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The world’s biggest, most functional city might also be the most pedestrian-friendly. That’s not a coincidence.
For cities that want to reduce the number of cars, bike lanes are a good place to start. They are cheap, usually city-level authorities can introduce them, and they do not require you to raise taxes on people who own cars. What if you want to do something more radical though? What would a city that genuinely wanted to get the car out of its citizens’ lives in a much bigger way do? A city that wanted to make it possible for most people to live decent lives and be able to get around without needing a car, even without needing to get on a bicycle?
There is only one city on Earth I have ever visited that has truly managed this. But it happens to be the biggest city on the planet: Tokyo, the capital of Japan.
In popular imagination, at least in the West, Tokyo is both incredibly futuristic, and also rather foreign and confusing. Before I first visited, in 2017, I imagined it to be an incredibly hectic place, a noisy, bustling megacity. I was on holiday and trying to escape Nairobi, the rather sprawling, low-height, and green city I was living in at the time, and I picked Tokyo largely because I wanted to get as far away from Africa as I could. I needed a break from the traffic jams, the power cuts, the constant negotiation to achieve anything, and the heat. I was looking for an escape somewhere as different as I could think of, and I wanted to ride trains around and look at high-tech skyscrapers and not worry about getting splattered by mud walking in the street. I was expecting to feel bowled over by the height of the buildings, the sheer crush of people, and the noise.
Yet when I emerged from the train station in Shibuya, blinking jetlagged in the morning light after a night flight from Amsterdam, what actually caught me off guard was not the bustle but rather how quiet the city is. When you see cliched images of Tokyo, what invariably is shown are the enormous crowds of pedestrians crossing the roads, or Mount Fuji in the background of the futuristic skyline. I expected something like Los Angeles in Blade Runner, I suppose — futuristic and overwhelming. From photos, Tokyo can look almost unplanned, with neon signs everywhere and a huge variety of forms of architecture. You expect it to feel messy. What I experienced, however, was a city that felt almost like being in a futuristic village. It is utterly calm, in a way that is actually rather strange.
And it took me a little while to realize why. There is simply no traffic noise. No hooting, no engine noise, not even much of the noise of cars accelerating on tarmac. Because there are so few of them. Most of the time you can walk in the middle of the street, so rare is the traffic. There are not even cars parked at the side of the road. That is not true of all of Tokyo, of course. The expressways are often packed. Occasionally, I was told, particularly when it snows, or during holidays when large numbers of people try to drive out to the countryside, jams form that can trap drivers for whole days. But on most residential streets, traffic is almost nonexistent. Even the relatively few cars that you do see are invariably tiny, quiet vehicles.
Among rich cities, Tokyo has the lowest car use in the world. According to Deloitte, a management consultancy, just 12 percent of journeys are completed by private car. It might surprise you to hear that cycling is actually more popular than driving in Tokyo — it accounts for 17 percent of journeys, though the Japanese do not make as much of a big deal out of it as the Dutch do. But walking and public transport dwarf both sorts of vehicles. Tokyo has the most-used public transport system in the world, with 30 million people commuting by train each day. This may sound rather unpleasant. You have probably seen footage of the most crowded routes at rush hour, when staff literally push people onto the carriages to make space, or read about young women being groped in the crush. It happens, but it is not typical. Most of the trains I rode were busy but comfortable, and I was able to get a seat.
And what makes Tokyo remarkable is that the city was almost entirely built after the original city was mostly flattened by American bombers in the Second World War. Elsewhere in the world, cities built after the war are almost invariably car-dependent. Think of Houston, Texas, which has grown from 300,000 people in the 1950s to 10 times that now. Or England’s tiny version, Milton Keynes, which is the fastest-growing city in the country. Or almost any developing world city. Since the advent of the automobile, architects and urban planners worldwide have found it almost impossible to resist building cities around roads and an assumption that most people will drive. Tokyo somehow managed not to. It rebuilt in a much more human-centric way.
