You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
A conversation with Manjula Martin about her new book The Last Fire Season.
When Manjula Martin was growing up in Northern California in the 1980s, wildfires weren’t something she thought about much. She knew about disaster — the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, which killed 63 people and injured thousands, hit when she was a teenager — but fire, she thought, was just something that happened up in the mountains in the summer.
Things are different now. In 2017, Martin left the high prices of San Francisco for the redwoods of Sonoma County. The night of their housewarming party, a firestorm swept through Santa Rosa and Sonoma and Napa counties. The next year — 5 years ago this week — the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive fire in the state’s history, destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.
In her new book, The Last Fire Season (out on January 16 next year), Martin writes about the fires that swept through California in 2020, weaving her personal story with that of fire in California writ large. It’s a beautiful book, and I called her up to talk about her relationship with fire and how we can learn to live with the changing world. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The book opens in 2020, which was a year of multiple fire complexes. Was that the first time fire made itself known in the immediate vicinity of your home?
No, it wasn’t. But it was the first time that I realized that it wasn’t an anomaly.
We had horrible fires near my area in 2017. In 2018, the Camp Fire happened in Northern California, which was like a four-hour drive away, but the smoke from that fire lingered in the Bay Area for weeks. And then in 2019, the Kincade fire was a huge fire up here in Sonoma, and the entire west of the county was evacuated in basically the course of a night, including ourselves.
Then in 2020, the Lightning Complex fires happened in late August, which is what the book starts with. And that was the moment where I personally was like, “oh, this is going to keep happening.”
Before that a natural disaster to me felt like a thing that happened once and then that’s it, right? It wasn’t connected to larger things for me. But the fact is that the new wildfires that we’re having are bigger and hotter and far more destructive than the previous wildfires we’ve had, and 2020, which is probably far too late, was the year that I personally put that all together under the name of climate change. It wasn’t the first year I knew about fire, but it was the moment I realized that I was going to be living with fire for the rest of my life.
I was struck by your description of the 2020 fires and the ways that COVID complicated your experience of them. It reminded me of the concept of cascading events; it was striking to read about how your go bag was filled with these N95 masks that were there for the sake of the fires, but also, of course, turned out to have utility for this other thing that you’re dealing with at the same time.
That was one of the reasons why I chose to center the book around 2020. I think that was a moment where it became clear for a lot of people that disasters don’t take their turn. When it was happening, I felt it was a historic moment.
You named your book The Last Fire Season. But, of course, it wasn’t the last.
Unfortunately not. The book began as an essay, and since I was writing it in 2021 I thought I was writing about the last fire season I had experienced. But then I realized that it was actually a really great title for a book. It’s pretty commonly acknowledged now that in the North American West, fire season isn’t really a thing anymore. Now fire authorities talk about having a fire year.
That is directly linked to the changing of the weather and the climate. But for me, the deeper meaning of it is this idea that fire being seasonal also sort of implies that it’s temporary, and that it’s going to go away. But really it’s not seasonal, it’s part of this land. And we’re going to be living with it forever.
There’s a point in your book where you write that the California ecosystem was fire-adapted, but also that fire is changing. What do you mean by that?
Since time immemorial, California’s ecosystems — from oak woodlands to redwood forests to grasslands and chaparral — evolved with fire as part of their natural cycle. Fire is actually something that helps the cycle of the landscape reset and continue.
And this was something that Indigenous people knew and really sort of harnessed and used in the way that they tended the lands. But the genocide of Indigenous people in California really sort of stopped that cycle, as is the case with colonialism in most places.
Right, you have a chapter about the Indigenous history of fire in California and the suppression of fire both through violence against Indigenous communities and also a long history of policies against fire.
Yeah, the colonial policies of managing the land in California had been what they call ”total fire exclusion,” which is basically the idea that all fire is bad and we need to extinguish fires right away. There was a policy in place called the 10 AM policy that actually said every new forest fire needs to be extinguished by 10 AM the next morning. And, you know, there are a lot of reasons why that happened, including profits and fear and prioritizing human habitat and recreation over the landscape. But the result is that the landscapes here are actually neglected at this point, 150 years after colonization.
