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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 shakoshomeisho, 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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Any EV is better for the planet than a gas-guzzler, but size still matters for energy use.
A few Super Bowls ago, when General Motors used its ad spots to pitch Americans on the idea of the GMC Hummer EV, it tried to flip the script on the stereotypes that had always dogged the gas-guzzling SUV. Yes, it implied, you can drive a military-derived menace to society and still do your part for the planet, as long as it’s electric.
You don’t hear much about the Hummer anymore — it didn’t sell especially well, and the Tesla Cybertruck came along to fill the tank niche in the electric car market. But the reasoning behind its launch endures. Any EV, even a monstrous one, is a good EV if it convinces somebody, somewhere, to give up gasoline.
This line of thinking isn’t wrong. A fully electric version of a big truck or SUV is far better, emissions-wise, than a gas-powered vehicle of equivalent size. It’s arguably superior to a smaller and efficient combustion car, too. A Ford F-150 Lightning, for example, scores nearly 70 in the Environmental Protection Agency’s miles per gallon equivalent metric, abbreviated MPGe, that’s meant to compare the energy consumption of EVs and other cars. That blows away the 20-some miles per gallon that the gas F-150 gets and even exceeds the 57 combined miles per gallon of the current Toyota Prius hybrid.
In terms of America’s EV adoption, then, we’ve come to see all EVs as being created equal. Yet our penchant for large EVs that aren’t particularly efficient at squeezing miles from their batteries will become a problem as more Americans go electric.
Big, heavy cars use more energy. This is how we worried about the greenness of cars back in the days before the EV: Needlessly enormous models such as the Ford Expedition and the Hummer H2 deserved to be shamed, while owning a fuel-sipping hybrid or a dinky subcompact was the height of virtue.
This logic has gotten a bit lost in the scale-up phase of electric vehicles going mainstream. We talk at length about EV sales and how fast their numbers are growing; we rarely talk about whether the EVs we buy are as energy-efficient as they could be. As a new white paper from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy points out, though, getting more miles out of our EV batteries would save drivers money and reduce the strain on the grid that will come from millions of people charging their cars.
The simplest way to measure an EV’s fuel efficiency is to know how many miles it travels per kilowatt-hour of electricity. Popular crossovers like Tesla’s Model Y and Kia’s EV6 achieve a pretty-good 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour. Look at bigger, heavier vehicles and you’ll see a major fall-off. InsideEVs found that Rivian’s R1S gets between 2.1 and 2.4 miles per kilowatt-hour. The hulking Hummer EV scores just 1.5, according to Motor Trend’s testing. The EPA’s MPGe data is another way to see the same story. The 60-some miles per gallon equivalent of an electric pickup like the Rivian R1T or Chevy Silverado EV crushes the mileage of petro trucks, but pales next to the 140-plus MPGe that an electric sedan from Hyundai or Lucid can claim. (Those EVs can deliver 4 or more miles per kilowatt-hour.)
Even modest gains in EV efficiency could cause beneficial ripple effects, the ACEEE says. Drivers who own a 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour car would save hundreds of dollars on fuel annually compared to those whose vehicles get 2.5 miles per kilowatt-hour. More efficient cars should be less expensive, as well. Huge, inefficient EVs need to carry enormous batteries just to reach an adequate range, and the bigger the battery, the bigger the cost. Whereas a Model Y’s battery capacity ranges from 60 kilowatt-hours for standard range to 81 kilowatt-hours for long range, a Rivian’s runs from 92 to 141.5 kilowatt-hours. ACEEE calculates that the jump from 2.5 to 3.5 kilowatt-hours could shave nearly $5,000 from the cost of making a car because it would need so much less battery.
Making EVs more efficient would mean faster charging stops, too, since drivers wouldn’t need to cram so many kilowatt-hours into their batteries. It would ease demand for electricity, making it easier for the grid to keep pace with an electrifying society. But convincing Americans to buy smaller, more efficient vehicles has been an uphill battle for decades.
Earlier this summer, Ford CEO Jim Farley called for a return to smaller vehicles as more of the U.S. car fleet turns over to electric. Yet it was Ford that just a few years ago quit making cars altogether (outside of the Mustang) because it reaped so much more profit on the pricier crossovers, SUVs, and pickups that Americans have voted for with their wallets. And not long after Farley’s speech, the company scaled back its EV ambitions, clearly struggling to find a way to sell electric vehicles profitably.
