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The first Earth Day email of the season arrived in my inbox in July. A tea company wanted to assure me — either three months late or nine months early — that it honored “the spirit of Earth Day every day.”
The next email came in October, letting me know that the CEO of a campsite-booking app I’d never used had spoken at a “Celebration of Half-Earth Day” (come again? Half-Earth Day?). That email was followed by another, from a music venue in Brooklyn, suggesting I observe Earth Day this year by attending “Our Planet Live In Concert.”
As April 22 approaches, the emails have become more frequent: I’ve been told to “Celebrate Earth Day with Adobe Stock”; invited to join an “Around the World” Earth Day challenge on Strava; pushed to read a frame company’s Earth Day pledges; promised my donation to the National Geographic Society will “be matched 2x — DOUBLING your impact as we celebrate Earth month”; and reminded by a pandemic-famous yoga instructor that Earth Day 2023 is “beautifully coinciding with the Lyrid Meteor Shower!”
With Saturday still days away, the onslaught is only getting started. Because Earth Day was intentionally not trademarked by its organizers when it began in 1970 — “we wanted groups to be able to take part, so we just made it public domain,” founder Denis Hayes told The Wall Street Journal last year — the week leading up to Earth Day now presents marketers with an opportunity to connect with their email subscribers. Er, I mean, to raise environmental awareness!
But come on, we all know better. Complaints about the corporate co-opting of Earth Day go back to at least 2003; these days, “it’s become fashionable for environmental journalists, myself included, to roll their eyes at the mere mention of Earth Day,” Rebecca Leber wrote for Mother Jones, going on to call April 22 “a trite, too-little-too-late rite marked more by corporate greenwashing than a recognition of the Earth’s complexity.” In fact, Earth Day-related advertising has gotten so out of hand that Hayes now says he regrets not getting that trademark (confusingly, “Earth Day Canada” is trademarked, specifically so it can prevent organizations from “shamelessly” attaching themselves to environmental causes).
Though the original Earth Day movement was explicitly antibusiness, that began to change around 1990, when AdWeek says the emphasis of the holiday “shifted from regulatory objectives to protest and pressure directed at corporate behavior.” But by telling customers to vote with their wallets, activists unintentionally gave brands an opening to “burnish [themselves] as responsible, caring stewards of the environment.” Since then, all the worst environmental offenders — from McDonald’s to Chase to ExxonMobil — have run Earth Day-related promotions, to the horror of onlooking activists.
The truth is, the only relationship most people actually have with Earth Day anymore is as a consumer.
Interest in the holiday has steadily dwindled over the past decade, even as promotions and sales keep rolling in. If you aren’t in elementary school, the likely extent of your interaction with Earth Day this year will be deleting an unopened email soliciting a donation to the Sierra Club or hawking a socially responsible nonalcoholic beer.
Perhaps part of the issue is that most holidays commemorate something that has, at least superficially, already been achieved: think Independence Day, Labor Day, or Juneteenth. Though the first Earth Day massively raised awareness of the environmental movement and is credited for the momentum behind the passage of the Clean Water Act, saving the ozone layer, and solving the problem of acid rain, there is nothing solved about climate change. As a holiday auto-entered into our phone calendars and pre-printed in our planners, though, it lacks its original urgency of a day of action and has been dulled by overexposure.
There is another way to look at it, though: that the brand opportunism around Earth Day is, in its own absurd way, actually a sign of progress. For one thing, promotions and ads are just how we celebrate things in America; there is no holiday on the calendar that can’t be used to sell a mattress. Also, it proves that appearing “green” has become unavoidably good business — so much so that even the world’s most powerful companies and biggest polluters want to be associated with the day, however disingenuously.
Buying something you don’t need is inarguably antithetical to the spirit of Earth Day; we’re not dubbing it “Greenwashing Week” for nothing. Still, the fact that Hyundai once tried to sell people a car during Earth Week, all because of the success of a 1970 environmental protest, is in its own odd and amusing and distinctly American way, a victory.
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Companies, states, cities, and other entities with Energy Department contracts that had community benefit plans embedded in them have been ordered to stop all work.
Amidst the chaos surrounding President Trump’s pause on infrastructure and climate spending, another federal funding freeze is going very much under the radar, undermining energy and resilience projects across the U.S. and its territories.
Days after Trump took office, acting Energy Secretary Ingrid Kolb reportedly told DOE in a memo to suspend any work “requiring, using, or enforcing Community Benefit Plans, and requiring, using, or enforcing Justice40 requirements, conditions, or principles” in any loan or loan guarantee, any grant, any cost-sharing agreement or any “contracts, contract awards, or any other source of financial assistance.” The memo stipulated this would apply to “existing” awards, grants, contracts and other financial assistance, according to E&E News’ Hannah Northey, who first reported the document’s existence.