It may come as a surprise that Japan is home to the world’s biggest relatively car-free city. After all, Japan is the country that gave the world Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Nissan, and exports vehicles all over the world. And in fairness, a lot of Japanese people do own cars. Overall car ownership in Japan is about 590 vehicles per 1,000 people, which is less than America’s rate of about 800 per 1,000, but comparable to a lot of European countries. On average, there are 1.06 cars per household. But Tokyo is a big exception. In Tokyo, there are only 0.32 cars per household. Most Japanese car owners live in smaller towns and cities than the capital. The highest rate of car ownership, for example, is in Fukui Prefecture, on the western coast of Honshu, one of Japan’s least densely populated areas.
And car ownership in Japan is falling, unlike almost everywhere else on Earth. Part of the reason is just that the country is getting older and the population is falling. But it is also that more and more people live in Tokyo. Annually, Japan is losing about 0.3 percent of its population, or about half a million people a year. Greater Tokyo, however, with its population of 37 million, is shrinking by less than that, or about 0.1 percent a year. And the prefecture of Tokyo proper, with a population of 14 million, is still growing. The reason is that Tokyo generates the best jobs in Japan, and it is also an increasingly pleasant place to live. You may think of Tokyoites as being crammed into tiny apartments, but in fact, the average home in Tokyo has 65.9 square meters of livable floor space (709 square feet). That is still very small—indeed, it is less than the size of the average home in London, where the figure is 80 square meters. But the typical household in London has 2.7 people living in it. In Tokyo, it is 1.95. So per capita, people in Tokyo actually have more space than Londoners.
Overall in fact, people in Tokyo have one of the highest qualities of life in the world. A 2015 survey by Monocle magazine came to the conclusion that Tokyo is the best city on Earth in which to live, “due to its defining paradox of heart-stopping size and concurrent feeling of peace and quiet.” In 2021 The Economist ranked it fourth, after Wellington and Auckland in New Zealand, and another Japanese city, Osaka. Life expectancy overall is 84 years old, one of the highest levels of any city on the planet. A good part of this has to do with the lack of cars. Air pollution is considerably lower than in any other city of equivalent size anywhere in the world. Typical commutes are, admittedly, often fairly long, at 40 minutes each way. But they are not in awful smoggy car traffic.
This article was excerpted from Daniel Knowles' book "Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It"Abrams Press ©2023
So how has Tokyo managed it? Andre Sorensen, a professor of urban planning at the University of Toronto, who published a history of urban planning in Japan, told me that Japan’s history has a lot to do with it. Japan’s urbanization happened a little more like some poorer countries — quickly. At the start of the 20th century, just 15 percent of Japanese people lived in cities. Now 91 percent do, one of the highest rates of urbanization in the entire world. That rapid growth meant that Tokyo’s postwar growth was relatively chaotic. Buildings sprawled out into rice paddies, with sewage connections and power often only coming later. Electricity is still often delivered by overhead wires, not underground cables. And yet somehow this haphazard system manages to produce a relatively coherent city, and one that is much easier to get around on foot or by public transport than by car.
Part of the reason, Sorensen explained to me, is just historical chance. Japanese street layouts traditionally were narrow, much like medieval alleys in Europe. Land ownership was often very fragmented, meaning that house builders had to learn to use small plots in a way that almost never happened in Europe or America. And unlike the governments there, the government in postwar Japan was much more concerned with boosting economic growth by creating power plants and industrial yards than it was with creating huge new boulevards through neighborhoods. So the layouts never changed. According to Sorensen’s research, 35 percent of Japanese streets are not actually wide enough for a car to travel down them. More remarkably still, 86 percent are not wide enough for a car to be able to stop without blocking the traffic behind it.