The issue is not only carbuyers’ preference for big, heavy vehicles. ACEEE points out that public policy doesn’t punish big electric cars. “The EPA standard treats all EVs as having zero emissions. It therefore provides no incentive to improve EV efficiency since inefficient and efficient EVs are treated the same for compliance purposes,” the paper says.
That is why ACEEE floats the idea of a policy change. For example, its paper suggests the fees some states levy against EVs (ostensibly to make up for the lost revenue from those cars avoiding the gas tax) could be tweaked to charge more for inefficient EVs. Rebates for purchasing an EV could be changed in the same manner.
It was, after all, regulatory loopholes and misplaced incentives that helped big gas guzzlers conquer the roads in the first place. With better rules about big EVs, perhaps we could avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
On new heat records, Trump’s sea level statements, and a super typhoon
Current conditions: Torrential rains flooded the streets of Milan, Italy • The U.K. recorded its coldest summer since 2015 • The temperature in Palm Springs, California, hit 121 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday.
Summer 2024 was officially the warmest on record in the Northern Hemisphere, according to new data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Between June and August, the average global temperature was 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 1991-2020 average, beating out last summer’s record. August 2024 tied August 2023 for joint-hottest month ever recorded globally, with an average surface air temperature of 62.27 degrees Fahrenheit.
C3S
“During the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest boreal summer on record,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S. “This string of record temperatures is increasing the likelihood of 2024 being the hottest year on record. The temperature-related extreme events witnessed this summer will only become more intense, with more devastating consequences for people and the planet unless we take urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
During a speech at the Economic Club of New York yesterday, former President Donald Trump said that because of climate change, “the ocean is going to go down 100th of an inch within the next 400 years,” and dismissed this as “not our problem.” This appears to be a warped variation of his repeated claim that “the ocean is going to rise one eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.” He’s said this many times, occasionally subbing in “200 to 300 years” for 400 years. Either way, he’s incorrect. “Trump’s numbers are orders of magnitude off the mark,” wrote Heatmap’s Jeva Lange in her epic historical fact check of Trump’s various climate statements. “The oceans are on track to rise 3.5 feet to 7 feet along America’s coastlines by 2100,” Lange said. Back in 2022, Michael Oppenheimer, director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton University, called Trump’s sea-level calculation “so far from accurate as to appear to have been entirely fabricated.”
The U.S. and China had “excellent discussions” during climate talks this week in Beijing, climate envoy John Podesta said today. The two nations came closer to being on the same page about climate finance and greenhouse gas emissions cuts. “Notwithstanding some friction in our bilateral relationship, we can find places to collaborate for the good of our people and the good of our climate,” Podesta said. As Bloombergnoted, this is likely the last opportunity for the world’s two biggest emitters to try to find common ground ahead of the U.S. presidential election and the COP29 climate summit in November.
Ford reported some interesting August sales figures yesterday. The company saw a 50% jump in hybrid sales last month compared to a year before, and a 29% rise in electric vehicle sales, with F-150 Lightning sales up 160% year over year. But internal combustion engine cars still made up 86% of total monthly sales. The automaker recently scrapped its plans to build a three-row EV crossover and instead plans to make that vehicle as a hybrid, and will double down on producing more hybrid models.
China evacuated 400,000 people from some of its southern provinces in anticipation of Super Typhoon Yagi. Schools are shut down, flights have been canceled, and Hong Kong’s stock market is closed. The storm struck the Philippines earlier this week but has doubled in strength since, and now packs wind speeds of about 140 miles per hour, giving it the power of a Category 4 hurricane. It made landfall on the popular tourist island of Hainan this morning and is expected to hit Guangdong, China's most populous province, before churning toward Vietnam’s historic Ha Long Bay. It is the strongest typhoon to strike China’s southern coast in 10 years, and according to NASA, it has been supercharged by unusually warm water in the Northwest Pacific Basin.
“Everybody’s getting drunk and having a good time: ‘Oh, look at the gift they brought us!’ But at night, they’re going to sneak out of that horse, and they’re going to leave an environmental disaster.” –A long-time resident of Superior, Arizona, ponders the promise and perils of mining the town’s copper deposits, one of the largest remaining in the world.