You wrote at one point about going to prescribed burns and there was a section that really stood out to me:
Fire is exuberant. It’s joyous. It dances. I can see why people joke that all firefighters are secret pyros. It’s so much fun.
I fully relate to this feeling. Has going to prescribed burns changed your own relationship with fire?
Good fire and cultural fire, which is generally the term we use when we’re talking about Indigenous use of fire, have radically changed my feelings about fire. Humans have evolved with fire, and the more I engage with fire, the more I learn about it, the more I understand its role in both the land and the history of this place, the less afraid I feel.
You write about your own experience with getting a hysterectomy and how that affected your life afterwards, and I thought that was an interesting choice. You could have written a book that was just about fire, and we could have never learned about your hysterectomy. But you chose to include it. Can you tell me a little bit about how that came to happen?
I could have written a straight journalistic look at wildfire right now or at the 2020 fire season specifically. And that was something I toyed with. But I ultimately realized, in thinking about this idea of cascading disasters, that they’re all happening while people are living their lives. Climate change, wars, economic ruin are all happening on top of whatever else is going on in your life. So I thought this part of my life was worth including.
The hysterectomy, and many associated health crises, led me to having chronic pain. And one of the only things that helped me with that was gardening. For me, the physical act of literally touching the land, being in this dialogue with the environment and the ecosystem around me, was the thing that helped me recover from this health crisis. I wasn’t quite well. And more importantly, nature wasn’t quite well. And gardening in this environment is what really made it click for me that this environment is going through a crisis as well.
That garden was partly how you knew about the oncoming fires in 2020, right?
Yeah, when the Lightning Complex fires started, I was out in my garden watering the roses. I saw this little black object on the ground, and when I leaned down and picked it up I saw it was a leaf of a California bay laurel tree. And it was burned black, but it was still whole. It had been blown on the wind and landed in my garden. It was sort of like a messenger, telling me that a few miles away these trees were burning.
Bay trees are a natural part of the forest understory here, but they are highly flammable. They’re basically made of oil, and they serve as what’s called a ladder fuel; if fire gets in that tree, it will shoot up it and then can get into the crowns of taller trees like redwoods or oaks that would normally be more fire resistant. It’s literally a fire spreader. Anyone who lives in the area will tell you that when there’s a fire nearby it rains burnt leaves.
Parts of the book are unexpectedly written in the past tense. You write, for example, that “Northern California was a very large place,” but the depictions of events in the past or future are written in the present tense. Was that intentional? Did you mean to contract the idea of Northern California?
I absolutely did. The convention in nonfiction is to write events in the past tense, but to phrase facts, or things that are still true, in the present tense. I felt like it was important to acknowledge that the things we take as granted, these truths about the way the environment works, might not always remain that way. It was also partly a pragmatic decision, because I didn’t know what would happen before the book came out. What if my house burned down before that, or if I have to move? Things are just so chaotic right now.
The other time I break with convention is when I write about Indigenous nations and Indigenous management practices. I intentionally used the present tense there as a way to push back against the trope of a lot of non-Indigenous writers portraying Indigenous people and worldviews as extinct when in fact they’re very, very alive.
Throughout the book you’re constantly talking to your partner about whether to stay in your home or move away to a “safer” area. I think it can be really hard for people who don’t live in areas under threat to grasp just how hard the concept of migrating really is.
Right, that’s such a common binary: to stay or go. And the reality is actually a lot messier. I’m fortunate to even have the choice of whether to stay or go; I am a person who has a lot of different privileges. I have resources, I have friends, I’m educated, I’m white.
Most people don’t willingly leave their homes unless things are really bad. But it’s never really all bad: Sometimes there’s extreme weather and disasters, and then there isn’t. It’s up and down. There’s a lot of talk around what the perfect solution is, where the safe places are. And the truth is that nowhere is safe because of climate change.
