thought that the land being utilized, built, and made productive was pleasing to the eye of God,” Quammen said. Finally, Joseph Smith, the founder of LDS, emphasized the importance of his adherents understanding the U.S. Constitution inside and out. In the case of public lands disputes, this resurfaces in the claim that the federal government can’t own land indefinitely, Quammen told me. “That’s the piece about understanding the Constitution better than constitutional scholars.” Ironically, it disregards the state’s constitution, in which Utah explicitly agreed in 1894 to “forever disclaim[s] all right and title to the unappropriated public lands” in order to be granted statehood.
There is, of course, a significant small-government push in the Republican Party, too; privatizing land was part of the party’s presidential platform this year. It can be hard to tell, however, where one influence ends and another begins: William Perry Pendley, a key figure in the Reagan administration during the Sagebrush Rebellion fight over public lands in the 1970s and 1980s, authored the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of the Interior. Doug Burgum, Trump’s nominee for the head of the department, recently met with Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, a devout Latter-Day Saint, who afterward posted, “Great meeting with @dougburgum and planning the return of American lands to the American people.” And if Trump attempts to walk back protections of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments again, that land would be added to the pot of what Utah is seeking to acquire.
Utah’s organizers seem prepared to make an appeal to Congress or the Trump administration if the Supreme Court doesn’t make a move in their favor; funding for the messaging for Stand for Our Land, the publicity arm of the lawsuit, has reportedly outpaced the spending on lawyers. (A request for comment to the Utah Attorney General’s Office and Gov. Spencer J. Cox went unanswered.)
The implications of the Supreme Court’s decisions on limiting the scope of NEPA or hearing the public lands lawsuit are vast in both cases. The former could ease the way for expansive oil and gas development in Utah, which would be “a bona fide public health nightmare,” according to Brian Moench, an anesthesiologist on the board of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, which is opposing the railroad, due to all the additional pollution. “If they’re allowed to do this and increase the oil and gas drilling production by 500% — I don't know what you would call the end result. Unlivable, as far as I’m concerned.”
In the case of the public lands, meanwhile, “I think [Utah is] trying to give the impression that these are scrubby lands that nobody cares about when, in fact, it concerns landscapes like Labyrinth Canyon or the Dirty Devil or the Fisher Towers — these very iconic red rock landscapes that Americans think about when they think about visiting the state,” Bloch told me. “Those are the types of places in the crosshairs with this lawsuit.”
Ironically, it’s doubtful that a transfer of public lands would even benefit most Utahns. Because states can’t run deficits, a disaster like a bad wildfire would drain the Utah budget. Additionally, ranchers would pay far more for grazing their cattle on state lands (as high as $19.50 per animal unit per month, per the BLM) than on federal lands, where the fee is a dirt-cheap $1.35. Ultimately, the state likely wouldn’t even possess much of the land it claims to want so badly.
Utah’s politicians “would much prefer to be able to sell off any lands that they want — whether it’s for oil and gas leasing, whether it’s for mansions near national parks. This is very valuable land and a very valuable resource that belongs to all Americans,” Weiss of Western Priorities said. “And Utah would prefer if it belonged to them.”
Public lands and pride in the natural environment are fundamental to many Westerners’ beliefs and identities. By that token, it would seem Utah has made a miscalculation that only an insider could truly appreciate the cost of; by taking over control of portions of its territory from the federal government, it would be, in effect, boxing Utahns out of their own lands —a craven, modern twist if ever there was one.
But to be able to hike or hunt, to pitch a tent, to fish, to stargaze, to graze one’s cattle on nearly 70% of the land in Utah, because it belongs to us, the public?
Now that’s cowboy shit.
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Rob and Jesse get into the nitty gritty on China’s energy policy with Joanna Lewis and John Paul Helveston.
China’s industrial policy for clean energy has turned the country into a powerhouse of solar, wind, battery, and electric vehicle manufacturing.
But long before the country’s factories moved global markets — and invited Trump’s self-destructive tariffs — the country implemented energy and technology policy to level up its domestic industry. How did those policies work? Which tools worked best? And if the United States needs to rebuild in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, what should this country learn?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with two scholars who have been studying Chinese industrial policy since the Great Recession. Joanna Lewis is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. She’s also the author of Green Innovation in China. John Paul Helveston is an assistant professor in engineering management and systems engineering at George Washington University. He studies consumer preferences and market demand for new technologies, as well as China’s longstanding gasoline car and EV industrial policy. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: One kind of classical hard problem about industrial policy is selecting the technology that is going to eventually be a winner. And there’s a few ways to get around this problem. One is to just make lots of bets.
One thing that’s been a little unclear to me about the set of technology bets that China has made is that it has seemed to pick a set of technologies that are now extremely competitive globally, and it did seem to pick up on those technologies before Western governments or firms really got to them. Is that entirely because China just made a bunch of technology bets and it happened that these are the ones that worked out? Is it because China could look ahead to the environmental needs of the world and the clean development needs of the world and say, well, there’s probably going to be a need for solar? There’s probably going to be a need for wind? There’s probably going to be a need for EVs? Or is it a third thing, which is that China’s domestic needs, its domestic energy security needs, just happen to align really well with the direction of development that the world is kind of interested in moving in anyway.
