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AM Briefing: Frontier’s New Carbon Removal Deals
On prepurchase agreements, Al Gore, and Norway’s EVs
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On prepurchase agreements, Al Gore, and Norway’s EVs
On the U.S. Postal Service’s wonderfully weird shift to electric cars
Want to understand what’s happening to electric cars? Look at the Golden State.
Any EV is better for the planet than a gas-guzzler, but size still matters for energy use.
On glitchy EV software, calm Atlantic waters, and solar panels
On public lands for solar, Harris’ Pennsylvania problem, and record-breaking humidity.
Current conditions:Conditions in the central Atlantic appear “conducive” to the possible formation of Tropical Storm Francine over Labor Day weekend • A cold front is relieving the more than 20 million Americans who were under a heat alert this week • An “exceptionally rare deluge” could bring rain to parts of the Sahara Desert for the first time on record in August.
On Thursday, the Bureau of Land Management released its Final Utility-Scale Solar Energy Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement and Proposed Resource Management Plan Amendments — a mouthful more commonly known as the Western Solar Plan. The idea is to “drive responsible solar development to locations with fewer potential conflicts while helping the nation transition to a clean energy economy,” BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement.
To speed up the approval process of solar projects, the Western Solar Plan identifies 31 million acres of public lands across 11 western states as available for potential development, singling out regions that would bring solar “closer to transmission lines or to previously disturbed lands” and avoid “protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitat,” according to the BLM. Individual projects would still need to be authorized through site-specific environmental reviews and public comment periods.
CNN’s Dana Bash pressed Kamala Harris on her former opposition to fracking on Thursday night during the candidate’s first major sit-down with the press since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Asked if she stood by her 2019 statement that “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” Harris stressed, “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.” Harris said her “values have not changed” and that “we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate,” but that she has become convinced “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
Harris has had weak recent poll numbers in Pennsylvania, where the fracking industry employs about 24,000 people, and which could be a deciding factor in the November election. The Trump campaign has seized on her potential weakness there, telling Axios in the aftermath of the interview that Harris “has promised to ban fracking and kill good-paying energy jobs in Pennsylvania and across the heartland.”
Saturday, August 31, marks the end of meteorological summer (even if real ones know summer doesn’t end spiritually until next Tuesday and astronomically until the 22nd). And yes, this was another one for the books: Specifically, summer 2024 was the most humid in 85 years of record-keeping, and likely the most humid summer on Earth, as well, The Washington Post reports based on calculations by the climate scientist Brian Brettschneider.
“June 2024 and July 2024 both set records for highest dew point for their respective months,” Brettschneider told the Post. “I expect August 2024 to be a record too. Summer 2024 should break the record set in summer 2023.” Humidity notably makes extreme heat more dangerous, a process that is accelerating because warmer air caused by climate change can hold more moisture.
Just over half of Americans (52%) would support a bipartisan law that made it easier to build new clean energy projects and benefit some oil and gas development, a new poll by Heatmap has found. “That’s good news for one of the last remaining pieces of environmental policy that Congress could pass under this presidency: a bipartisan proposal from Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that would speed up the process of building climate-friendly infrastructure in exchange for concessions to the oil and gas industry,” writes Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer.
Though many people polled said they didn’t know enough about the bill to make a call one way or the other, those who did were largely in favor, including 58% of GOP voters, who were a little more amenable to the compromise than Democrats. “This all suggests that the permitting reform deal could remain largely depoliticized as Congress continues to debate it through the fall,” adds Meyer. “If you were to summarize respondents’ reactions to the survey, it might look like, ‘Sure, whatever, sounds good.’”
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At least seven teenage athletes have died in the U.S. in August during or immediately after football practice, with experts saying extreme heat may be to blame. Three of the deaths — 15-year-old Javion Taylor of central Virginia; 14-year-old Semaj Wilkins of Alabama; and 16-year-old Junior Leslie Noble of Maryland — were linked to heat, while others involved traumatic head injuries. But heat can also increase the risk of brain injuries, Kei Katawa, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Indiana University Bloomington, told NPR. “At that point, your brain [already has] asymptomatic heat exhaustion — pre-heat exhaustion. And then on top of that, you sustain head impact. It has a potential of amplifying head impact effect,” he said. Since 1960, at least 157 football players across all levels of the sport have died of heatstroke, according to The National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research.
A “daring team of three Tesla enthusiasts” is set to embark this week on a six-day, 460-mile round trip journey from Dawson City, Yukon, to the Arctic Ocean … in a Cybertruck. The drive — which is intended to promote “the sustainable energy future through electric vehicle travel” — is off to a bit of a rough start, per Futurist, which reports the adventurers have been struggling to reach their starting point due to northwestern Canada’s limited charging infrastructure.
