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Yes, it’s possible — even in the suburbs.
I love driving. Love it. And I am not alone.
“Automobility is our national way of life,” the historian and journalist Dan Albert has written. Getting your driver’s license is as close to a coming-of-age ritual as we have; cars inspire everything from our music to our movies to the design of where we live. At the same time, the automobile has boxed out other options for getting around, poisoned the air we breathe, and is the country’s most significant single cause of climate change.
Driving is so integral to American life that only 8% of U.S. households currently get by without owning a car (and 20% of those carless households, including mine, are located in the relative mass transit paragon New York City). For most people, “giving up driving” is more of a radical thought experiment than a realistic possibility.
Here’s the thing, though: You can almost certainly drive less than you do right now. Yes, that takes thinking and planning and doing some things differently than the way you’ve always done. (You can also check out our e-bike guide for more advice on that.) But the majority of car trips made by U.S. drivers are for distances of less than three miles. “If I just need to pick up a carton of milk, does it make sense to do that in a 6,000-pound metal box on wheels that is powered by dinosaur juice? Not so much,” Doug Gordon, the cohost of “The War on Cars,” a podcast about the fight against car culture, told me recently for our guide about how to drive less.
As urban theorists have argued for decades, America’s overreliance on cars has reduced our overall freedom. In addition to diminishing our options for getting around — it’s car or bust in places without safe bike lanes, public transportation options, or dense residential and commercial development — there is also the “inescapable dependence on a vast support structure comprising oil refineries, tanker fleets, service stations, repair shops, road crews, traffic police, emergency services, investment in road projects, manufacturing, licensing, registration, insurance, and all who work in these areas,” notes the Public Transport Users Association. “Seen this way, even a bicycle permits greater freedom.”
Cycling is, on balance, usually more convenient than driving (no need to look for parking!), not to mention far cheaper and healthier. Driving costs about $5,522 per year, according to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics; cycling only 10 miles a week can knock off about $299. Other studies have found that the health benefits of cycling add an additional three to 14 months to your life, even when the possibilities of collisions and air pollution are factored in.
We can’t just Tesla our way out of the global emissions problem, either. To reduce transportation emissions by 45% by 2030, we would need 70 million electric vehicles on the road — in addition to reducing miles driven 20% per capita, RMI has found. Public transportation or cycling are the next best options for most people in most places.
E-bikes, especially, are incredible car replacement tools, helping to make otherwise daunting commutes manageable for a bigger pool of people (you don’t even have to be athletic!). While there can be sticker shock shopping around, there are also also all kinds of e-bike incentive programs and lending libraries available, and even higher-end models cost cost a fraction of a car at the end of the day. (“Well, but what if it rains?” As the old Scandi saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad weather; just bad clothing..)
Americans admittedly have one very good reason to resist letting go of their cars: Our infrastructure is so overwhelmingly car-centric that it is actively hostile to people who are thinking about alternative ways of getting around. “So often in the United States, we think about things like, ‘What is the most convenient way for every single person in a car to get from Point A to Point B with as few obstacles as possible?’” Alexa Sledge, the director of communications at Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit organization that promotes non-polluting and safe travel in New York City, told me. “But that leaves so many people behind.”
This might actually be one of the biggest social benefits of using your car less: It will, in turn, open your eyes to how little room has been left for anything else. “Reimagining how we’re going to truly allocate our public resources — our public dollars, our public services — to serve everyone is so important,” Sledge stressed. Looking around, you’ll realize there is almost never a justifiable reason for your suburb or city to lack protected bike lanes or sidewalks or crosswalks — other than because they weren’t expected or demanded in the first place. What a failure of imagination that is.
And the best part? Even as you think about driving a little less, you can still love cars. A car can be an incredible freedom machine. But it isn’t the only one.
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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.