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Seventy-eight percent of Americans say they would pay more to buy a U.S.-made EV over a similar Chinese model. Here's why that's significant for Biden's climate law.
Consider for a moment that you are deciding between two electric cars for purchase.
The first is a name-brand American-made EV.
The second is almost identical — same range, same features, same reviews — but it is $5,000 cheaper than the first vehicle, and it is made in China.
Which would you choose?
When asked a nearly identical version of this question last month, nearly four out of every five Americans — some 78% of adults — said that they would buy the more expensive, U.S.-made car, new results from the Heatmap Climate Poll have found. Only 22% of adults said that they would choose the less expensive Chinese vehicle.
The results, which arrive as the Biden administration is finalizing rules that will govern new electric-car subsidies, suggest that many Americans are willing to support costly measures to boost a home-grown EV industry. And it offers some of the first evidence that Americans — who have long told pollsters that they want to buy U.S.-made products, but that they won’t pay extra for them — may be changing their views and buying habits in light of geopolitics.
The result “highlights the opportunity under the [Inflation Reduction Act] that not only Biden has, but the broader U.S. automotive sector has,” Corey Cantor, a senior associate for electric vehicles at BloombergNEF, a clean-energy analysis group, told me. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Congress passed last year, contains what analysts have estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks for companies that manufacture EVs or their batteries in the United States.
The poll adds ballast to one of the law’s central ideas: that Americans would support policy to boost U.S. domestic industry as much — or more — than they would back a more straightforward decarbonization measure. “It sounds like the IRA’s theory — or Joe Manchin’s theory, or Biden’s theory — is really well supported by the American public,” Cantor said, referencing the two Democrats most often credited with the bill’s design.
The EV question united Americans across party, gender, race, age, and ideological lines. Among people who voted for Trump in 2020, 83% said that they would choose the American car; 76% of Biden voters agreed. More than 80% of white, Black, and Asian Americans each picked the domestic model. So did similar majorities of older and younger Americans, men and women, Democrats and Republicans, and college graduates and those without a college degree.
Even among prospective EV buyers — presumably the most cost-sensitive cohort — 75% said that they would choose the pricier, U.S.-made car. The Heatmap Climate Poll, a scientific survey of 1,000 American adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, was conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group and Heatmap News during a five-day period last month.
An opinion poll is not a guarantee of consumer behavior. But in the past, Americans have generally said they would choose U.S.-made products only if they cost about as much as foreign-made goods. In 2016, an Associated Press-GFK poll found that while about 75% of Americans wanted to buy U.S.-made products, only about 30% were willing to pay more for them. According to a Boston Consulting Group analysis, Americans tend to be willing to pay about 5% more for a domestic-made product, The Washington Post has reported. With the average price of a new car approaching $50,000, Americans now seem to say that they will pay more than double that to avoid a Chinese-made electric vehicle.
For now, that preference probably has bigger political implications than consumer ones. Although China makes more EVs than any other country and dominates global market share, relatively few Chinese-made vehicles make their way to the United States. The American government has imposed high tariffs on Chinese-made EVs and EV parts — including key minerals used in electronics such as lithium, cobalt, and cadmium — since 2018.
Probably the highest-profile Chinese-made EV now sold in the United States is the Polestar 2, a well-reviewed, roughly $50,000 sedan that gets 300 miles of range. Although Polestar is headquartered in Sweden and associated with Volvo, it is controlled by Li Shufu, a Chinese billionaire and the founder of the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, China’s seventh-largest carmaker. Geely also owns Volvo, so some of Volvo’s electric cars — such as the XC40 Recharge, a small SUV — use the same underlying “platform,” or shared set of design and engineering components, as Geely’s cars.
But aspects of this arrangement are changing. Polestar has said that its next car, the Polestar 3 — an $83,000 SUV due to go on sale later this year — will be made in Ridgeville, South Carolina.
Chinese-made EVs have been welcomed more warmly elsewhere in the world. The five most popular EVs in Australia are all made in China. BYD, a Chinese firm that is by some measures already the world’s largest EV maker, sells cars there and across northern Europe; it plans to expand to the U.K., Japan, and Mexico this year. So do Geely and Nio, another Chinese automaker. And some American firms are deepening their China ties: Tesla’s Shanghai plant is the company’s largest factory worldwide.