John Paul Helveston: All of the above. I don’t know — like, that’s the answer here. I’ll add one thing that’s a little bit nuanced: There’s been tremendous waste. I’ll just put that out there. There’s been all kinds of investments that did not pan out at all, like semiconductors for a long, long time. Just things that didn’t work.
I think where China has had a lot of success is in areas where … It’s like the inverse of what the United States innovation ecosystem does well. China’s ecosystem is really driven around production, and a lot of that is part of the way the government’s set up, that local provinces have a ton of power over how money gets spent, and often repurpose funds for export-oriented production. So that’s been a piece of the engine of China’s economic miracle, is mass producing everything.
But there’s a lot of knowledge that goes along with that. When you look at things like solar, that technology goes back many, many decades for, you know, satellites. But making it a mass produced product for energy applications requires production innovations. You need to get costs down. You need to figure out how to make the machine that makes the machine. And that is something that the Chinese ecosystem does very well.
So that’s one throughline across all of these things, is that the technology got to a certain level of maturity where production improvements and cost decreases were the bigger things that made them globally competitive. I don’t think anyone would be considering an EV if we were still looking at $1,000 a kilowatt hour — and we were there just 15 years ago. And so that’s the big thing. It’s just production. I don’t know if they’ve been exceptionally good at just picking winners, but they’re good at picking things that can be mass produced.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
That’s according to new research published today analyzing flows of minerals and metals vs. fossil fuels.
Among fossil fuel companies and clean energy developers, almost no one has been spared from the effects of Trump’s sweeping tariffs. But the good news is that in general, the transition to clean energy could create a world that is less exposed to energy price shocks and other energy-related trade risks than the world we have today.
That’s according to a timely study published in Nature Climate Change on Wednesday. The authors compared countries’ trade risks under a fossil fuel-based energy economy to a net-zero emissions economy, focusing on the electricity and transportation sectors. The question was whether relying on oil, gas, and coal for energy left countries more or less exposed than relying on the minerals and metals that go into clean energy technologies, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and uranium.
First the researchers identified which countries have known reserves of which resources as well as those countries’ established trading partners. Then they evaluated more than a thousand pathways for how the world could achieve net-zero emissions, each with different amounts or configurations of wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, and electric vehicles, and measured how exposed to trade risks each country would be under each scenario.
Ultimately, they found that most countries’ overall trade risks decreased under net-zero emissions scenarios relative to today. “We have such a concentration of fossil resources in a few countries,” Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study, told me. Transition minerals, by contrast, are less geographically concentrated, so “you have this ability to hedge a little bit across the system.”
The authors’ metric for trade risk is a combination of how dependent a given country is on imports and how many trading partners it has for a given resource, i.e. how diverse its sourcing is. “If you have a large domestic supply of a resource, or you have a large trade network, and you can get that resource from lots of different trading partners, you're in a relatively better spot,” Davis said.
Of course, this is a weird time to conclude that clean energy is better equipped to withstand trade shocks. As my colleagues at Heatmap have reported, Trump’s tariffs are hurting the economics of batteries, renewables, and minerals production, whether domestic or not. The paper considers risks from “random and isolated trade shocks,” Davis told me, like losing access to Bolivian lithium due to military conflict or a natural disaster. Trump’s tariffs, by contrast, are impacting everything, everywhere, all at once.
Davis embarked on the study almost two years ago after working as a lead author of the mitigation section of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a report delivered to Congress every four years. A lot of the chapter focused on the economics of switching to solar and wind and trying to electrify as many end uses of energy as possible, but it also touched on considerations such as environmental justice, water, land, and trade. “There's this concern of having access to some of these more exotic materials, and whether that could be a vulnerability,” he told me. “So we said, okay, but we also know we're going to be trading a lot less fossil fuels, and that is probably going to be a huge benefit. So let's try to figure out what the net effect is.”
The study found that some more affluent countries, including the United States, could see their energy security decline in net-zero scenarios unless their trade networks expand. The U.S. owns 23% of the fossil reserves used for electricity generation, but only 4% of the critical materials needed for solar panels and wind turbines.
One conclusion for Davis was that the U.S. should be much more strategic about its trade partnerships with countries in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Companies are already starting to invest in developing mineral resources in those regions, but policymakers should make a concerted effort to develop those trade relationships, as well. The study also discusses how governments can reduce trade risks by investing in recycling infrastructure and in research to reduce the material intensity of clean energy technologies.
Davis also acknowledged that focusing on the raw materials alone oversimplifies the security question. It also matters where the minerals are processed, and today, a lot of that processing happens in China, even for minerals that don’t originate there. That means it will also be important to build up processing capacity elsewhere.
One caveat to the paper is that comparing the trade risks of fossil fuels and clean energy is sort of apples and oranges. A fossil fuel-based energy system requires the raw resource — fuel — to operate. But a clean energy system mostly requires the raw materials in the manufacturing and construction phase. Once you have solar panels and wind turbines, you don’t need continuous commodity inputs to get energy out of them. Ultimately, Davis said, the study’s conclusions about the comparative trade risks are probably conservative.
“Interrupting the flow of some of these transition materials could slow our progress in getting to the net zero future, but it would have much less of an impact on the actual cost of energy to Americans,” he said. “If we can successfully get a lot of these things built, then I think that's going to be a very secure situation.”
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.”