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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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The EV-maker is now a culture war totem, plus some AI.
During Alan Greenspan’s decade-plus run leading the Federal Reserve, investors and the financial media were convinced that there was a “Greenspan put” underlying the stock market. The basic idea was that if the markets fell too much or too sharply, the Fed would intervene and put a floor on prices analogous to a “put” option on a stock, which allows an investor to sell a stock at a specific price, even if it’s currently selling for less. The existence of this put — which was, to be clear, never a stated policy — was thought to push stock prices up, as it gave investors more confidence that their assets could only fall so far.
While current Fed Chair Jerome Powell would be loath to comment on a specific volatile security, we may be seeing the emergence of a kind of sociopolitical put for Tesla, one coming from the White House and conservative media instead of the Federal Reserve.
The company’s high-flying stock shed over $100 billion of value on Monday, falling around 15% and leaving the price down around 50% from its previous all-time high. While the market as a whole also swooned, especially high-value technology companies like Nvidia and Meta, Tesla was the worst hit. Analysts attributed the particularly steep fall to concerns that CEO Elon Musk was spending too much time in Washington, and that the politicization of the brand had made it toxic to buyers in Europe and among liberals in the United States.
Then the cavalry came in. Sean Hannity told his Fox News audience that he had bought a Model S, while President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.” By this afternoon, Trump had turned the White House lawn into a sales floor for Musk’s electric vehicles. Tesla shares closed the day up almost 4%, while the market overall closed down after Trump and his advisors’ furious whiplash policy pronouncements on tariffs.
Whether the Tesla put succeeds remains to be seen. The stock is still well, well below its all-time highs, but it may confirm a new way to understand Tesla — not as a company that sells electric vehicles to people concerned about climate change, but rather as a conservative culture war totem that has also made sizable investments in artificial intelligence and robotics.
When Musk bought Twitter and devoted more of his time, energy, money, and public pronouncements to right wing politics, some observers thought that maybe he could lift the dreadful image of electric vehicles among Trump voters. But when Pew did a survey on public attitudes towards electric vehicles back in 2023, it found that “Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, younger adults, and people living in urban areas are among the most likely to say they would consider purchasing an EV” — hardly a broad swathe of Trump’s America. More than two-thirds of Republicans surveyed said they weren’t interested in buying an electric car, compared to 30% of Democrats.
On the campaign trail, Trump regularly lambasted EVs, although by the end of the campaign, as Musk’s support became more voluminous, he’s lightened up a bit. In any case, the Biden administration’s pro-electric-vehicle policies were an early target for the Trump administration, and the consumer subsidies for EVs passed under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act are widely considered to be one of the softest targets for repeal.
But newer data shows that the tide may be turning, not so much for electric vehicles, but likely for Tesla itself.
The Wall Street Journalreported survey data last week showing that only 13% of Democrats would consider buying a Tesla, down from 23% from August of 2023, while 26% of Republicans would consider buying a Tesla, up from 15%. Vehicle registration data cited by the Journal suggested a shift in new Tesla purchases from liberal urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, towards more conservative-friendly metropolises like Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Miami.
At the same time, many Tesla investors appear to be mostly seeing through the gyrations in the famously volatile stock and relatively unconcerned about month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter sales data. After all, even after the epic fall in Tesla’s stock price, the company is still worth over $700 billion, more than Toyota, General Motors, and Ford combined, each of which sells several times more cars per year than Tesla.
Many investors simply do not view Tesla as a luxury or mass market automaker, instead seeing it as an artificial intelligence and robotics company. When I speak to individual Tesla shareholders, they’re always telling me how great Full Self-Driving is, not how many cars they expect the company to sell in August. In many cases, Musk has made Tesla stockholders a lot of money, so they’re willing to cut him tremendous slack and generally believe that he has the future figured out.
Longtime Tesla investor Ron Baron, who bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares from 2014 to 2016, told CNBC Tuesday morning, that Musk “believes that digitization [and] autonomy is going to be driving the future. And he thinks we’re … on the verge of having an era of incredible abundance.”Baron also committed that he hasn’t, won’t, and will never sell. “I’m the last in, I’ll be the last out. So I won’t sell a single share personally until I sell all the shares for clients, and that’s what I’ve done.”
Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives, one of the biggest Tesla bulls on the street, has told clients that he expects Tesla’s valuation to exceed $2 trillion, and that its self-driving and robotics business “will represent 90% of the valuation.”
Another longtime Tesla bull, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, told clients in a note Monday that Tesla remained a “Top Pick,” and that his price target was still $430, compared to the stock’s $230.58 close price on the day. His bull case, he said, was $800, which would give the company a valuation over $2.5 trillion.