Justice40 was Biden’s signature environmental justice initiative. Community benefit plans were often used by Biden’s DOE to strengthen the potential benefits that projects could have on surrounding local economies and were seen as a vehicle for environmental justice. When we say often, we mean it: some high profile examples of these plans include those used for the Holtec Palisades nuclear plant restart in Michigan and the agency’s battery materials processing and recycling awards.
After Kolb’s edict went out, companies, states, cities, and other entities with DOE contracts that had community benefit plans embedded in them were ordered to stop all work, according to multiple letters to contract recipients reviewed by Heatmap News. “Recipients and subrecipients must cease any activities, including contracted activities, and stop incurring costs associated with DEI and CBP activities effective as of the date of this letter,” one letter reads, adding: “Costs incurred after the date of this letter will not be reimbursed.”
One such letter was posted by the University of Michigan research department in an advisory notice. The department’s website summarizes the letter as “directing the suspension” of all work tied to “any source of DOE funding” if it in any way involved “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs,” as well as Justice40 requirements and community benefits plans.
These letters state companies and other entities with community benefit plans in their contracts or otherwise involved in their funding awards would be contacted by DOE to make “modifications” to their contracts. They only cite President Trump’s executive orders that purportedly address Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices; they do not cite a much-debated Office of Management and Budget memo freezing all infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act spending, which has been challenged in federal court. It is altogether unclear if any outcome of the OMB memo litigation is even relevant to this other freeze.
We reached out to the Energy Department about these letters for comment on how many entities may be impacted and why they targeted community benefit plans. We will update this story if we hear back.
A lot is still murky about this situation. It is unclear how many entities have been impacted and the totality of the impacts may be unknown for a while, because a lot of these entities supposed to get money may want to keep fighting privately to, well, still get their money. It’s also hazy if all entities that received these letters are continuing to do any construction or preparatory work or other labor connected to their funding not tied to the community benefit planning, or just halting the funded labor altogether.
The blast radius from this freeze is hard to parse, said Matthew Tejada, a former EPA staffer who most recently served as the agency’s deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice under the Biden administration. Tejada, who now works for the advocacy group NRDC and remains connected to advocates in the environmental justice space, said he was very much aware of this separate freeze when he was first reached by Heatmap. But “unless you’re able to really have a network of information bottom up from the recipients, it’s a bit of a black box we’re operating around because we’re not going to get transparency and information from the administration.“
“Part of their obvious strategy here is to create enough confusion as possible to make defending as difficult as possible. But I’m fairly certain the community and various others here -- local governments, tribes -- will have plenty to say about cutting through that chaos to make sure the will of Congress and the outcomes of these programs and projects are delivered upon.” He believes that any attempts to modify these contract awards “on the pretext of canceling the contract[s] will in all likelihood meet a legal challenge.”
But the ripple effects of this other freeze are starting to surface in local news accounts.
According to the Erie Times-News, the city of Erie, Pennsylvania currently cannot access funding for a city-wide audit for home energy efficiency. And a big road improvement project in the Mariana Islands – a U.S. territory – was nearly derailed by the freeze, according to the news outlet Mariana’s Variety, which reported project developers are just going to try and move forward without the remaining money provided under contract.
We’ll have to wait and see the breadth of the impacts here and whether this freeze will produce its own legal or regulatory rollercoaster. Hang on tight.
If President Trump’s proposed 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada — which were set to begin tomorrow morning before the two countries’ leaders negotiated 30-day delays — were to go into effect, they would hit automotive supply chains like a lightning bolt. A single spring inside a fuel pump can zig-zag across the northern and southern U.S. borders half a dozen times before making it into a vehicle. The jolt of tariffs would follow it, gathering force at each crossing before shocking car buyers with higher prices.
Electric vehicles, however, famously do not have as many parts as conventional cars. There’s no engine, transmission, exhaust system, or fuel pump. EV drivers will also not have to contend with the effect of tariffs on the price of gasoline. So does it follow that, despite Trump’s wish to undo Biden’s EV subsidies, he would actually be making battery-powered cars more competitive?
Experts I spoke with agreed that EV manufacturers might be somewhat less exposed. But the tariffs will still affect them, and the small edge could be outweighed by other Trump administration policies.
An internal combustion engine vehicle can have 20,000 to 30,000 parts, Amy Broglin-Peterson, an expert in automotive supply chains at Michigan State University, told me; an electric vehicle might have anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand. Many of these components are manufactured by independent specialists throughout North America. “They’ll be assembled utilizing cheaper Mexican labor, and then they’ll cross back into the U.S. and be put into a bigger assembly, which is then sent back down again for either more assembly work or finished vehicle production,” she said.
Electric vehicles also contain many of the same complex components as conventional cars, like seats and lights and dashboards and radios and mirrors. “That’s kind of the great equalizer amongst these different vehicles,” Mike Wall, an auto analyst at S&P Global Mobility told me. “They’re all going to be in the same soup in terms of vulnerability to cross-border trade.”