“European consumers have been fairly favorable” to Chinese EVs, Cantor said. “The response has been more like, This is a cool car, they’re a cool company. There’s a more complicated geopolitical relationship for any Chinese company to come into the American market.”
Dan Wang, a technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, an economic-research firm based in Beijing, said that Americans may not be ready for how different these Made-in-China EVs will initially feel. “It’s not clear that the mindset [that Chinese automakers] bring from the Chinese market — featuring greater phone connectivity and a richer infotainment experience for the rider — meets the taste of Americans,” he told me.
That said, the poll question may be unrealistic about China’s ability to make cost-efficient EVs in the American market. In addition to the high tariffs, the federal government will soon provide subsidies of up to $7,500 to EVs that meet strict U.S.-made standards; it is due to announce that program’s details later this week.
Even beyond EVs, a large majority of Americans seemed to back the IRA’s broad, industry-forward approach when it was described to them in neutral terms, the poll found. Asked to choose from a list of pro-climate policies, just under half of Americans said that they would support a carbon tax. But 69% said that they wanted the government to invest “in technologies that greatly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” such as renewables or carbon removal. Essentially the same share said they supported requiring businesses to buy a certain share of their energy from renewable or zero-carbon sources.
Perhaps above all, the poll hints at Americans’ deepening skepticism of what was once one of the central bargains in its global trade agreements: that the U.S. should accept less domestic manufacturing in exchange for cheaper consumer prices. Americans — at least when asked hypothetically and about their own pocketbooks — don’t seem as willing to make that exchange anymore. Will they make the same decision at the dealership? The answer will matter to more than just the auto industry.
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted via online panels by Benenson Strategy Group from Feb. 15 to 20, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.02 percentage points. You can read more about the topline results here.
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SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk and traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” contends Johannes Ackva of Founder Pledge.
Johannes Ackva likes a contrarian bet. Back in 2020, when he launched the climate program at Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to philanthropic causes, he sought out “surgical interventions” to support technologies that didn’t already enjoy the widespread popularity of wind turbines and solar panels, such as advanced nuclear reactors and direct air carbon capture.
By late 2023, however, the Biden administration’s legislative sweep was directing billions to the very range of technologies Ackva previously saw as neglected. So he turned his attention to shoring up those political wins.
The modern climate movement came into its own demanding that the world stop shrinking from inconvenient truths. But as polls increasingly showed the 2024 election trending toward Republicans, Ackva saw few funders propping up advocates with any influence over the GOP. Founders Pledge pumped millions into Deploy/US, a climate group where former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida served as the top adviser, which then distributed the money to upward of 30 right-leaning climate groups, including the American Conservation Coalition and the Evangelical Environmental Network.
The bipartisan gamble paid off. In April 2024, Founders Pledge received an anonymous $40 million donation to bolster its efforts. Now an anonymous donor has granted Founders Pledge’s climate fund another $50 million, Heatmap has learned.
Founders Pledge declined to say whether the money came from the same unnamed source or separate donors. But the influx of funding has “radically transformed our ability to make large grants,” Ackva told me, noting that the budget before 2024 came out to about $10 million per year.
“The word exponential is overused,” he said. “But that’s roughly the trajectory.”
Amid the so-called green freeze that followed the Trump administration’s rollback of climate funding, Founders Pledge has joined other climate philanthropies in stepping in to back projects that have lost money. When Breakthrough Energy shuttered its climate program in March, Founders Pledge gave $3.5 million to serve as the primary funding for the launch of the Innovation Initiative, started by former staff from the Bill Gates-backed nonprofit.
Ackva said his organization is looking to invest in climate efforts across the political spectrum. But Founders Pledge’s focus on right-of-center groups wasn’t an election-year gimmick.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” he said. “That’s not an authentic way to build a civil society ecosystem.”
As Republicans in Congress proceed with their gutting of green funding, including through Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Ackva said it’s too soon to say whether the political strategy is paying off.
“If you think of grantmaking as making bets, some bets exceed others sooner, but that doesn’t make them bad bets,” Ackva told me. “Ultimately, philanthropy cannot define how a given policy goes. You can adjust the probabilities, maybe level the bets. But obviously it’s larger forces at play that shape how the One Big, Beautiful Bill gets made.”