When the stock lags, Jonas wrote, investors see Tesla as a car company. “In December with the stock testing $500/share, the prevailing sentiment was that the company is an AI ‘winner’ with untapped exposure to embodied AI expressions such as humanoid robotics,” Jonas wrote. “Today with the stock down 50% our investor conversations are focused on management distraction, brand degradation and lost auto sales.”
In a note to clients Tuesday, Ives beseeched Musk to “step up as CEO,” and lamented that there has been “little to no sign of Musk at any Tesla factory or manufacturing facility the last two months.” But his bullishness for Tesla was undaunted. He argued that the scheduled launch of unsupervised Full Self-Driving in June “kicks off the autonomous era at Tesla that we value at $1 trillion alone on a sum-of-the-parts valuation.”
“Autonomous will be the biggest transformation to the auto industry in modern day history,” Ives wrote, “and in our view Tesla will own the autonomous market in the U.S. and globally.”
The most effective put of all may not be anything Trump says or does, but rather investors’ optimism about the future — as long as it’s Elon Musk’s future.
The uncertainty created by Trump’s erratic policymaking could not have come at a worse time for the industry.
This is the second story in a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
Climate tech investment rode to record highs during the Biden administration, supercharged by a surge in ESG investing and net-zero commitments, the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, and at least initially, low interest rates. Though the market had already dropped somewhat from its recent peak, climate tech investors told me that the Trump administration is now shepherding in a detrimental overcorrection. The president’s fossil fuel-friendly rhetoric, dubiously legal IIJA and IRA funding freezes, and aggressive tariffs, have left climate tech startups in the worst possible place: a state of deep uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is the enemy of economic progress,” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, told me.
The lack of clarity is understandably causing investors to throw on the brakes. “We’ve talked internally about, let’s be a little bit more cautious, let’s be a little more judicious with our dollars right now,” Gabriel Kra, co-founder at the climate tech firm Prelude Ventures, told me. “We’re not out in the market, but I would think this would be a really tough time to try and go out and raise a new fund.”
This reluctance comes at a particularly bad time for climate tech startups, many of which are now reaching a point where they are ready to scale up and build first-of-a-kind infrastructure projects and factories. That takes serious capital, the kind that wasn’t as necessary during Trump’s first term, or even much of Biden’s, when many of these companies were in a more nascent research and development or proof-of-concept stage.
I also heard from investors that the pace of Trump’s actions and the extent of the economic upheaval across every sector feels unique this time around. “We’re entering a pretty different economic construct,” Beebe told me, citing the swirling unknowns around how Trump’s policies will impact economic indicators such as inflation and interest rates. “We haven’t seen this kind of economic warfare in decades,” he said.
Even before Trump took office, it was notoriously difficult for climate companies to raise funding in the so-called “missing middle,” when startups are too mature for early-stage venture capital but not mature enough for traditional infrastructure investors to take a bet on them. This is exactly the point at which government support — say, a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office or a grant from the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations — could be most useful in helping a company prove its commercial viability.
But now that Trump has frozen funding — even some that’s been contractually obligated — companies are left with fewer options than ever to reach scale.
One investor who wished to remain anonymous in order to speak more openly told me that “a lot of the missing middle companies are living in a dicier world.” A 2023 white paper on “capital imbalances in the energy transition” from S2G Investments, a firm that supports both early-stage and growth-stage companies, found that from 2017 to 2022, only 20% of climate capital flowed toward companies at this critical inflection point, while 43% went to early-stage companies and 37% towards established technologies. For companies at this precarious growth stage, a funding delay on the order of months could be the difference between life and death, the investor added. Many of these companies may also be reliant on debt financing, they explained. “Unless they’ve been extremely disciplined, they could run into a situation where they’re just not able to service that debt.”
The months or even years that it could take for Trump’s rash funding rescission to wind through the courts will end up killing some companies, Beebe told me. “And unfortunately, that’s what people on the other side of this debate would like, is just to litigate and escalate. And even if they ultimately lose, they’ve won, because startups just don’t have the balance sheets that big companies would,” he explained.
Kra’s Prelude Ventures has a number of prominent companies in its portfolio that have benefitted from DOE grants. This includes Electric Hydrogen, which received a $43.3 million DOE grant to scale electrolyzer manufacturing; Form Energy, which received $150 million to help build a long-duration battery storage manufacturing plant; Boston Metal, which was awarded $50 million for a green steel facility; and Heirloom, which is a part of the $600 million Project Cypress Direct Air Capture hub. DOE funding is often doled out in tranches, with some usually provided upfront and further payments tied to specific project milestones. So even if a grant has officially been awarded, that doesn’t mean all of the funding has been disbursed, giving the Trump administration an opening to break government contracts and claw it back.