Which is why it’s great that so many Americans are now leasing EVs.
The new way to buy an electric car is not to buy one at all.
Just three years ago, four out of five EV drivers had financed their car or paid in cash, while only 21% had leased the EV, according to data from TransUnion. But by the second quarter of this year, leasing had become the top choice: 48.7% of people leased their new electric vehicle versus 34.7 percent who financed and 16.6% who paid in cash.
That’s a sea change in the way people shop for EVs, and it could be great news for the electric car market — just think of all the gently used cars that will flood the market when those leases end.
There are numerous factors behind leasing’s ascendance, starting with money matters. Electric cars still cost more than fossil fuel-burners, but the monthly payment on a lease is almost always less than what you’d pay per month to finance the full cost of a vehicle. In that way, leasing brings EVs within reach for budget-minded drivers — Joseph Yoon, consumer insights analyst at Edmunds, recently told me there are great leasing deals aplenty on EVs because dealers want to move them off the lots.
A tweak to the federal tax credits helped, too. It got more complicated to buy an EV outright this year after the government restricted the benefits to vehicles with a minimum amount of domestic manufacturing. But the same rules don’t apply to leased vehicles, giving those who lease an EV the option to get a discount on a car that wouldn’t necessarily be eligible if they financed it.
There are other hypotheses about the rising popularity of the lease. A bigwig at one of the credit bureaus told InsideEVs that leasing reflects buyers’ comfort with the subscription model that has taken over our economy at large. The data also shows that the total number of first-time lessees has actually declined a little since 2019, which suggests to me that perhaps a lot of people who always lease their vehicles decided over the past few years that it was time to go for an EV.
Leasing is also simply an attractive choice given the current state of electric vehicle offerings. Most of today’s most popular models haven’t been on the road long enough to tell us much about how they’ll age — or what might go wrong when they’re eight or 10 or 12 years old. Lease-holders don’t have to worry about any of that. They need not worry about the battery range inevitably fading, either.
For this reason I’ve begun, from time to time, to second-guess my own decision to buy my EV. Rather than watching its battery diminish as the years go by, I could have leased it, returned it after three years, and gotten into a cool new EV that didn’t exist when I bought mine. Then again, I’m closing in on the last monthly payment rather than being locked into the cycle of forever payments that comes with leasing. So I got that going for me, which is nice.
The jump in leasing is having a clear impact on the shape of the electric vehicle market, where carmakers in the U.S., in particular, are still having trouble putting out affordable EVs that buyers want. Luxury buyers, on the other hand, have always favored leases as a way to keep themselves in a shiny, new-ish car, and to avoid the unpleasant experience of owning an out-of-warranty BMW, Mercedes-Benz, or Audi. Around 90% of those three companies’ EVs are leased, a number that has helped the Germany luxury brands get a foothold in the electric car market (especially considering the staggering MSRPs of most of their electric offerings).
And then there’s what happens to all those leased vehicles. Once a typical three-year agreement expires, its driver must give back the vehicle to the dealership, presumably in the undamaged, low-mileage condition that’s specified in the terms of the lease. From there, the vehicle goes on to start its second life as someone else’s brand new used car — which is why it’s good news that lots of people are leasing EVs.
While leasing is one way to work around the high sticker prices of EVs, buying used is another. Used vehicles have long been a better deal because somebody else suffered the financial penalty of buying a new car and seeing its value plummet the moment they drove it off the lot. (In fact, what you’re really paying for when you lease a car is the severe depreciation it undergoes during its first few years of life. The dealership has to get that money from lease customers because they’ll get much less for the vehicle when it returns from its lease as a three-year-old and they resell it as a used car.)
The used EV market, though, hasn’t been particularly robust to date. For one thing, there just aren’t that many vehicles on the market since EV sales really only took off in the past few years. Further limiting supply are the plummeting prices of used EVs, which appear to be depreciating much faster than gasoline cars or hybrids. Since owners would recoup so little from selling their EVs, more of them are hanging onto their cars.
That’s why the rise in leased EVs could be good news for everyone else. In a few years, all of those electric vehicles will return to the lot where many will become gently used, certified pre-owned cars that sell for much less than new vehicles. And though the fate of the federal tax credits after this year’s election are uncertain, used EVs currently also qualify for a tax break.
Used electric vehicles have their own set of concerns. Their drivers won’t enjoy the full driving range that the battery offered when new. They’ll be responsible for the longer-term repairs if they want to keep the car running indefinitely. But used EVs with 80% or 90% of their original range are plenty useful, and given those prices and tax breaks, they’re a steal, too. And with a lot of leased EVs soon to enter the secondary market, you might even be able to find one.