But EVs lack the most complex component of all — the engine. Instead, EVs have a battery, and many automakers are either already producing their batteries in the U.S. or are building new factories to do so. As of December, there were more than 80 facilities making battery components, assembling battery packs and cells, manufacturing drive units, producing EV chargers, and doing final EV assembly in the U.S., according to a database maintained by Wellesley University historian Jay Turner. But that’s set to increase over the next few years due to tax incentives and grants that were part of Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, which reward domestic manufacturing of clean technology components. More than 200 additional facilities, including critical mineral extraction and processing facilities, are in various stages of development.
Broglin-Peterson told me her quick answer to my question is that EVs likely wouldn’t be hit quite as hard by tariffs as conventional cars. But she emphasized that they will still see an impact, and she wasn’t sure of the extent to which other Trump administration policies would undermine any tariff-related advantages. “The EV picture right now has become a lot more murky, obviously, since President Trump was elected,” she told me. “I do think the traditional automakers are more heavily leveraged, though, on their internal combustion engine supply chains.”
Wall agreed that EVs were somewhat less exposed, but he said it really depends on which internal combustion engine vehicle you’re comparing them to. Some engines are assembled in the U.S. and have more U.S.-manufactured components than others. Battery makers are still vulnerable, as the processing of the critical minerals that go into EV batteries is currently heavily concentrated in China, which will also be hit by 10% tariffs on top of existing tariffs on Chinese goods. When you take into account the president’s plans to end the electric vehicle tax credit and leasing option, which can shave up to $7,500 off a car’s sticker price, EVs could still end up less competitive than before Trump took office, Wall said.
Some electric vehicle producers will be hit harder than others. Tesla, for instance, has one of the lowest exposures to non-U.S. content, according to data collected by the Department of Transportation. But some 20% to 25% of Tesla components come from Mexico.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty around tariffs,” Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla's chief financial officer, said during an earnings call last week. “Over the years, we’ve tried to localize our supply chain in every market, but we are still reliant on parts from across the world for all our businesses.” The company’s stock price dropped 5% on Monday, though that may be partly because the company also lost market share in Europe.
Rivian builds its EVs in Illinois and is opening a second factory in Georgia. But the company’s CEO RJ Scaringe told Inside EVs that tariffs will still hurt. “Many, many, many hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested in Mexico in production capacity for supply chains that supply to all of us,” he said. “That will need to get remapped or will just carry higher costs.”
Other manufacturers are more spread out. Ford assembles its Mustang Mach-E in Mexico and its F-150 Lightning in Michigan. GM makes its Chevy Silverado, GM Sierra, and Cadillac Escalade EVs in Michigan, but its Equinox and Blazer EVs in Mexico. Stellantis makes its electric Jeep Wagoneer in Mexico, but recently invested more than $400 million to prep three of its Michigan factories for EV assembly.
Analysts told me not to expect any sudden moves from car companies. “Revamping the automotive supply chain to be 100% U.S. based is probably not realistic,” David Whiston, an equity strategist who covers the auto sector for Morningstar, told me in an email. “Companies right now are not willing to pivot capacity on a dime — they won’t allocate capital without more certainty.”
Trump doesn’t have much interest in certainty. After threatening to put the tariffs into immediate effect last weekend, the president quickly struck agreements with Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday to pause the tariffs for 30 days while the countries negotiate. He has yet to discuss next steps with China.
The leaders of both countries reached deals with the U.S. in exchange for a 30-day reprieve on border taxes.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a month-long pause on across-the-board 25% tariff on Mexican goods imported into the United States that were to take effect on Tuesday.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that Sheinbaum had agreed to deploy 10,000 Mexican troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, “specifically designated to stop the flow of fentanyl, and illegal migrants into our Country.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick will lead talks in the coming month over what comes next.
“I look forward to participating in those negotiations, with President Sheinbaum, as we attempt to achieve a ‘deal’ between our two Countries,” Trump wrote.
In her own statement, Sheinbaum said the U.S. had committed to work on preventing the trafficking of firearms into Mexico.
There has still been no pause on planned tariffs on Canadian imports, which would likely affect the flow of oil, minerals, and lumber, as well as possibly break automobile supply chains in the United States. Canadian leaders announced several measures to counter the tariffs at both the federal and provincial level.
Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have spoken today, and are scheduled to do so again this afternoon. Canadian officials are not optimistic, however, that they’ll be able to get a similar deal, a Canadian official told The New York Times.
UPDATE 4:55 p.m. ET: Trudeau announced that he had reached a similar deal that would stave off the imposition of tariffs for a month. Following a “good call” with Trump, Trudeau said in a post on X that he would deploy personnel and resources to his country’s southern border. “Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border,” Trudeau wrote. He also said that Canada would have a “Fentanyl Czar” and would “launch a Canada- U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering.”