Kra told me that a few of his firm’s companies were on the verge of securing government funding before Trump took office, or have a project in the works that is now on hold. “We and the board are working closely with those companies to figure out what to do,” he told me. “If the mandates or supports aren’t there for that company, you’ve got to figure out how to make that cash last a bunch longer so you can still meet some commercially meaningful milestones.”
In this environment, Kra said his firm will be taking a closer look at companies that claim they will be able to attract federal funds. “Let’s make sure we understand what they can do without that non-dilutive capital, without those grants, without that project level support,” he told me, noting that “several” companies in his portfolio will also be impacted by Trump’s ever-changing tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China. Prelude Ventures is working with its portfolio companies to figure how to “smooth out the hit,” Kra told me later via email, but inevitably the tariffs “will affect the prices consumers pay in the short and long run.”
While investors can’t avoid the impacts of all government policies and impulses, the growth-stage firm G2 Venture Partners has long tried to inoculate itself against the vicissitudes of government financing. “None of our companies actually have any exposure to DOE loans,” Brook Porter, a partner and co-founder at G2, told me in an email, nor have they received government grants. If you add up the revenue from all of the companies in G2’s portfolio, which is made up mainly of sustainability-focused startups, only about 3% “has any exposure to the IRA,” Porter told me. So even if the law’s generous clean energy tax credits are slashed or the programs it supports are left to languish, G2’s companies will likely soldier on.
Then there are the venture capitalists themselves. Many of the investors I spoke with emphasized that not all firms will have the ability or will to weather this storm. “I definitely believe many generalist funds who dabbled in climate will pull back,” Beebe told me. Porter agreed. “The generalists are much more interested in AI, then I think in climate,” he said. It’s not as if there’s been a rash of generalist investors announcing pullbacks, though Kra told me he knows of “a couple of firms” that are rethinking their climate investment strategies, potentially opting to fold these investments under an umbrella category such as “hard tech” instead of highlighting a sectoral focus on energy or climate, specifically.
Last month, the investment firm Coatue, which has about $70 billion in assets under management, raised around $250 million for a climate-focused fund, showing it’s not all doom and gloom for the generalists’ climate ambitions. But Porter told me this is exactly the type of large firm he wouldexpect to back out soon, citing Tiger Global Management and Softbank as others that started investing heavily during climate tech’s boom years from 2020 to 2022 that he could imagine winding down that line of business.
Strategic investors such as oil companies have also been quick to dial back their clean energy ambitions and refocus their sights on the fossil fuels championed by the Trump administration. “Corporate venture is very cyclical,” Beebe told me, explaining that large companies tend to make venture investments when they have excess budget or when a sector looks hot, but tighten the purse strings during periods of uncertainty.
But Cody Simms, a managing partner at the climate tech investment firm MCJ, told me that at the moment, he actually sees the corporate venture ecosystem as “quite strong and quite active.” The firm’s investments include the low-carbon cement company Sublime Systems, which last year got strategic backing from two of the world’s largest building materials companies, and the methane capture company Windfall Bio, which has received strategic funding from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. Simms noted that this momentum could represent an overexuberance among corporations who just recently stood up their climate-focused venture arms, and “we’ll see if it continues into the next few years.”
Notably, Sublime and Windfall Bio both also have millions in DOE grants, and another of MCJ’s portfolio companies, bio-based chemicals maker Solugen, has a “conditional commitment” from the LPO for a loan guarantee of over $200 million. Since that money isn’t yet obligated, there’s a good chance it might never actually materialize, which could stall construction on the company’s in-progress biomanufacturing facility.
Simms told me that the main thing he’s encouraging MCJ’s portfolio companies to do at this stage is to contact their local representatives — not to advocate for climate action in general, but rather “to push on the very specific tax credit that they are planning to use and to talk about how it creates jobs locally in their districts.”
Getting startups to shift the narrative away from decarbonization and climate and toward their multitudinous co-benefits — from energy security to supply chain resilience — is of course a strategy many are already deploying to one degree or another. And investors were quick to remind me that the landscape may not be quite as bleak as it appears.
“We’ve made more investments, and we have a pipeline of more attractive investments now than we have in the last couple of years,” Porter told me. That’s because in spite of whatever havoc the Trump administration is wreaking, a lot of climate tech companies are reaching a critical juncture that could position the sector overall for “a record number of IPOs this year and next,” Porter said. The question is, “will these macro uncertainties — political, economic, financial uncertainty — hold companies back from going public?”