For me, the point of living at this moment on this planet is that it’s messy. It’s full of grief, it’s full of joy and beauty, and it’s also dangerous. There may be a time when I leave this place, for a variety of reasons. But I think the idea that you can run away from climate change is false.
Something I’ve learned a lot from talking with people who are deeply connected to the land here and who work with fire is that you have a responsibility to the place where you live. If I love this place so much, what do I owe it? The idea of tending a place for its overall health, not just for my personal survival, is very powerful.
Right, at one point you write about you and your partner thinking about doing prescribed burns in the woods near you to help reduce the risk of more fires.
We have thought a lot about the idea of reintroducing good fire where we live. Our neighborhood has been getting together and doing work days where we clear fuels from the forest floor together. And it’s really proof of how much work is needed, because you can clear brush and cut dead limbs off trees for a day with a group of 15 people, and then you look at this tiny quarter acre that you’ve worked on, and it still needs so much more work.
Stewardship is a constant act.
Absolutely. And it might not be perfect, and honestly it might not make a difference. These woods might still burn. But if and when they do burn, they are going to be healthier afterwards because the fire is going to be healthier.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
On Neil Jacobs’ confirmation hearing, OBBBA costs, and Saudi Aramco
Current conditions: Temperatures are climbing toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit in central and eastern Texas, complicating recovery efforts after the floods • More than 10,000 people have been evacuated in southwestern China due to flooding from the remnants of Typhoon Danas • Mebane, North Carolina, has less than two days of drinking water left after its water treatment plant sustained damage from Tropical Storm Chantal.
Neil Jacobs, President Trump’s nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, fielded questions from the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday about how to prevent future catastrophes like the Texas floods, Politico reports. “If confirmed, I want to ensure that staffing weather service offices is a top priority,” Jacobs said, even as the administration has cut more than 2,000 staff positions this year. Jacobs also told senators that he supports the president’s 2026 budget, which would further cut $2.2 billion from NOAA, including funding for the maintenance of weather models that accurately forecast the Texas storms. During the hearing, Jacobs acknowledged that humans have an “influence” on the climate, and said he’d direct NOAA to embrace “new technologies” and partner with industry “to advance global observing systems.”
Jacobs previously served as the acting NOAA administrator from 2019 through the end of Trump’s first term, and is perhaps best remembered for his role in the “Sharpiegate” press conference, in which he modified a map of Hurricane Dorian’s storm track to match Trump’s mistaken claim that it would hit southern Alabama. The NOAA Science Council subsequently investigated Jacobs and found he had violated the organization’s scientific integrity policy.
The Republican budget reconciliation bill could increase household energy costs by $170 per year by 2035 and $353 per year by 2040, according to a new analysis by Evergreen Action, a climate policy group. “Biden-era provisions, now cut by the GOP spending plan, were making it more affordable for families to install solar panels to lower utility bills,” the report found. The law also cut building energy efficiency credits that had helped Americans reduce their bills by an estimated $1,250 per year. Instead, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase wholesale electricity prices almost 75% by 2035, as well as eliminate 760,000 jobs by the end of the decade. Separately, an analysis by the nonpartisan think tank Center for American Progress found that the OBBBA could increase average electricity costs by $110 per household as soon as next year, and up to $200 annually in some states.
EIA
Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco is in talks with Commonwealth LNG in Louisiana to buy liquified natural gas, Reuters reports. The discussion is reportedly for 2 million tons per year of the facility’s 9.4 million-ton annual export capacity, which would help “cement Aramco’s push into the global LNG market as it accelerates efforts to diversify beyond crude oil exports” and be the “strongest signal yet that Aramco intends to take a material position in the U.S. LNG sector,” OilPrice.com notes. LNG demand is expected to grow 50% globally by 2030, but as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported, President Trump’s tariffs could make it harder for LNG projects still in early development, like Commonwealth, to succeed. “For the moment, U.S. LNG is still interesting,” Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a research scholar focused on natural gas at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told Emily. “But if costs increase too much, maybe people will start to wonder.”
