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Suppose you’d never heard of the gas-powered car. One day, someone comes along to evangelize a new Honda CR-V as the hottest thing in technology. You might rightfully ask: Are you serious? You want me to put my family inside a box propelled by petroleum explosions? I’m supposed to maintain a machine made of thousands of moving parts ready to fail at any time, and that needs a fossil fuel imported largely from hostile nations?
Hank Green of YouTube fame recently posted such a thought experiment on Threads to point out the power of the status quo. After a century of our burning gasoline to get around, the frankly bizarre nature of internal combustion has become invisible. Instead, it is the ascendant electric car that is met by the doubt and derision that scoffs at anything new and different.
I’m not going to tell you EVs don’t have growing pains. But the big arguments against them aren’t as impressive as they sound.
Some anti-EV complaints are little more than bad-faith attacks drummed up by petroleum partisans and others with an ax to grind against electrification. For example, there is the notion that EVs aren’t actually better for the climate because they produce more emissions than gas cars. Opponents adore this one, since it would negate the rationale for electrifying the car fleet.
Except, it’s wrong. It may be true that building an EV requires slightly more upfront carbon emissions, which are caused by mining the essential materials and making the battery. However, combustion cars more than make up the difference by burning fossil fuels, and spewing a constant stream of climate pollution, for as many years as they run. Meanwhile, an EV gets cleaner and cleaner as the grid that supplies its electricity adds more and more renewables to its makeup. You’d basically have to burn nothing but coal for EVs to be worse over their lifespans.
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What about the annoyance of EV ownership? Some antagonists suggest driving electric is like using cloth diapers: an onerous, soul-sucking inconvenience taken on for the sake of saving the planet. Don’t believe it. EV life has its quirks, sure. On the other hand, I’ve covered the numerous ways that EVs are just plain better than gas cars, which includes the impressive zoom off the starting line, the ability to use your garage as a refueling station, and much more.
Range anxiety, held up as a dealbreaker for some buyers considering an EV, isn’t the problem you think it is. The fear is essentially nil for people who can charge an EV at home: You’ll wake up each morning with 80 or 90 percent of battery capacity, which is more than enough for all your daily driving needs. Finding a public charger is mainly a problem for longer trips, and the growing number of fast-charging stations means there’ll be one. Furthermore, battery ranges are getting longer and charging times are getting shorter. As this trend continues, range anxiety is quickly diminishing, as is the convenience difference between gas and electric.
Some naysayers say it’s impossible for an electric vehicle to meet their needs. I get it. It’d be easy to look at maps of U.S. charging infrastructure and conclude that if you don’t live in one of the big metropolitan areas where plugs are abundant, then EV ownership is impossible or impractical. Well, not necessarily.
Yes, those who reside in truly rural parts of America, and drive many miles far from the interstate highway system, ought to wait on going electric. But you don’t need to live in Los Angeles to live with an EV. Remember, if you can charge at home, then your house supplies the energy for the vast majority of your driving. Fast chargers now line the major highways even in states with low EV ownership to date, so you could drive a long distance as long as it’s not into the hinterlands. Having an EV especially makes sense in a two-car family where the other car is, say, a traditional hybrid. Simply accomplish most of your local driving on cleaner, electric power, and take out the Prius if you’re driving to a far-flung national park.
EVs are too expensive, they say. That one is true. However, while the federal tax credits for electric vehicles were already perplexing and are getting worse, they exist. If you can manage to navigate them, it is still possible to save $7,500 up front on buying an EV, an amount that brings them much closer to their gasoline counterparts. And that’s before the credits and rebates available in many states for buying zero-emissions cars or installing home charging stations. It also doesn’t include the savings from reduced routine maintenance and low fuel costs, both of which make electrics cheaper to operate as the years go by.