The Senate may save or even expand parts of the IRA that support baseload power, e.g. nuclear and geothermal. But regardless, Ackva said, climate advocates are making a mistake training their focus so intently on the fate of this one law.
“It’s kind of the only thing that’s being discussed,” he said.
Meanwhile the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set for reauthorization next fall. The Energy Act of 2020 is slated for renewal this year. And funding for the Department of Energy is up for debate as the White House now pushes to expand the Loan Programs Office’s lending authority for nuclear projects by $750 million.
“Those are things we would see as at least as important as the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ackva said.
Given those deadlines, Ackva said he expected other donors to press advocates for plans last year on how to sway Republicans toward more ambitious bills this Congress. But after former Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket last year, he said he’d heard from his grantees “that they were asked what they were going to do with a Harris trifecta.”
“Everyone was betting on Harris to win,” he said. “There’s a very strong ideological lean among climate funders to a degree that was frankly a little bit shocking.”
The partisan divide over climate wasn’t always so pronounced. In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, ran on a more ambitious decarbonization platform than what President Barack Obama proposed in the White House.
There are dueling — though not mutually exclusive — narratives about how the American climate movement over-indexed on one side of the political spectrum. Both stories start in 2010.
The version liberals and leftists will find familiar is one that blames fossil fuel megadonors such as Charles and David Koch for aggressively promoting climate denial among Republican lawmakers.
The version told by Ted Nordhaus, the founder of the Breakthrough Institute think tank where Ackva got his start years before joining Founders Pledge, starts with the failure of the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill to pass through Congress.
When the legislation “went up in flames in 2010,” Nordhaus told me, a bunch of environmental philanthropies hired Harvard professor Theda Skocpol to author a 145-page report on what triggered the blaze.
“The report concluded that the problem is we were too focused on the technocratic, inside-the-Beltway stuff,” Nordhaus summarized. “We needed to build political power so the next time there’s an opportunity to do big climate policy, we would have the political power to put a price on carbon.”
Out of that finding came what Nordhaus called the “two-pronged, boots-on-the-ground” era of the movement, which backed college campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and also efforts to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline.
Reasonable people could debate the fiduciary merits of scrapping investments in natural gas companies or the value of blocking oil infrastructure whose cancellation spurred more shipments of crude on rail lines that face higher risk of a spill or explosion than pipelines. But once supporting fossil fuel divestment or opposing pipelines became the key litmus tests activists used to determine if a Democrat running for office took climate change seriously, the issue became more ideological.
“That made it impossible for any Democrat to become a moderate on climate, and made it impossible for any Republican to be a moderate on climate,” Nordhaus said. “The Republican Party has its own craziness and radicalism, but a bunch of that is negative polarization.”
To fund an effective “climate right,” Nordhaus said, Founders Pledge should seek out groups that don’t explicitly focus on the climate or environment at all.
“I’d be looking at which groups are all-in on U.S. natural gas, which has been the biggest driver of decarbonization in the U.S. over the last 15 years; which groups are all in and really doing work on nuclear; and which groups are doing work on permitting reform,” Nordhaus said. “That’s how you’re going to make progress with Republicans.”
I asked Ackva where the line would be for funding an eco right. Would Founders Pledge back groups that — like some green-leaning elements of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party or allies of France’s Marine Le Pen — support draconian restrictions on immigration in the name of reducing national emissions from the increased population?
“That would not be appropriate,” Ackva told me. “When we say we’re funding the eco right, like when we’re funding groups on the left or in the center, the things they are proposing don’t need to be exactly the things we will be prioritizing, but they need to be plausible, high-impact solutions.”
To Emmet Penney, a senior fellow focused on energy at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, it’s an obvious play. The green left that has long dominated climate policy debates “is premised on aggressive permitting and environmental law that makes it impossible to actually build anything useful toward addressing the things they’re most afraid of.”
“It’s become clear to anyone who wants to build anything that what the environmental left has to offer simply doesn't work,” he told me. “Naturally, more centrist organizations who might not even otherwise be slated as right-wing now look that way and are becoming increasingly attractive to people who are interested in building.”
On Senate committees, a public lands selloff, and energy investment
Current conditions: Southern New England will experience its hottest day of the year so far today, with temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit • Record levels of Sargassum seaweed are overwhelming Caribbean resorts • Saharan dust has spread across most of Florida and will continue over the coastal Southeast through this weekend.