The raw material of America’s energy transition is poised for another boom.
In the town of Superior, Arizona, there is a hotel. In the hotel, there is a room. And in the room, there is a ghost.
Henry Muñoz’s father owned the building in the early 1980s, back when it was still a boarding house and the “Magma” in its name, Hotel Magma, referred to the copper mine up the hill. One night, a boarder from Nogales, Mexico, awoke to a phantom trying to pin her to the wall with the mattress; naturally, she demanded a new room. When Muñoz, then in his fearless early 20s, heard this story from his father, he became curious. Following his swing shift at the mine, Muñoz posted himself to the room with a case of beer and passed the hours until dawn drinking and waiting for the spirit to make itself known.
Muñoz didn’t see a ghost that night, but he has since become well acquainted with others in town. There is the Mexican bakery, which used to sell pink cookies but now opens only when the late owner’s granddaughter feels up to it. There’s the old Magma Club, its once-segregated swimming pool — available one day a week to Hispanics — long since filled in. Muñoz can still point out where all the former bars were on Main Street, the ones that drew crowds of carousing miners in the good years before copper prices plunged in 1981 and Magma boarded up and left town. Now their dusty windows are what give out-of-towners from nearby Phoenix reason to write off Superior as “dead.”
“What happens when a mine closes, the hardship that brings to people — today’s generation has never experienced that,” Muñoz told me.
Superior is home to about 2,400 people, less than half its population when the mine was booming. To tourists zipping past on U.S. 60 to visit the Wild West sites in the Superstition Mountains, it might look half a step away from becoming a ghost town, itself. As recently as 2018, pictures of Main Street were used as stock photos to illustrate things like “America’s worsening geographic inequality.”
But if you take the exit into town, it’s clear something in Superior is changing. The once-haunted boarding house has undergone a multi-million-dollar renovation into a boutique hotel, charging staycationers that make the hour drive south from Scottsdale $200 a night. Across the street, Bellas Cafe whips up terrific sandwiches in a gleaming, retro-chic kitchen. The Chamber of Commerce building, a little further down the block, has been painted an inviting shade of purple. And propped in the window of some of the storefronts with their lights on, you might even see a sign: WE SUPPORT RESOLUTION COPPER.
Resolution Copper’s offices are located in the former Magma Hospital, where Muñoz was born and where his mother died. People in hard hats and safety vests mill about the parking lot, miners without a mine, which is not an unusual sight in Superior these days — no copper has been sold out of the immediate area in over two decades. And yet just a nine-minute drive further up the hill and another 15-minute elevator ride down the deepest mine shaft in the country lies one of the world’s largest remaining copper deposits. It’s estimated to be 40 billion pounds, enough to meet a quarter of U.S. demand, according to the company’s analysis.
That’s “huge,” Adam Simon, an Earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told me, and not just in terms of sheer size.
“Copper is the most important metal for all technologies we think of as part of the energy transition: battery electric vehicles, grid-scale battery storage, wind turbines, solar panels,” Simon said. In May, he published a study with Lawrence Cathles, an Earth and atmospheric sciences researcher at Cornell University, which looked at 120 years of copper-mining data and found that just to meet the demands of “business as usual,” the world will need 115% more of the material between 2018 and 2050 than has been previously mined in all of human history, even with recycling rates taken into account.
Aluminum, used in high-voltage lines, is sometimes floated as a potential substitute, but it’s not as good of a conductor, and copper is almost always the preferred metal in batteries and electricity generation. Renewables are particularly copper-intensive; one offshore wind turbine can require up to 29 tons. What lies in the hills behind Superior, then, represents “millions of electric vehicles, millions of wind turbines, millions of solar panels. And it’s also lots of jobs, from top to bottom — jobs for people with bachelor’s degrees in engineering, mining, geology, and environmental science, all the way down to security officers and truck drivers,” Simon said. He added: “The world will need more copper year over year for both socioeconomic improvement in the Global South and also the energy transition, and neither of those can happen without increasing the amount of copper that we produce.”
Muñoz insisted to me that the promises of jobs and a robust local economy are a kind of Trojan horse. “Everybody’s getting drunk and having a good time: ‘Oh, look at the gift they brought us!’” he said of Superior’s support for Resolution Copper. “But at night, they’re going to sneak out of that horse, and they’re going to leave an environmental disaster.”