Yet the much bigger reason for Tokyo’s high quality of life is that Japan does not subsidize car ownership in the way other countries do. In fact, owning a car in Tokyo is rather difficult. For one thing, cars are far more enthusiastically inspected than in America or most of Europe. Cars must be checked by officials every two years to ensure that they are still compliant, and have not been modified. That is true in Britain too, but the cost is higher than what a Ministry of Transport test costs. Even a well-maintained car can cost 100,000 yen to inspect (or around $850). On cars that are older than 10 years, the fees escalate dramatically, which helps to explain why so many Japanese sell their cars relatively quickly, and so many of them end up in East Africa or Southeast Asia. On top of that there is an annual automobile tax of up to 50,000 yen, as well as a 5 percent tax on the purchase. And then gasoline is taxed too, meaning it costs around 160 yen per liter, or about $6 a gallon, less than in much of Europe, but more than Americans accept.
And even if you are willing to pay all of the taxes, you cannot simply go and buy a car in the way that you might in most countries. To be allowed to purchase a car, you have to be able to prove that you have somewhere to park it. This approval is issued by the local police, and is known as a shako shomeisho, or “garage certificate.” Without one, you cannot buy a car. This helps to explain why the Japanese buy so many tiny cars, like the so-called Kei cars. It means they can have smaller garages. Even if the law didn’t exist though, owning a car in Japan without having a dedicated parking space for it would be a nightmare. Under a nationwide law passed in 1957, overnight street parking of any sort is completely illegal. So if you were to somehow buy a car with no place to store it, you could not simply park it on the street, because it would get towed the next morning, and you would get fined 200,000 yen (around $1,700). In fact, most street parking of any sort is illegal. There are a few exceptions, but more than 95 percent of Japanese streets have no street parking at all, even during the day.
This, rather than any beautiful architecture, explains why Tokyo’s streets feel so pleasant to walk down, or indeed to look at. There are no cars filling them up. It also means that land is actually valued properly. If you want to own a car, it means that you also have to own (or at least rent) the requisite land to keep it. In rural areas or smaller towns, this is not a huge deal, because land is relatively cheap, and so a permit might only cost 8,000 to 9,000 yen, or about $75 a month. But in Tokyo, the cost will be at least four times that. Garages in American cities can cost that much too, but in Japan there is no cheap street parking option, as in much of New York or Chicago. Most apartment buildings are constructed without any parking at all, because the developers can use the space more efficiently for housing. Only around 42 percent of condominium buildings have parking spaces for residents. Similarly, even if you own a parking space, it is almost never free to park anywhere you might take your car. Parking in Tokyo typically costs 1,000 yen an hour, or around $8.50.
This is a big disincentive to driving. Sorensen told me that when he lived in Tokyo, some wealthy friends of his owned a top-end BMW, which they replaced every few years, because they were car nuts. But because they did not have anywhere to park it near their home, if they wanted to use it, they had to take public transport (or a taxi) to get to it at its garage. As a result, they simply did not use their car very much. In their day-to- day life, they used the trains, the same as everybody else, or took taxis, because that was cheaper than picking up the car. This sort of thing probably helps to explain why the Japanese, despite relatively high levels of car ownership, do not actually drive very far. Car owners in Japan typically drive around 6,000 kilometers per year. That is about half what the average British car owner drives, and less than a third of what the average American does.
Parking rules are not, however, the limit of what keeps cars out of Tokyo. Arguably, an even bigger reason is how infrastructure has been funded in Japan. That is, by the market, rather than directly by taxes. In the 1950s and ’60s, much like Europe and the United States, Japan began building expressways. But unlike in Europe and America, it was starting from a considerably more difficult place. In 1957, Ralph J. Watkins, an American economist who had been invited to advise the Japanese government, reported that “the roads of Japan are incredibly bad. No other industrial nation has so completely neglected its highway system.” Just 23 percent of roads were paved, including just two-thirds of the only highway linking Osaka, Japan’s historical economic hub, to Tokyo.