Ford confirmed this week that its $3 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan will still qualify for federal tax credits due to eleventh-hour tweaks to the bill’s language, The New York Times reports. Though Ford had said it would build its factory regardless of what happened to the credits, the company’s executive chairman had previously called them “crucial” to the construction of the facility and the employment of the 1,700 people expected to work there. Ford’s battery plant is located in Michigan’s Calhoun County, which Trump won by a margin of 56%. The last-minute tweaks to save the credits to the benefit of Ford “suggest that at least some Republican lawmakers were aware that cuts in the bill would strike their constituents the hardest,” the Times writes.
Italy and Spain are on track to shutter their last remaining mainland coal power plants in the next several months, marking “a major milestone in Europe’s transition to a predominantly renewables-based power system by 2035,” Beyond Fossil Fuels reported Wednesday. To date, 15 European countries now have coal-free grids following Ireland’s move away from coal in 2025.
Italy is set to complete its transition from coal by the end of the summer with the closure of its last two plants, in keeping with the government’s 2017 phase-out target of 2025. Two coal plants in Sardinia will remain operational until 2028 due to complications with an undersea grid connection cable. In Spain, the nation’s largest coal plant will be entirely converted to fossil gas by the end of the year, while two smaller plants are also on track to shut down in the immediate future. Once they do, Spain’s only coal-power plant will be in the Balearic Islands, with an expected phase-out date of 2030.
“Climate change makes this a battle with a ratchet. There are some things you just can’t come back from. The ratchet has clicked, and there is no return. So it is urgent — it is time for us all to wake up and fight.” — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in his 300th climate speech on the Senate floor Wednesday night.
Some of the Loan Programs Office’s signature programs are hollowed-out shells.
With a stroke of President Trump’s Sharpie, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now law, stripping the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office of much of its lending power. The law rescinds unobligated credit subsidies for a number of the office’s key programs, including portions of the $3.6 billion allocated to the Loan Guarantee Program, $5 billion for the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, $3 billion for the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, and $75 million for the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program.
Just three years ago, the Inflation Reduction Act supercharged LPO, originally established in 2005 to help stand up innovative new clean energy technologies that weren’t yet considered bankable for the private sector, expanding its lending authority to roughly $400 billion. While OBBBA leaves much of the office’s theoretical lending authority intact, eliminating credit subsidies means that it no longer really has the tools to make use of those dollars.
Credit subsidies represent the expected cost to the government of providing a loan or a loan guarantee — including the possibility of a default — and thus how much money Congress must set aside to cover these potential losses. So by axing these subsidies, Congress is effectively limiting the amount of lending that the LPO can undertake, given that many third-party lenders would be reluctant to finance riskier, more novel, or larger projects in the absence of federal credit support.
“The LPO is statutorily allowed to take loans on its books to finance these projects in these categories, but it has no credit subsidy by which to take the risk required to do so,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and a Heatmap contributor, told me.
The particular programs that have been eliminated support new and improved energy technologies, clean energy infrastructure, fuel efficient vehicles, and help native communities access energy project financing. The long-running Loan Guarantee Program and the advanced vehicles program in particular are behind some of the best known LPO efforts, supporting companies such as Tesla, Ford, and NextEra Energy, and projects such as Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear reactors, the Thacker Pass lithium mine, and Shepherd’s Flat, one of the world’s largest wind farms.
The Loan Guarantees Program is “the big Kahuna,” Arun told me. “This is the longest-standing program of the LPO. So to see this defunded is like, you’re decapitating the LPO’s crown jewel.”
The program only has about $11 million left over in credit subsidies, consisting of funding that it received prior to the IRA’s appropriations. That won’t be enough to make any meaningful loans, Arun said, and is more likely to be used to “keep a skeleton crew online” for any remaining administrative tasks.