For now, though, the copper has just one catch: Resolution isn’t allowed to touch it.
If not for a painted sign declaring the ground HOLY LAND, there would be nothing visible to suggest the 16 oak-shaded tent sites over Resolution Copper’s ore body were anything particularly special. The Oak Flat campground is less than five miles past Superior, but at an elevation of nearly 4,000 feet, it can feel almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. On the late June day that I visited with Muñoz, Sylvia Delgado, and Orlando “Marro” Perea — the leaders of the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition — the floor of the East Valley was 113 degrees Fahrenheit, and the altitude offered only limited relief.
Directly below us and to the east of the campground, beneath a bouldery, yucca-studded desert, lies the copper deposit. At 7,000 or so feet deep, extracting it would require an advanced mining process called block caving, in which ore is collected from below through what is essentially a controlled cave-in, like sand slipping through the neck of an hourglass.
Muñoz, a fifth-generation miner, prefers the metaphor of going to the dentist. “They drill out your tooth and refill it: that’s basically traditional cut-and-fill mining,” he told me. “Block cave, on the other hand, would be going to the dentist and having them pull out the whole molar. It just leaves a vacant hole.” In this case, the resulting cavity would be almost two miles wide and over 1,000 feet deep by the time the ore was exhausted sometime in the 2060s.
Even four decades is just a blink of an eye for Oak Flat, though, where human history goes back at least 1,500years; anthropologists say the mine’s sinkhole would swallow countless Indigenous burial locations and archeological sites, including petroglyphs depicting antlered animals that Muñoz and Perea showed me hidden deep in the rocks. Even more alarmingly, the subsidence would obliterate Chí'chil Biłdagoteel, the Western Apache’s name for the lands around Oak Flat, which are sacred to at least 10 federally recognized tribes. The members of the San Carlos Apache who are leading the opposition effort, and use the location for a four-day-long girlhood coming-of-age ceremony, say it is the only place where their prayers can reach the Creator directly.
Mining and Indigenous sovereignty have been at odds in Arizona for over a century. “The Apache is as near the lobo, or wolf of the country, as any human being can be to a beast,” The New York Times wrote in 1859, claiming the tribe was “the greatest obstacle to the operations of the mining companies” in the area. Three years later, the U.S. Army’s departmental commander ordered Apache men killed “wherever found,” the social archaeologist John Welch writes in his eye-opening historical survey of the region, in which he also advocates for using the term “genocide” to describe the government’s policies. That violence still casts a shadow in Superior: Apache Leap, an astonishing escarpment that looms over the town and backs up against Oak Flat, is named for a legend that cornered Apache warriors jumped to their deaths from its cliffs rather than surrender to the U.S. Cavalry.
As the Apache were being forced onto reservations and into residential boarding schools during the late 1890s, a treaty with the government set aside Oak Flat for protection. The land was later fortified against mining by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with the federal protections reconfirmed by the Nixon administration in the 1960s. (The defunct Magma Mine that fueled the first copper boom in Superior is located just off this 760-acre “Oak Flat Withdrawal Area.”)
In 1995, the enormity of the Oak Flat ore body — and the billions it would be worth if it could be accessed — started to become apparent. The British and Australian mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton formed a U.S. subsidiary, Resolution Copper, which bought the old Magma mine and began to lobby Arizona politicians to sign over the neighboring parcel of Oak Flat. Between 2004 and 2013, lawmakers from the state introduced 11 different land transfer bills into Congress, none of which managed to earn broad support.
Then, in December 2014, President Barack Obama signed a must-pass defense spending bill. On page 1,103 was a midnight rider, inserted by Arizona Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, which authorized a land transfer of 2,400 acres of Tonto National Forest, including Oak Flat, to Resolution Copper in exchange for private land the company had bought in other parts of the state. (Flake previously worked as a paid lobbyist for a Rio Tinto uranium mine, and the company contributed to McCain’s 2014 Senate campaign.)
Heatmap Illustration / Esri, TomTom, Garmin, FAO, NOAA, USGS, © OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS User Community
The senators’ rider also included an odd little twist. While the National Environmental Policy Act requires the Forest Service to conduct an environmental impact statement for a potential mine, the bill stipulated that the land transfer to Resolution Copper had to be completed within a 60-day window of the final environmental impact statement’s release, regardless of what the FEIS found.