In addition, those high sticker prices won’t stay high forever. A lot of the EVs that have hit the market so far are high-end, and their eye-popping MSRP helps carmakers cover the costs of designing new all-electric platforms and building big batteries. As the electric market matures, more entry-level models will emerge, made possible in part by the cost of batteries falling as the industry reaches a bigger scale.
There is a long list of alleged reasons why electrification supposedly cannot work across an entire country or the world. Among them: Battery materials are scarce, and must be mined in problematic areas. The grid supposedly can’t handle the extra demand (it can), and we can’t put enough renewable energy on the grid for EVs to make a maximum climate impact. Charging infrastructure is woefully inadequate.
These all are issues to be sorted, surely. The fundamental problem with this kind of anti-electric rhetoric around them, though, is that it suggests such problems are unsolvable. They’re not. New sources for raw materials are being found, such as the giant lithium deposit discovered this year near the Oregon-Nevada border. The ascendant EV battery recycling industry has the potential to recover most of the precious metals from spent cells. In the longer term, scientists are at work on novel chemistries that could use more abundant and easily obtained materials to make the batteries of tomorrow from something other than lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
The electricity grid does need to be improved, with more high-capacity transmission lines and energy storage solutions to allow for saving solar and wind energy for later. Frankly, though, our decaying infrastructure needs hardening anyway, and the EV revolution may help provide the push to get such projects past political gridlock. In the meantime, there are available smart solutions such as trying to line up energy demand with renewable supply — for example, by charging all our new EVs in midday when the sun is shining.
Maybe the people who say those solutions are too expensive or too difficult simply have no vision. After all, many of them would be out there stumping about the power of American ingenuity — if that ingenuity were in pursuit of a technology that profited them or appealed to their voters. While the EV transition will be hard, what would be even harder is giving up and living with the effects of unmitigated climate change, or trying to realize 11th-hour miracle solutions to save the planet like direct air capture.
The only truly compelling argument against EVs is that they don’t go far enough. They are still cars, after all, and a society that drives electric cars still wastes its land on parking lots and kills thousands of its citizens each year through crashes and collisions with other vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians. Sticking with cars just because they fit into the civilization we’ve built is a missed opportunity to build a walkable, bikeable, better future. There’s no arguing with that one.
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Using more electricity when it’s cheap can pay dividends later.
One of the best arguments for electric vehicles is the promise of lower costs for the owner. Yes, EVs cost more upfront than comparable gas-powered cars, but electric cars are cheaper to fuel and should require less routine maintenance, too. (Say goodbye to the 3,000-mile oil change.)
What about the societal scale, though? As the number of EVs on the road continues to rise, more analysts are putting forth the argument that EV ownership could lead to lower energy bills for everyone, even the people who don’t buy them.
The idea may be counterintuitive, given the prevailing narrative about voracious appetite for electricity. EVs do require a lot of energy. Electricity demand for EVs in the U.S. jumped 50% from 2023 to 2024 alone as more Americans bought electric, and the research group Ev.energy says demand could triple by 2030. Studies suggest that replacing every internal combustion vehicle in the country with an EV would eat up as much as 29% of American electricity.
Meanwhile, the grid is struggling to keep up — it is, after all, much more difficult to add more megawatts to the capacity of our power system than it is to put a few more EVs on the road. The obvious inference would then seem to be that a battery-powered car fleet could cause an energy crunch and spike in prices.
A new report from Ev.energy, however, argues that if we got smarter about how and when we charge our cars, their presence could actually cut costs for the average American by 10%. The gains could be even better if EVs reach their true potential as a way to give the grid a unique kind of flexibility and resilience.
Compare an electric car to a data center, the other application painted as a ticking time bomb for electricity prices. Worries about the energy-gobbling habits of AI-powering servers are well-founded, given their 24/7 appetite. An EV, however, needs to charge only once in a while. In fact, most people don’t need to charge every day, given the range of modern EVs and the driving habits of the typical American.