Then there’s the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, which the IRA stood up with a whopping $250 billion in lending authority to transition and transform existing fossil fuel infrastructure for clean energy purposes. Now, OBBBA has axed the program’s remaining $5 billion in credit subsidies and replaced it with $1 billion in new subsidies for projects that “retool, repower, repurpose, or replace” existing energy infrastructure, with a focus on expanding capacity and output as opposed to decarbonizing the economy. It also refashioned the program as the predictably-named “Energy Dominance Financing” initiative.
The new-old program — which the law extended through 2028 — no longer requires LPO-funded infrastructure to reduce or sequester emissions, broadening the office’s lending authority to include support for fossil fuel and critical minerals projects. It also adds language encouraging the LPO to “support or enable the provision of known or forecastable electric supply,” which Arun fears is a “backend way of penalizing the addition of renewable energy” on previously developed land.
“Under the Trump administration’s direction, [the LPO] can use that term, ‘known and forecastable,’ to actually just say, well, guess what? Renewables are not known or forecastable because they are intermittent due to the weather,” Arun told me. So while government and private industry were once excited about, say, turning sites originally developed for coal mining or coal ash disposal into solar and battery facilities, those days are probably over.
Carbon capture in particular stands to suffer from this reprogramming, Arun said, explaining that while the Biden LPO saw potential in adding carbon capture to natural gas and coal plants, its current incarnation will no longer allocate funding in any meaningful amount “because reducing emissions is no longer part of the LPO’s mandate.” Some policymakers and clean energy developers had also hoped that excess renewable energy would make it economically feasible to power the production of hydrogen fuel with renewable energy. But with this law — and really each passing day under Trump — a mass buildout of solar and wind seems less and less likely, making it doubtful that green hydrogen will move down the cost curve.
As bleak as this looks, it’s better than it could have been. There was no guarantee that Trump would keep the LPO around at all. Even in this denuded state, the office can still fund the expansion of existing nuclear projects, and perhaps even the buildout of transmission lines or battery projects on brownfield sites, Arun said, depending on how LPO’s leadership ends up interpreting what it means to “increase the capacity output of operating infrastructure.”
But in many ways, what happened with the LPO looks like another instance of the Trump administration picking winners and losers: Yes to clean, firm energy and fossil fuels, no to solar, wind, and electric vehicles.
Take the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, for example. OBBBA nixed both its credit subsidies and its tens of billions of dollars in lending authority. That’s hardly a surprise, given that the Bush administration created the program in 2007 explicitly to support the domestic development and manufacture of fuel-efficient vehicles and components. But it means that unlike the LPO programs for which lending authority still stands, even if Congress wanted to, it could not redesign the advanced vehicles program to serve a more Trump-aligned purpose. Safer, I suppose, to cut off any opening for funding EVs and hybrids.
The latest LPO rescissions add to the growing list of reasons the private sector has to be wary of the consistently inconsistent landscape for federal funding, Arun told me. He worries that slashing the LPO’s authority at the same time as there’s so much uncertainty around tax credit eligibility will lead some companies to forgo federal funding opportunities altogether.
“We’ll see if private developers even want to play around with the LPO,” Arun told me, “given the uncertainty around the rest of the federal landscape here.”
Electric vehicle batteries are more efficient at lower speeds — which, with electricity prices rising, could make us finally slow down.
The contours of a 30-year-old TV commercial linger in my head. The spot, whose production value matched that of local access programming, aired on the Armed Forces Network in the 1990s when the Air Force had stationed my father overseas. In the lo-fi video, two identical military green vehicles are given the same amount of fuel and the same course to drive. The truck traveling 10 miles per hour faster takes the lead, then sputters to a stop when it runs out of gas. The slower one eventually zips by, a mechanical tortoise triumphant over the hare. The message was clear: slow down and save energy.
That a car uses a lot more energy to go fast is nothing new. Anyone who remembers the 55 miles per hour national speed limit of the 1970s and 80s put in place to counter oil shortages knows this logic all too well. But in the time of electric vehicles, when driving too fast slashes a car’s range and burns through increasingly expensive electricity, the speed penalty is front and center again. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.