But unlike America, the idea of making them free never seemed to cross politicians’ minds, probably because Japan in the postwar era was not the world’s richest country. Capital was not freely available. To build the roads, the national government formed corporations such as the Shuto Kōsoku-dōro Kabushiki-gaisha, or Metropolitan Expressway Company, which was formed in greater Tokyo in 1959. These corporations took out vast amounts of debt, which they had to repay, so that the Japanese taxpayer would not be burdened. That meant that tolls were imposed from the very beginning. The tolls had to cover not just the construction cost, but also maintenance and interest on the loans. Today, to drive on the Shuto Expressway costs from 300 to 1,320 yen, or $2.50 to $11 for a “standard-size” automobile. Overall, tolls in Japan are the most expensive in the world — around three times higher than the level charged on the private autoroutes in France, or on average, about 3,000 yen per 100 kilometers ($22 to drive 62 miles).
What that meant was that, from the beginning, roads did not have an unfair advantage in their competition with other forms of transport. And so in Japan, unlike in almost the entire rest of the rich world, the postwar era saw the construction of enormous amounts of rail infrastructure. Indeed, at a time when America and Britain were nationalizing and cutting their railways to cope with falling demand for train travel, in Japan, the national railway company was pouring investment into the system. The world’s first high-speed railway, the Tokaido Shinkansen, was opened in 1964 to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics, with a top speed of 210 kilometers per hour. That was almost double what trains elsewhere mostly managed. From 1964 to 1999, the number of passengers using the Shinkansen grew from 11 million annually to more than 300 million.
Sorensen told me about how in the 1950s and ’60s, the trains were a huge point of national pride for the Japanese government, a bit like car industries were elsewhere. “And justifiably! It was a fantastic invention. To say we can make electric rail go twice as fast. What an achievement.” Thanks to that, the railways ministry became a huge power center in government, rather than a neglected backwater as it often had become elsewhere. In rail, the Japanese “built up expertise in engineering, in bureaucratic resources and capacities, and political clout that just lasted,” he told me. “Whereas the road-building sector was weak.” Elsewhere, building roads became a self-reinforcing process, because as more was poured into constructing them, more people bought cars and demanded more roads. That did not happen in Japan. Instead, the growth in railway infrastructure led to growth in, well, more railway infrastructure.
If you visit Tokyo now, what you will find is that the most hectic, crowded places in the city are all around the train and subway stations. The reason is that Japan’s railway companies (the national firm was privatized in the 1980s) do not only provide railways. They are also big real estate investors. A bit like the firm that built the Metropolitan Railway in the 1930s in Britain, when Japan’s railway firms expanded service, they paid for it by building on the land around the stations. In practice, what that means is that they built lots of apartments, department stores, and supermarkets near (and directly above) railway stations, so that people can get straight off the train and get home quickly. That makes the trains more efficient, because people can get where they need to go without having to walk or travel to and from stations especially far. But it also means that the railways are incredibly profitable, because unlike in the West, they are able to profit from the improvement in land value that they create.
What this adds up to is that Tokyo is one of very few cities on Earth where travel by car is not actively subsidized, and funnily neither is public transport, and yet both work well, when appropriate. However, Tokyo is not completely alone. Several big cities across Asia have managed to avoid the catastrophe (cartastrophe?) that befell much of the western world. Hong Kong manages it nearly as well as Tokyo; there are just 76 cars per 1,000 people in the city state. So too does Singapore, with around 120 per 1,000 people. What those cities have in common, which makes them rather different from Japan, is a shortage of land and a relentless, centralized leadership that recognized early on that cars were a waste of space.
Unfortunately, replicating the Asian model in countries in Europe, America, or Australia from scratch will not be easy. We are starting with so many cars on our roads to begin with, that imposing the sorts of curbs on car ownership that I listed above is almost certainly a political nonstarter. Just look at what happens when politicians in America or Britain try to take away even a modest amount of street parking, or increase the tax on gasoline. People are already invested in cars, sadly. And thanks to that, there is also a chicken-and-egg problem. Because people are invested in cars, they live in places where the sort of public transport that makes life possible for the majority of people in Tokyo is simply not realistic. As it is, constructing rail infrastructure like Japan’s is an extraordinarily difficult task. Look at the difficulties encountered in things like building Britain’s new high-speed train link, or California’s, for example.