After six years of study, the FEIS was rushed to publication by President Donald Trump in the final five days of his term, triggering that 60-day countdown. President Biden rescinded Trump’s FEIS once he took office in 2021, pending further consultation with the tribes, but the clock will begin anew once a revised FEIS is released, potentially later this year. (The new FEIS was expected last summer, but the Forest Service has since reported there is no timeline for its release. The agency declined to comment to Heatmap for this story, citing ongoing litigation.)
A spokesperson for Resolution Copper told me that the company is “committed to being a good steward of the land, air, and water throughout the entirety of this project,” and described programs to restore the local ecology and preserve certain natural features, including Apache Leap. “At each step,” the spokesperson said, “we have taken great care to solicit and act upon the input of our Native American and other neighbors. We have made many changes to the project scope to accommodate those concerns and will continue those efforts over the life of the project.”
Meanwhile, Apache Stronghold — the San Carlos Apache-led religious nonprofit opposing the mine — filed a lawsuit to block the land transfer, arguing that the destruction of Oak Flat infringes on their First Amendment right to practice their religion. The lower courts haven’t agreed, citing a controversial 1988 decision against tribes who made a similar argument in defense of a sacred grove of trees in California. Apache Stronghold, joined by the religious liberty group Becket, is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its case, a decision that is expected any day now. Nearly everyone I spoke with for this story, however, was pessimistic that the Justices would agree to hear the battle over Oak Flat, meaning the lower court’s ruling against Apache Stronghold would stand.
If Mila Besich could have it her way, Biden would visit Superior. He’d marvel at Apache Leap and Picketpost Mountain, visit the impressive new Superior Enterprise Center — paid for partially with money from his 2021 American Rescue Plan Act — and maybe wrap up the day with a purple scoop of prickly pear ice cream from Felicia’s Ice Cream Shop. And, most importantly, he’d hear her pitch: that “Superior and the state of Arizona have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to be the leader in advancing your green energy strategy.” She says Superior — and America — needs this mine.
Superior is a blue town, and Besich, its mayor, is a Democrat, which means she has found herself in the awkward position of defending Resolution Copper against colleagues like Congressman Raúl Grijalva of Tucson and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who have introduced unsuccessful bills in Congress to prevent the land transfer. There is something of a bitter irony, too, in seeing her party tout the economic upsides of the energy transition while standing in the way of Superior’s mine, which would employ an average of 1,434 workers per year and add over $1 billion annually to Arizona’s economy during its lifespan, according to the FEIS.
“Every mayor wants more jobs in their community,” Besich told me simply. But, she also pointed out, “Copper is critical to the green economy, so if we want the green economy, we should want to be mining American copper.”
Superior, of course, isn’t just any town. “Everybody here either worked in the mines or had family that worked in the mines,” James Schenck, a former employee of Resolution Copper who supports the mine and serves as the treasurer for Rebuild Superior, a nonprofit working to diversify the local economy, told me. “They understand the downsides, and some of them, for a while, were having a hard time understanding how this is different than what went on before.”
Though everyone seems to be on cordial terms — at one point during my visit, I was having lunch with Muñoz and Delgado when Besich walked in, and everyone smiled politely at one another — there are still clear factions. A Facebook group for locals warns against “posts concerning DRAMA, POLITICS, RELIGION, and MINING,” presumably the same topics to be avoided at family Thanksgivings.
The critical mineral experts I talked to for this story, though, said Schenck is largely right on that point. “Mining in 2024 is radically different than mining in 1954 or in 1904,” Simon told me. “It is really surgical.”
Muñoz is one of those in town who still isn’t buying it, and has converted his garage into an interpretive center for exposing the perceived infiltrators. As soft classic rock played over the speakers and a fan whirred to keep us cool, he showed me the 3D model he had commissioned of the Oak Flat sinkhole, with a miniature Eiffel Tower subsumed in its crater for scale. Laid out on a table on the other side of the room was a row of six dictionary-thick, spiral-bound sections of the FEIS, their most pertinent sections bookmarked. On the walls, Muñoz had hung pictures of comparable tailings sites in other parts of the world — cautionary tales of the hazards posed during the long lifespan of mines. (Including the water demands, no small concern in a place like Arizona, which opens a whole other can of worms).