You certainly can notice the cost of lead-footedness in a gasoline-powered car. It’s simpler today, when lots of vehicles have digital displays that show the miles per gallon you’re getting, than in the old days when you had to do the math yourself. An EV puts the hard efficiency math right in front of you. Battery life is often displayed in terms of estimated miles of range remaining, and those miles evaporate before your eyes if you climb a mountain or accelerate like a drag racer.
This is no academic concern, like trying to boost one’s fuel efficiency through hypermiling techniques such as gentle acceleration, downhill coasting, and killing the AC. In six years of owning a Tesla Model 3, I’ve pushed its range limits trying to reach far-flung national parks and other destinations where fast chargers are scarce. I’ve found myself in numerous situations where I’ve set the cruise control at exactly the speed limit or slightly below to make sure the car would reach the one and only charging depot in the vicinity. For particularly close calls, I’ve puttered white-knuckled with one eye on Tesla’s in-car energy app — and felt my stomach drop when I found myself underperforming its expectations.
Fortunately, slow works. Three years ago I managed a comfortable round-trip from what was then the closest Tesla Supercharger to Crater Lake National Park by driving there down a 55-mile-per-hour two-lane highway; at freeway speed, my little battery probably wouldn’t have made it. Today, my fully charged Model 3 might make it something like 130 to 140 miles at interstate speed, depending on elevation. Go a little slower and it comes close to matching the 200 miles of supposed range.
Fear is the speed-killer, sure. The chance of being stranded with a dead battery is enough for any driver to be scared straight into observing the posted limit. But having all that data at the ready had already started to affect my driving habits even when there was no danger of stranding myself. It’s hard to watch the range drop when you slam the accelerator without thinking of the Interstellar meme about how much this little maneuver is going to cost us. With the price of electricity at the fast charger rising, I’m much more conscious of wasting a few kilowatt-hours by being in a hurry.
The difference is stunningly clear in the kind of controlled range tests that car sites and EV influencers have been conducting. For example, the State of Charge YouTube channel recently drove the Cadillac Escalade IQ, the fully electric version of the status SUV that is officially rated at 465 miles of range. Driven at exactly 70 miles per hour until it ran out of juice, the big EV exceeded that estimate by traveling 481 miles. With the speedometer held at 60 miles per hour, however, the vehicle went 607 miles — more than 100 miles more.
Granted, the Caddy’s comically large 205 kilowatt-hour battery — more than three times as big as the one in my little Tesla — does the lion’s share of the work in allowing it to go so very many miles. A peek into State of Charge’s data, though, makes it clear what 10 miles per hour can do. Dropping from 70 miles per hour to 60 caused the car’s miles per kilowatt-hour figure to rise from 2.1 to 2.6 or 2.7.
That’s not to say EV ownership turns every driver into an energy-obsessed hypermiler. One blessing of the huge batteries that go into Cadillac EVs and Rivians is freeing their drivers from some of the mental burden of range calculations. With driving ranges reaching well above 300 miles, you’re going to make it to the next plug even if you drive like a maniac.
Even so, the increased awareness of the cost of electricity might make some of us reconsider the casual speeding we all do just to take a few minutes off the trip. That’s a good thing for public safety: Big EV batteries make these vehicles heavier than other cars, on average, and thus potentially more dangerous in auto accidents. And slowing down will be especially relevant as electricity prices outpace inflation. Consumer electricity prices are up nearly 5% over last year and are poised to get worse: The budget reconciliation bill signed by President Trump last week won’t help, as one projection sees it leading to an increase in annual energy bills of up to $290 by 2035.
To be honest, the biggest problem of slowing down a little isn’t really the extra time it takes to get someplace. It’s trying to conserve in a world where 5 to 10 miles per hour over the speed limit is the expectation. I once had to cross 140 miles of wind-swept New Mexico expanse from Albuquerque to Gallup on a single charge, a task that required driving 55 miles per hour in a 65 zone of the interstate, holding on tight as semi trucks flew past me in revved aggravation. We made it. But if you really want to make your electrons go farther, then be prepared to become the target of road rage by the hasty and the aggrieved.