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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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The administration is doubling down on an April 20 end date for the traffic control program.
Congestion pricing has only been in effect in New York City for three months, but its rollout has been nearly as turbulent as the 18-year battle to implement it in the first place.
Trump’s Department of Transportation escalated its threat this week to retaliate against New York if the state’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA, does not shut down the tolling program by April 20.
The federal agency reposted a CBS New York story on social media that purported it had agreed to allow congestion pricing to remain in place through October, calling the story “a complete lie.”
“Make no mistake — the Trump Administration and USDOT will not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal in response to non-compliance later this month,” the agency said in the post.
The post did not say what those tools might be, but a previous post from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on March 20 made a veiled threat to withhold funding from the state if it did not shut down the tolling program. “The billions of dollars the federal government sends to New York are not a blank check,” he said.
Duffy notified the MTA on February 19 that he was rescinding federal approval of its congestion pricing program, which charges a $9 fee for drivers who enter New York City’s central business district. The toll had only just gone into effect in early January, but there was already evidence that it was reducing traffic. The MTA immediately filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York challenging Duffy’s actions.
The CBS New York story reported on a joint letter that the MTA and USDOT submitted to the presiding judge mapping out a timeline for the case to proceed. The MTA agreed to file an amended complaint by April 18, and the DOT agreed to respond to it by May 27. Following that, the timeline allows for the back-and-forth over evidence leading up to a ruling to potentially stretch until late October. Both parties called for the judge to reach a decision based on written arguments, without a formal trial.
Despite agreeing to this timeline for the case — the whole point of which is to determine the legality of DOT’s order to terminate congestion pricing — the DOT maintains that New York City must stop charging drivers by April 20.
The MTA refuses to do so. “Congestion pricing is in effect,” Regina Kaplan, the attorney for the MTA, said during a pretrial conference call on Wednesday. “We believe it's working, and as we stated in our complaints, we don't intend to turn it off unless there's an order from your honor that we need to do so.”
In response, Dominika Tarczynska, from the U.S. attorney’s office, told the judge that Duffy is “still evaluating what DOT’s options are if New York City does not comply, and there has been no final decision as to, what, if anything will occur on April 20.”
The president’s executive order is already too late to save at least one Arizona plant.
The Trump administration is trying to save coal again. But despite the president’s seemingly forceful actions, there’s little indication he’ll be any more successful at it this time than he was the last time around.
Backed by coal miners in hard hats and high visibility jackets, Trump on Tuesday announced a series of executive orders meant to boost “beautiful, clean coal.” The orders lift barriers to extracting coal on public lands, ask the Department of Energy to consider metallurgical coal a critical mineral, push out compliance with some air quality rules by two years, instruct the Department of Energy to use emergency authorities to keep coal plants open, and direct theattorney general to go after state climate laws that Trump claimed “discriminate” against greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources like coal.
What’s not clear is how much these orders will boost the coal industry, let alone save it. It’s not even clear whether the specific plant Trump said he was saving will burn coal again.
During the announcement, Trump said that his administration would keep open the Cholla Generating Station, an Arizona coal plant that began operating in 1962. The plant’s final two units were slated to be retired this year.
“We will ensure our nation’s critical coal plants remain online and operational,” Trump said. “To that end, I’m instructing Secretary Wright to save the Cholla coal plant in Arizona.”
But according to Arizona Public Service, the utility that co-owns the plant, the plant has already stopped generating power. A spokesperson told me the utility was “aware” of the president’s statement and is “evaluating what it means for the plant.” APS plans on preserving the site, possibly for nuclear power and has “procured reliable and cost-effective generation that will replace the energy previously generated by Cholla Power Plant,” the spokesperson said..
The Department of Energy didn’t return a request for comment.
Trump’s orders repeatedly cite Section 202 of the Federal Power Act, which allows the Secretary of Energy “during a continuance of a war in which the United States is engaged or when an emergency exists” to allow energy facilities to continue to operate on a temporary basis that otherwise would not.