“I use my experience to educate the people,” Muñoz said. “This isn’t what it’s made out to be. They’re going to play you.”
Muñoz was employed at the Magma Copper mine until 1982, when he was 27. “One day they said, ‘We’re shutting down.’ They folded up just like a carnival does on Monday morning,” he recalled. The abrupt departure devastated Superior: In These Timesdescribed the following years as an “economic cataclysm” for the town. By 1989, the median household income was just $16,118 compared to $36,806 in Queen Creek, the nearest Phoenix suburb just a 45-minute drive away.
“I witnessed grown men cry,” Muñoz said. “Men who’d been in the mines pretty close to 30 years — they never knew nothing else.” His father, the former boarding house owner, was among them: “He had limited writing abilities and what have you. He was 58. People lost their homes here. They lost their cars. There were divorces. Some people committed suicide. The drinking, the drugs. It was a bad time.”
Muñoz went on food stamps and unemployment. “This generation that is coming up, they’ve never experienced that,” he said. “They’ve never experienced a repossession note in the mail from the bank. They’ve never experienced a disconnection notice hanging from your front door knob. And they’ve never experienced calling up the utilities and saying, ‘Hey, can you wait until Friday when my unemployment check comes in?’”
Superior’s story isn’t unique; Arizona’s Copper Triangle is a constellation of hollowed-out company towns. Like many other out-of-work Magma miners, Muñoz eventually found a job at San Manuel, a BHP-owned block cave mine about an hour south of Superior. Then, in 1999, copper prices stuttered again, and by 2003, it shut down, too.
Muñoz had just returned from a car show in San Manuel when we met in his garage, and he reported it was still a sorry sight. “The main grocery store is closed, the Subway, all the buildings are boarded up, and the schools are shut down,” he said. The mine “just abandoned that town.”
Even as Muñoz and the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition work with Apache Stronghold and national environmentalist groups like HECHO, the Sierra Club, and the National Wildlife Federation try to block Resolution Copper’s mine, there is a distinct feeling in Superior of its inevitability. Schenck, the treasurer for Rebuild Superior, told me he suspects just “10% or 15%” of people in town are “against the project.”
“My personal belief is this copper deposit is going to be developed at some point,” Schenck said. “It’s too important.”
Besich, the mayor, gave this impression too. “What people need to understand is, this ore body is not going anywhere,” she said. “Someone will mine it in the future.” She views Superior and the copper industry as partners in an “arranged marriage,” and her job as mayor is helping them “figure out how to get along.”
From the outside, though, Resolution Copper looks more like a sugar daddy. To date, Rio Tinto and BHP have spent more than $2 billion combined pursuing the Oak Flat mine, including pumping money into the Chamber of Commerce building, the Enterprise Center, and the fire department. When the town of Kearny, downstream of the mine’s proposed tailings site, needed a new ambulance, Resolution Copper offered to help foot the bill. Local high schoolers and tribal members can even apply for Resolution Copper scholarships.
Critics say Resolution Copper is buying political and social influence in the Copper Corridor, a modern-day iteration of the propaganda tactics that swept aside the Apache in the late 1800s. Rio Tinto and BHP “remain committed to influencing U.S. government decisions about the use of public lands and minerals, regardless of additional harms to those lands, to Native Americans, or to National Register historic sites and sacred places,” the archaeologist Welch wrote in his Oak Flat study.
Rio Tinto is infamous even in the mining industry for its poor history of handling community- and heritage-related concerns. To pick a recent example, the company drew international condemnation for its 2020 destruction of the Juukan Gorge cave in Western Australia, a sacred site to the Aboriginal people that had evidence of continuous human occupation going back to the Ice Age. Though Rio Tinto had the legal right to destroy the 45,000-year-old caves, “it is hard to believe community engagement is being taken seriously” by the company, Glynn Cochrane, a former Rio Tinto senior advisor, said in a testimony in the aftermath. Archaeologists and sympathetic politicians have warned that the cultural and spiritual loss caused by mining Oak Flat would be like a second Juukan Gorge.
The San Carlos Apache are not a monolith, however, and the community has differing beliefs about the cultural importance of Oak Flat. Tribal members who support the mine or work for Resolution Copper are often cited by non-Native supporters as proof of Apache Stronghold’s supposedly arbitrary defense of Oak Flat. (Apache Stronghold, which is on a prayer journey to petition the Supreme Court, did not return Heatmap’s request for comment.)