And yet it is worth paying attention to Tokyo precisely because it shows that vast numbers of cars are not necessary to daily life. What Tokyo shows is that it is possible for enormous cities to work rather well without being overloaded by traffic congestion. Actually, Tokyo works better than big cities anywhere else. That is why it has managed to grow so large. The trend all over the world for decades now has been toward greater wealth concentrating in the biggest metropolises. The cost of living in somewhere like New York, London, or Paris used to be marginally higher than living in a more modest city. That is no longer the case. And it reflects the fact that the benefits of living in big cities are enormous. The jobs are better, but so too are the restaurants, the cultural activities, the dating opportunities, and almost anything else you can think of. People are willing to pay for it. The high cost of living is a price signal — that is, the fact that people are willing to pay it is an indicator of the value they put on it.
Especially in this post-pandemic era where many jobs can be done from anywhere, lots of New Yorkers could easily decamp to, say, a pretty village upstate, and save a fortune in rent, or cash in on their property values. Actually, hundreds of thousands do every year (well, not only to upstate). But they are replaced by newcomers for the simple reason that New York City is, if you set aside the cost, a pretty great place to live. And yet, if everyone who would like to live in a big city is to be able to, those cities need to be able to grow more. But if they continue to grow with the assumption that the car will be the default way of getting around for a significant proportion of residents, then they will be strangled by congestion long before they ever reach anything like Tokyo’s success. People often say that London or New York are too crowded, but they are wrong. They are only too crowded if you think that it is normal for people to need space not just for them but also for the two tons of metal that they use to get around.
The sheer anger of motorists might mean that banning overnight parking on residential streets proves difficult. But if we want to be bold, some of Tokyo’s other measures are more realistic. We could, for example, do a lot more to build more housing around public transport, and use the money generated to help contribute to the network. According to the Centre for Cities, a British think tank, there are 47,000 hectares of undeveloped land (mostly farmland) within a 10-minute walk of a railway station close to London or another big city. That is enough space to build two million homes, more than half of which would be within a 45-minute commute to or from London. The reason we do not develop the land at the moment is because it is mostly Metropolitan Green Belt, a zoning restriction created in the late 1940s by the Town and Country Planning Act intended to contain cities and stop them sprawling outward. But the problem with it as it works in Britain at the moment is that it does not stop sprawl — it just pushes it further away from cities, into places where there really is no hope of not using a car.
Developing the green belt too would not be popular. People have an affection for fields near their homes, and they do not necessarily want the trains they use to be even more crowded. But there are projects that show it is possible to overcome NIMBYism. In Los Angeles in 2016, voters approved the Transit Oriented Communities Incentive Program, which creates special zoning laws in areas half a mile from a major transit stop (typically, in L.A., a light rail station). This being Los Angeles, it is fairly modest. One of the rules is that the mandatory parking minimums applied are restricted to a maximum of 0.5 car parking spaces per bedroom, and total parking is not meant to exceed more than one space per apartment, which is still rather a lot of parking. But nonetheless, it does allow developers to increase the density of homes near public transport, and it has encouraged developers to build around 20,000 new homes near public transport that probably would not have been constructed otherwise. These are small but real improvements.
Ultimately, no city will be transformed into Tokyo overnight, nor should any be, at least unless a majority of the population decides that they would like it. I am trying to persuade them; for now, not everyone is as enamored with the Japanese capital as I am. But NIMBYism and other political problems can be gradually overturned, if the arguments are made in the right way, even in the most automotive cities.
This article was excerpted from Daniel Knowles’ book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It, published by Abrams Press ©2023.