As we've covered before, it’s when you charge that matters. Optimizing EV charging can be a helpful way to ease pressure on the power grid and align EV charging with the availability of clean energy.
Here in California, which has far and away the most EVs in America, TV commercials remind us to use less energy between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., when the state is dealing with rising residential energy use just as solar power is tapering off for the day. It would cause a grid crisis if every EV owner charged as soon as they got home from work. Having EV owners charge their cars overnight, a period of low demand, helps ease the pressure. So does charging during midday, when California sometimes has more solar energy than it knows what to do with.
When EVs charge in this mindful manner, using energy during times of day when it’s cheap for utilities to provide it, data suggests they can effectively push down electricity prices for everyone. Says one recent report from Synapse Energy: “In California, EVs have increased utility revenues more than they have increased utility costs, leading to downward pressure on electric rates for EV-owners and non-EV owners alike.” As the NRDC points out, California has revenue decoupling in place for its utilities, so “any additional revenue in excess of what was anticipated is returned to all utility customers — not just EV drivers — in the form of lower rates.”
Those rosy figures depend upon drivers following this model and charging during off-peak hours, of course. But with time-of-use rates giving them the financial motivation to charge overnight rather than in the early evening, it’s not an outrageous presumption.
And there’s something else that differentiates EVs from other applications that consume lots of electricity: Thanks to their ability to store a large number of kilowatt-hours over a lengthy period of time, electric vehicles can give back. EVs can be a cornerstone of the virtual power plant model because the cars — those equipped with bidirectional charging capabilities, at least — could feed the energy in their batteries back onto the grid to prevent blackouts, for example. In Australia, the Electric Vehicle Council recently crunched the numbers to argue in favor of incentivizing residents to install vehicle-to-grid infrastructure. Their math indicates Australia would reap more than the government invests because these connected EV would cut everyone’s electricity price.
It’s getting more expensive for the individual to own an EV — the federal tax credit for buying one disappears at month’s end, and punitive yearly fees for EV ownership are coming. Yet it seems that driving electric might be doing your neighbors a favor, and not just by clearing the air.
The energy sector — including oil and gas — and manufacturing took some heavy hits in the latest jobs report.
We got a much better sense of what the American labor market is doing today. And the news was not good.
The economy added only 22,000 jobs last month, far fewer than economists had predicted, according to a new release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The new data also shows that the economy gained slightly more jobs in July than we thought at the time, but that it actually lost 13,000 jobs in June — making that month the first since 2020 to see a true decline in U.S. employment.
The unemployment rate now stands at 4.3%, one tenth of a percent higher than it was last month. All in all, the American labor market has been frozen since President Trump declared “Liberation Day” and announced a bevy of new tariffs in April.
On the one hand, some aspects of that job loss shouldn’t be a surprise. As we’ve covered at Heatmap, the Trump administration has spent the past few months attacking the wind, solar, and electric vehicle industries. It has yanked subsidies from new electricity generation, rewritten rules on the fly, and waged an all-out regulatory war on offshore wind farms. Electricity costs are rising nationwide, constraining essentially all power-dependent industries except artificial intelligence.
In short: The news hasn’t been good for the transition industries. But what’s notable in this report is that the job declines are not limited to these green industries. The first eight months of Donald Trump’s presidency have been more and more damaging for the blue collar fields and heavy industries that he promised to help.
For instance: Mining, quarrying, and oil extraction lost 6,000 jobs in August. These losses were led by the oil and gas industry, as well as mining support companies. Other industries — such as coal mining firms — saw essentially no growth or very slightly declines.
More cuts are likely to come soon for the fossil fuel industry. The oil giant ConocoPhillips says it will lay off about a quarter of its roughly 13,000-person workforce before the year is out. The oilfield services company Halliburton has also been shedding workers in recent weeks, according to Reuters. The West Texas benchmark oil price has lost nearly $10 since the year began, and is now hovering around $62. That’s roughly the average breakeven price for drilling new wells in the Permian Basin.