Muñoz and his team are specifically worried about how Superior, the town, will make out. U.S. copper smelters are already at capacity, meaning Resolution Copper would likely send much if not all of the raw copper extracted at Oak Flat to China for processing. (Rio Tinto’s largest shareholder is the Aluminum Corporation of China.) The spokesperson for Resolution Copper told me that it’s the company’s priority to process the ore domestically, and Rio Tinto does have its own facility in the U.S., the Kennecott copper smelting facility in Utah. Yet it hasn’t committed publicly to processing the Arizona ore there, and it’s far from clear that it even has the capacity to do so.
For Simon, the University of Michigan professor, that shouldn’t be a deterrent: “If we mine more copper here and it just means we have to export it — who cares?” he pushed back. “If it has to go to China and they smelt it, then you send it to China and they smelt it. Climate is the prize, and if we want to mitigate our impact, we’ve got to do it. There are no ifs, ands, or buts.”
Oak Flat is also located outside of Superior’s town limits, meaning the community would only recoup about $500,000 in tax revenue, on the high end, from the mine annually, according to the 2021 FEIS — Schenek told me the town’s budget is around $3 million, so it’s hardly insignificant, though it is peanuts compared to the $38 million the state would reap. The FEIS additionally estimated that only about a quarter of the mine’s eventual employees would actually “seek to live in or near Superior;” many would choose instead to commute the hour or so from Phoenix’s Maricopa County.
Because of technological advances in mining and robotics, the mine also won’t bring back the physical jobs locals remember from the 1970s — by Resolution Copper’s own admission. Besich, at least, isn’t bothered by this detail: “In all reality, I don’t see my children and their peers wanting to do the manual physical labor that my grandfather, my father, and certainly my great-grandfather did,” she told me. “So the change in technique is good, and I think that it’s actually better for the environment in the long term.” She added that Resolution Copper’s investment in things like local infrastructure and worker training programs will compensate for the comparably insignificant tax revenue the town will otherwise receive, ensuring Superior gets a fair cut of the bonanza.
What supporters and opponents of the mine can agree on is that Superior must avoid the devastation of the 1980s if or when the Oak Flat mine is exhausted in 40 or more years. Besich and Schenck told me their vision is for Superior to be a town with a mine, not a mining town. But is such a thing even possible? In recent years, Superior has tried to position itself as an outdoor recreation gateway to the many climbing routes and hiking trails in the area. Yet I struggle to imagine anyone would want to vacation or recreate so close to a massive mining operation.
Muñoz believes Superior should throw itself entirely into tourism, which brings in three times as much revenue as the copper industry in Arizona. He dismissed arguments that losing the mine this far into negotiations and preparations would set the town back two decades, telling me about a conversation he had with Vicky Peacey, the president of Resolution Copper. “She said, ‘How do I tell my 300-plus employees that they don’t have a job?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘The same way BHP told the 3,300 in San Manuel they didn’t have a job. Magma Copper didn’t have a problem telling us we didn’t have a job in ‘82.”
Whatever gets decided about Oak Flat will reverberate far beyond Superior, though. “We’ve got to keep our eyes on the prize,” Simon told me. “And if the prize is mitigating human impacts on climate, and that requires the energy transition, and that requires copper, and we have a potential mine in Arizona that would provide 500,000 tons of copper every year for decades — we need to do that.”
At the end of my day in Superior, I went with Muñoz and Delgado, another former miner, to visit the haunted boarding house.
The renovated interior was surprisingly beautiful, decorated with period-appropriate details like iron bed frames, clawfoot bathtubs, and lace curtains that softened the harshness of the mid-afternoon light. Though even the FEIS warns that “mining in Arizona has followed a ‘boom and bust’ cycle, which potentially leads to great economic uncertainty,” it was with a pang that I imagined the building one day falling back into disrepair. It, and the town, had survived too much.
After peeking into Room 103, where Muñoz had passed his tipsy night all those decades ago, we asked the friendly woman working the front desk if she’d had any supernatural experiences herself — surely she’d seen the mattress-flipping phantom, or swinging chandeliers, or perhaps a white-boot miner who’d come down from the hills?
To our disappointment, she shook her head. For now, whatever ghosts there once might have been in Superior had gone.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comment from Resolution Copper.