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Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France that were freezing last week are now experiencing record high temperatures • Forecasters are monitoring a storm system that could become Australia’s first named tropical cyclone of this season • The Colorado Rockies could get several feet of snow today and tomorrow.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, according to AccuWeather. “For perspective, this would equate to nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter. The figure accounts for long-term economic impacts including job losses, medical costs, drops in tourism, and recovery expenses. “The combination of extremely warm water temperatures, a shift toward a La Niña pattern and favorable conditions for development created the perfect storm for what AccuWeather experts called ‘a supercharged hurricane season,’” said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This was an exceptionally powerful and destructive year for hurricanes in America, despite an unusual and historic lull during the climatological peak of the season.”
AccuWeather
This year’s hurricane season produced 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes. Five hurricanes made landfall, two of which were major storms. According to NOAA, an “average” season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season comes to an end on November 30.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the $7,500 EV tax credit, California will consider reviving its Clean Vehicle Rebate Program. The CVRP ran from 2010 to 2023 and helped fund nearly 600,000 EV purchases by offering rebates that started at $5,000 and increased to $7,500. But the program as it is now would exclude Tesla’s vehicles, because it is aimed at encouraging market competition, and Tesla already has a large share of the California market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has cozied up to Trump, called California’s potential exclusion of Tesla “insane,” though he has said he’s okay with Trump nixing the federal subsidies. Newsom would need to go through the State Legislature to revive the program.
President-elect Donald Trump said yesterday he would impose steep new tariffs on all goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico on day one of his presidency in a bid to stop “drugs” and “illegal aliens” from entering the United States. Specifically, Trump threatened Canada and Mexico each with a 25% tariff, and China with a 10% hike on existing levies. Such moves against three key U.S. trade partners would have major ramifications across many sectors, including the auto industry. Many car companies import vehicles and parts from plants in Mexico. The Canadian government responded with a statement reminding everyone that “Canada is essential to U.S. domestic energy supply, and last year 60% of U.S. crude oil imports originated in Canada.” Tariffs would be paid by U.S. companies buying the imported goods, and those costs would likely trickle down to consumers.
Amazon workers across the world plan to begin striking and protesting on Black Friday “to demand justice, fairness, and accountability” from the online retail giant. The protests are organized by the UNI Global Union’s Make Amazon Pay Campaign, which calls for better working conditions for employees and a commitment to “real environmental sustainability.” Workers in more than 20 countries including the U.S. are expected to join the protests, which will continue through Cyber Monday. Amazon’s carbon emissions last year totalled 68.8 million metric tons. That’s about 3% below 2022 levels, but more than 30% above 2019 levels.
Researchers from MIT have developed an AI tool called the “Earth Intelligence Engine” that can simulate realistic satellite images to show people what an area would look like if flooded by extreme weather. “Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate,” wrote Jennifer Chu at MIT News. The team found that AI alone tended to “hallucinate,” generating images of flooding in areas that aren’t actually susceptible to a deluge. But when combined with a science-backed flood model, the tool became more accurate. “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk,” said MIT’s Björn Lütjens, who led the research. “Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.” The tool is still in development and is available online. Here is an image it generated of flooding in Texas:
Maxar Open Data Program via Gupta et al., CVPR Workshop Proceedings. Lütjens et al., IEEE TGRS
A new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris lets visitors listen to the sounds of endangered and extinct animals – along with the voice of the artist behind the piece, the one and only Björk.
How Hurricane Helene is still putting the Southeast at risk.
Less than two months after Hurricane Helene cut a historically devastating course up into the southeastern U.S. from Florida’s Big Bend, drenching a wide swath of states with 20 trillion gallons of rainfall in just five days, experts are warning of another potential threat. The National Interagency Fire Center’s forecast of fire-risk conditions for the coming months has the footprint of Helene highlighted in red, with the heightened concern stretching into the new year.
While the flip from intense precipitation to wildfire warnings might seem strange, experts say it speaks to the weather whiplash we’re now seeing regularly. “What we expect from climate change is this layering of weather extremes creating really dangerous situations,” Robert Scheller, a professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, explained to me.