The manufacturing industry has lost 78,000 jobs since the year began. In the past month, it shed jobs almost as fast as the federal government, which has deliberately culled its workforce, as the economic analyst Mike Konczal observed.
This manufacturing weakness is also showing up in corporate earnings. John Deere, the American farm equipment maker, has seen its income degrade through the year. It estimates that Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs will cost the company $600 million in 2025, and it recently laid off several hundred workers in the Midwest.
Even industries that have previously shown some resilience — and that benefited from the AI boom — have started to stall out a bit. The utility industry lost about 1,000 jobs last month, on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the new data. (At the same time, the number of non-managerial utility workers slightly increased.) The utility sector has still gained more than 6,000 jobs compared to a year ago.
A few months ago, I quipped that you could call President Trump “Degrowth Donald” because his tax and trade policies seemed intent on raising prices and killing the carbon-intensive sectors of the American economy. (Of course, Trump was doing plenty that radical climate activists didn’t want to see, too, and his anti-renewable campaign has only gotten worse.) Now we’re seeing the president’s anti-growth policies bear fruit. It was a joke then. Now it’s just sad.
Trump’s enthusiasm for the space has proved contagious — building on what Biden started.
It’s become a well-known adage in energy circles that “critical minerals are the new oil.” As the world pushes — haltingly but persistently — toward decarbonization and electrification, minerals such as lithium, nickel, and copper have only risen in their strategic importance.
These elements are geographically concentrated, largely in spots with weighty implications for geopolitics and national security — lithium largely in South America and Australia, copper in South America, nickel in Indonesia, cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and graphite in China. They’re also subject to volatile price swings and dependent on vast infrastructure to get them out of the ground. But without them, there are no batteries, no magnets, no photovoltaic cells, no semiconductors, no electrical wiring. It is no surprise, then, that it’s already been a big year for investment.
Sector-wide data is scarce, but the announcements are plentiful. Some of the biggest wins so far this year include the AI minerals discovery company Kobold, which closed a colossal $537 million funding round, software-driven mining developer Mariana Minerals landing $85 million in investment, rare earth magnet startup Vulcan Minerals raising $65 million, and minerals recycling company Cyclic Materials announcing plans for a commercial plant in Canada.
“The good investments are still the good investments,” Joe Goodman, co-founder and managing partner at the firm VoLo Earth Ventures, told me. “But I think the return opportunities are larger now.” VoLo’s primary bets include Magrathea, which has an electrolysis-based process to produce pure magnesium from seawater and brines and is reportedly in discussions to form a $100 million partnership for a commercial-scale demonstration plant, as well as Nth Cycle, which recovers and refines critical minerals from sources such as industrial waste and low-grade ores and is well into its first full year of commercial operations.
Much of this activity has been catalyzed by the Trump administration’s enthusiasm for critical minerals. The president has issued executive orders aimed at increasing and expediting domestic minerals production in the name of national defense, and a few weeks ago, announced its intent to issue nearly $1 billion in funding aimed at scaling every stage of the critical minerals supply chain, from mining and processing to manufacturing. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at the time, “For too long, the United States has relied on foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential to modern life and our national security.”
Ironically, the Trump administration is building on a foundation laid by former President Biden as part of his administration’s efforts to decarbonize the economy and expedite the energy transition. In 2022, Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to give the federal government more leeway to support domestic extraction, refining, and recycling of minerals. It also invested billions of dollars from the previous year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to secure a “Made In America supply chain for critical minerals.” These initiatives helped catalyze $120 billion in private sector investments, the administration said.
While they were “motivated by radically different ideologies,” Goodman told me, the message is the same: “We care a lot about our minerals.” As he put it, “The last two administrations could not have been better orchestrated to send that message to public markets.”