1. The Senate’s first pass at IRA repeal cuts huge climate programs ...
On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill. “At least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in her analysis of the contents — although there is one Environmental Protection Agency grant program, for reducing pollution at ports, that had been targeted in by the House bill and is absent from the Environment and Public Works Committee’s text. As in the House bill, the latest text eliminates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the Trump administration has sought to kill with accusations of fraud, though it has yet to produce any evidence of impropriety.
Elsewhere in the Senate, however, some Republicans appear more friendly toward preserving at least some IRA tax credits. “I would be in the camp that doesn’t think we need [to do] a full repeal and instead can live with a circumscribed, narrower version of the existing IRA credits,” Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a member of the Finance Committee, said, as reported by Axios. Senator John Curtis of Utah published an op-ed in Deseret News on Wednesday in which he argued that “the right policy solution must navigate tax credits and regulatory reform in what I believe is central to America’s economic future, the planet and our national security: energy.”
2. … and a public lands sell-off is back on the table
Senate Republicans are reviving a plan to sell off public lands to fund President Trump’s tax cuts after their colleagues in the House thwarted a similar proposal, Senator Mike Lee of Utah told reporters on Wednesday. According to the senator, a new version of the plan will be included in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’s pass at the bill, which will likely be made public on Monday, Bloomberg reports.
Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana helped lead the charge to kill the earlier version of the proposal in the House, although Lee added that his version would exempt Montana. Still — as I’ve reported — the plan would jeopardize as much as 500,000 acres of public land across Utah and Nevada alone. “These are the places people recreate with their families, they are places to hunt and fish, and they are held in trust for the American people to enjoy for generations to come,” Travis Hammill, the D.C. director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement.
3. 2025 will be a banner year for energy investment, despite economic turbulence: IEA
Despite tariffs, trade wars, and economic uncertainty, the International Energy Agency anticipates a record $3.3 trillion investment in global energy in 2025, per a new report released Thursday. That represents a 2% rise from 2024. “The fast-evolving economic and trade picture means that some investors are adopting a wait-and-see approach to new energy project approvals, but in most areas we have yet to see significant implications for existing projects,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement about the findings.
Around $2.2 trillion of the total global investment is “going collectively to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, twice as much as the $1.1 trillion going to oil, natural gas, and coal,” the report says. Solar specifically is booming, with a forecast of $450 billion in investment by 2025. The overall picture represents an enormous reversal from a decade ago, when fossil fuel investments were 30% higher than electricity generation, grids, and storage. That said, the research also found that investment in grids — at around $400 billion per year — is “failing to keep pace with spending on generation and electrification,” mainly because of “lengthy permitting procedures and tight supply chains for transformers and cables.” Read the full report here.
4. UK solar is having a record year due to unusually sunny spring
Carbon BriefSolar farms in the United Kingdom generated more electricity than ever before in the first five months of the year, according to a newly released accounting by Carbon Brief. The surge in solar energy was 42% higher than over the same period last year, growing from 5.4 terawatt-hours of electricity generated to a record 7.6 terawatt-hours. Carbon Brief credited the record output to the nation’s sunniest spring on record, although the publication notes it was also “aided by rising capacity, which reached 20.2GW in 2024, up by 2.3GW from 17.9GW a year earlier.” You can read the full report here.
5. ‘Atmospheric thirst’ is making droughts more severe: study
While extreme heat almost always has a climate change signal, the same cannot be said for droughts, which have different causes and feedback mechanisms that researchers are still working to understand. A new study published Wednesday in Nature has found that atmospheric evaporative demand — that is, the complex process of water evaporation into the atmosphere, also called “atmospheric thirst” — has increased drought severity by an average of 40%. Over the five years from 2018 to 2022, areas in drought have expanded 74% on average compared to the 1981 to 2017 period, with atmospheric evaporative demand “contributing to 58% of this increase,” the report further found. “We were very much shocked when we saw the results,” Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, told The New York Times.
“A large majority of new residential houses and buildings in Germany feature a heat pump as their main heating system,” according to government numbers reported by Clean Energy Wire. “The climate-friendly heating technology was installed in more than two-thirds (69.4%) of the 76,100 homes finished in 2024, a 5% increase compared to 2023.”