Scheuller said North Carolina had been experiencing drought conditions early in the year, followed by intense rain leading up to Helene’s landfall. Then it went dry again — according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, much of the state was back to some level of drought condition as of mid-November. The NIFC forecast report says the same is true for much of the region, including Florida, despite its having been hit by Hurricane Milton soon after Helene.
That dryness is a particular concern due to the amount of debris left in Helene’s wake — another major risk factor for fire. The storm’s winds, which reached more than 100 miles per hour in some areas, wreaked havoc on millions of acres of forested land. In North Carolina alone, the state’s Forest Service estimates over 820,000 acres of timberland were damaged.
“When you have a catastrophic storm like [Helene], all of the stuff that was standing upright — your trees — they might be snapped off or blown over,” fire ecologist David Godwin told me. “All of a sudden, that material is now on the forest floor, and so you have a really tremendous rearrangement of the fuels and the vegetation within ecosystems that can change the dynamics of how fire behaves in those sites.”
Godwin is the director of the Southern Fire Exchange for the University of Florida, a program that connects wildland firefighters, prescribed burners, and natural resources managers across the Southeast with fire science and tools. He says the Southeast sees frequent, unplanned fires, but that active ecosystem management helps keep the fires that do spark from becoming conflagrations. But an increase like this in fallen or dead vegetation — what Godwin refers to as fire “fuel” — can take this risk to the next level, particularly as it dries out.
Godwin offered an example from another storm, 2018’s Hurricane Michael, which rapidly intensified before making landfall in Northern Florida and continuing inland, similar to Hurricane Helene. In its aftermath, there was a 10-fold increase in the amount of fuel on the ground, with 72 million tons of timber damaged in Florida. Three years later, the Bertha Swamp Road Fire filled the storm’s Florida footprint with flames, which consumed more than 30,000 acres filled with dried out forest fuel. One Florida official called the wildfire the “ghost” of Michael, nodding to the overlap of the impacted areas and speaking to the environmental threat the storm posed even years later.
Not only does this fuel increase the risk of fire, it changes the character of the fires that do ignite, Godwin said. Given ample ground fuel, flame lengths can grow longer, allowing them to burn higher into the canopy. That’s why people setting prescribed fires will take steps like raking leaf piles, which helps keep the fire intensity low.
These fires can also produce more smoke, Godwin said, which can mix with the mountainous fog in the region to deadly effect. According to the NIFC, mountainous areas incurred the most damage from Helene, not only due to downed vegetation, but also because of “washed out roads and trails” and “slope destabilization” from the winds and rain. If there is a fire in these areas, all these factors will also make it more challenging for firefighters to address it, the report adds.
In addition to the natural debris fire experts worry about, Helene caused extensive damage to the built environment, wrecking homes, businesses, and other infrastructure. Try imagining four-and-a-half football fields stacked 10 feet tall with debris — that’s what officials have removed so far just in Asheville, North Carolina. In Florida’s Treasure Island, there were piles 50 feet high of assorted scrap materials. Officials have warned that some common household items, such as the lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and electric vehicles, can be particularly flammable after exposure to floodwaters. They are also advising against burning debris as a means of managing it due to all the compounding risks.
Larry Pierson, deputy chief of the Swannanoa Fire Department in North Carolina, told Blueridge Public Radio that his department’s work has “grown exponentially since the storm.” While cooler, wetter winter weather could offer some relief, Scheuller said the area will likely see heightened fire behavior for years after the storm, particularly if the swings between particularly wet and particularly dry periods continue.
Part of the challenge moving forward, then, is to find ways to mitigate risk on this now-hazardous terrain. For homeowners, that might mean exercising caution when dealing with debris and considering wildfire risk as part of rebuilding plans, particularly in more wooded areas. On a larger forest management scale, this means prioritizing safe debris collection and finding ways to continue the practice of prescribed burns, which are utilized more in the Southeast than in any other U.S. region. Without focused mitigation efforts, Godwin told me the area’s overall fire outlook would be much different.
“We would have a really big wildfire issue,” he said, “perhaps even bigger than what we might see in parts of the West.”