Ultimately, political motivations matter far less than cash. In that vein, many companies and venture capitalists are now aligning with the current administration’s priorities. As the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz noted in an article titled “It’s Time to Mine: Securing Critical Minerals,” an F-35 fighter jet requires 920 pounds of rare earth elements, a Navy missile destroyer needs 5,200 pounds, and a nuclear-powered submarine take a whopping 9,200 pounds. Rare earths — a group of metals that form a key subset of critical minerals — are crucial components of the high-performance magnets, precision electronics, and sensors these defense systems rely on.
The military is also certainly interested in energy storage systems, including novel battery chemistries with potential to be more efficient and cost effective than the status quo. This just so happens to be the realm of many a lucrative startup, from Form Energy’s iron-air batteries to Lyten’s bet on lithium-sulfur and Peak Energy’s sodium-ion chemistry.
The Army has also gone all in on microgrids, frequently building installations that rely on solar plus storage. And batteries for use in drones, cargo planes and tactical vehicles are often simply the most practical option, given that they can operate in near silence and reduce vulnerabilities associated with refueling. “It’s much easier to get electricity into contested logistics than it is to get hydrocarbons,” Duncan Turner, a general partner at the venture capital firm SOSV, told me.
Turner has overseen the firm’s investments in minerals companies across the supply chain, a number of which focus on the extraction or refining of just one or a few minerals. For example, SOSV’s portfolio company Still Bright is developing an electrochemical process to extract copper from both high-grade ores as well as mining waste, replacing traditional copper smelting methods. The minerals recycling company XEra Energy is initially focused on reclaiming nickel from ore concentrates and used batteries, though it plans to expand into other battery materials, as well, while the metal recycling company Biometallica is developing a process to recover palladium, platinum, and rhodium from e-waste.
These startups could theoretically use their tech to go after a whole host of minerals, but Turner explained that many find the most lucrative strategy is to fine tune their processes for certain minerals in particular. “That is just a telltale sign of maturity in the market,” he told me, as companies identify their sweet spot and carve out a profitable niche.
Clea Kolster, the head of science at Lowercarbon Capital, was bullish on the potential for critical minerals investments well before the Trump administration shifted the conversation toward their role in the defense sector. “Our view was always that demand for these minerals was just going to increase,” she told me. “This administration has certainly provided a boon and validator for our thesis, but these investments were made on the basis that these would render metal production cheaper and more accessible.”
Lowercarbon was an early investor in the well-capitalized startup Lilac Solutions, first backing the company’s pursuit of a more efficient and sustainable method of lithium brine extraction in early 2020. Since then, Lilac has raised hundreds of millions in additional funding rounds — which Lowercarbon has led — and is now seeking additional capital as it plans for its first commercial lithium production plant in Utah. Lilac isn’t the firm’s only lithium bet — it’s also backing Lithios, a company developing an electrochemical method for separating lithium from brines, and Novalith, which is working on a carbon-negative process for extracting lithium from hard rock without the use of environmentally damaging acids.
Kolster admitted that in Lowercarbon’s early days, the firm “didn’t fully appreciate how significant those additional narratives would become beyond decarbonization,” pointing to critical minerals’ newly prominent role not just in defense, but also in the AI arms race. After all, no new transmission lines, transformers, gear to turn circuits on and off, or other critical grid components can be built or scaled to support the rising electricity demands of data centers without critical minerals.
Goodman told me that some generalist investors have yet to take note of this, however. “There’s large pockets of the investment community who feel like climate is out of the rotation,” he said.
“So in a way we’re experiencing a better pricing opportunity right now, access to higher quality deals.”
From here on out, he predicts we’ll see a steady stream of announcements signaling that the U.S. has secured yet another link in the minerals supply chain, which will be crucial to counter China’s global influence. “I think annually you’ll be seeing the US raise the flag and declare success on another mineral,” Goodman told me. “It might be two years after we raise the flag that a facility is actually operational. But there's going to be a cadence to us taking back our supply chain.”