As with so many economic downturns and periods of instability, investors also see this as a moment for the true blue startups and venture capitalists to prove their worth and business acumen in an environment that’s working against them. “Now we have the hardcore founders, the people who really are driven by building economically viable, long-term, massively impactful companies, and the investors who understand the markets very well, coming together around clean business models that aren’t dependent on swinging from one subsidy vine to the next subsidy vine,” Beebe told me.
“There is no opportunity that’s an absolute no, even in this current situation, across the entire space,” the anonymous climate tech investor told me. “And so this might be one of the most important points — I won’t say a high point, necessarily — but it might be a moment of truth that the energy transition needs to embrace.”
On the energy secretary’s keynote, Ontario’s electricity surcharge, and record solar power
Current conditions: Critical fire weather returns to New Mexico and Texas and will remain through Saturday • Sharks have been spotted in flooded canals along Australia’s Gold Coast after Cyclone Alfred dropped more than two feet of rain • A tanker carrying jet fuel is still burning after it collided with a cargo ship in the North Sea yesterday. The ship was transporting toxic chemicals that could devastate ecosystems along England’s northeast coast.
In a keynote speech at the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told executives and policymakers that the Trump administration sees climate change as “a side effect of building the modern world,” and said that “everything in life involves trade-offs." He pledged to “end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change” and insisted he’s not a climate change denier, but rather a “climate realist.” According toThe New York Times, “Mr. Wright’s speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause.” Wright also reportedly told fossil fuel bosses he intended to speed up permitting for their projects.
Other things overheard at Day 1 of CERAWeek:
The premier of Canada’s Ontario province announced he is hiking fees on electricity exported to the U.S. by 25%, escalating the trade war kicked off by President Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources. The decision could affect prices in Minnesota, New York, and Michigan, which get some of their electricity from the province. Ontario Premier Doug Ford estimated the surcharge will add about $70 to the monthly bills of affected customers. “I will not hesitate to increase this charge,” Ford said. “If the United States escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely.” The U.S. tariffs went into effect on March 4. Trump issued another 30-day pause just days later, but Ford said Ontario “will not relent” until the threat of tariffs is gone for good.
There was a lot of news from the White House yesterday that relates to climate and the energy transition. Here’s a quick rundown:
The EPA cancelled hundreds of environmental justice grants: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency nixed 400 grants across environmental justice programs and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs worth $1.7 billion. Zeldin said this round of cuts “was our biggest yet.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rescinded Biden memos about infrastructure projects: The two memos encouraged states to prioritize climate change resilience in infrastructure projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and to include under-represented groups when planning projects.
The military ended funding for climate studies: This one technically broke on Friday. The Department of Defense is scrapping its funding for social science research, which covers climate change studies. In a post on X, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said DOD “does not do climate change crap. We do training and war fighting.”
Meanwhile, a second nonprofit – the Coalition for Green Capital – filed a lawsuit against Citibank over climate grant money awarded under the Inflation Reduction Act but frozen by Zeldin’s EPA. Climate United filed a similar lawsuit (but targeting the EPA, as well as Citibank) on Saturday.
A new report from the Princeton ZERO Lab’s REPEAT Project examines the potential consequences of the Trump administration’s plans to kill existing EV tax credits and repeal EPA tailpipe regulations. It finds that, compared to a scenario in which the current policies are kept in place:
“In other words, killing the IRA tax credits for EVs will decimate the nascent renaissance in vehicle and battery manufacturing investment and employment we’re currently seeing play out across the United States,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor and expert in energy systems engineering and policy at Princeton University and head of the REPEAT Project. (Jenkins is also the co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.)
REPEAT Project
The U.S. installed nearly 50 gigawatts of new solar power capacity last year, up 21% from 2023, according to a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie. That’s a record, and the largest annual grid capacity increase from any energy technology in the U.S. in more than 20 years. Combined with storage, solar represents 84% of all new grid capacity added in 2024.
SEIA and Wood Mackenzie
Last year was “the year of materialization of the IRA,” with supply chains becoming more resilient and interest from utilities and corporate buyers growing. Installations are expected to remain steady this year, with little growth, because of policy uncertainty. Total U.S. solar capacity is expected to reach 739 GW by 2035, but this depends on policy. The worst case scenario shows a 130 GW decline in deployment through 2035, which would represent $250 billion in lost investments.
“Last year’s record-level of installations was aided by several solar policies and credits within the Inflation Reduction Act that helped drive interest in the solar market,” said Sylvia Levya Martinez, a principal analyst of North America utility-scale solar for Wood Mackenzie. “We still have many challenges ahead, including unprecedented load growth on the power grid. If many of these policies were eliminated or significantly altered, it would be very detrimental to the industry’s continued growth.”
Tesla shares plunged yesterday by 15%, marking the company’s worst day on the market since 2020 and erasing its post-election stock bump.