In 2017, the first Trump administration used Section 202 to allow two coal plant units in Virginia to continue operating occasionally when necessary for grid reliability, despite their having been due to close to comply with air quality regulations. Two years later, the electricity market PJM told the Department of Energy that a new transmission line had rendered the emergency authorization unnecessary, and the plants closed in 2019.
The executive orders “don’t seem to realize that natural gas killed coal and if they aren’t banning fracking, none of this matters,” Grid Strategies president Rob Gramlich wrote on X. “Nothing here seems to change the economics, and it’s the economics that have held coal-fired power production down.” (Gramlich is also a Heatmap contributor.)
Of course, the United States has plenty of coal. But many of its uses — including electricity generation — can be easily substituted with other sources, such as natural gas. That’s why U.S. coal production has been falling since 2008.
“Coal is increasingly uncompetitive in deregulated electricity markets,” Seaver Wang, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, told me. That’s because operating a coal-fired power plant comes with all sorts of extra costs that natural gas doesn’t, including the transportation and storage of coal — compare the barges and trains required to move rocks to the neat pipelines gas flows through. The energy research group Energy Innovation has foundthat nearly all coal plants are more expensive to run than the combinations of wind, solar, and storage that might replace them.
“I don’t see the demand drivers for this to remotely bring coal back. I have no idea who would ever invest as a result of this executive order or related policies,” Wang said.
While existing coal plants may stick around for another few years as a result of heightened demand or relaxed regulatory burdens, that’s a far cry from building new coal plants or opening new coal mines. A large coal plant hasn’t opened in the United States since 2013. In 2024, wind and solar generation surpassed coal generation on the grid, according to Ember.
Some 12.3 gigawatts of coal capacity are scheduled to be retired in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration, making up two-thirds of planned retirements by capacity this year. But coal retirements have also been slowing down, according to EIA data. The 7.5 gigawatts retired last year was the least since 2011.
Jefferies analysts estimated that over 12 gigawatts of coal capacity is due for retirement in 2028. That could be pushed back thanks to the relaxation of the mercury and air toxics rules the president announced Tuesday.
“There is logic to delaying coal retirements to serve incremental high-density load customers like data centers,” the Jefferies analysts wrote. “Not all coal retirements are alike, and the economic-driven transitions will continue to draw support, but the calculus will change with more expensive renewables and natural gas alternatives from tariffs and potential changes to the Inflation Reduction Act.”
This is not the first time a Trump White House has tried to rescue this declining industry. During his first term, then Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed that coal and nuclear plants at risk of closing because of low demand have guaranteed payments, known as cost recovery, in order to stay open. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with a Republican majority, said no to Perry by a vote of 5-0.
Despite the president’s promises throughout his campaign, the coal industry shrunk by a huge degree during his first term, part of a longer trend that brought down coal’s share in the electricity generating sector from about half in 2007 to 16% in 2023. During Trump’s time in office, coal mining jobs declined from 51,000 to 38,000 during the pandemic, and have recovered only to 40,000 today.
When it comes to mines, Wang said, investors would likely be leery of putting money into the sector, given the strong likelihood that a future Democratic administration would be far less friendly to coal. Coal investors “are going to be accounting for the fact that any policy swings are short lived,” Wang told me.
“We all know that lead times for mines are long. Everyone knows this administration only has four years in office. I don’t really expect that this will drive a lot of investment interest,” Wang said.
The critical mineral designation for coal, if it makes it through the Department of Energy’s process, may not change much initially, Wang explained. It could lead to some “beneficial outcomes in terms of agency prioritization,” he said. But much critical minerals policy is still being worked out, and there are few programs that specifically and programmatically target the critical minerals included on lists maintained by either the Department of Energy or the United States Geological Service.
“A lot of the politicking over critical minerals designation is about the expectation of future outcomes that would arise from broad bipartisan interest in critical minerals as a category,” Wang said.
And unlike with other critical minerals, the U.S. is essentially self-sufficient for coal’s industrial and energy uses. We’re not talking about graphite here, let alone praseodymium.
At least so far, the coal industry has not thrilled to having a more friendly figure in the White House, although the share prices of some coal companies are up in afternoon trading. Coal exports in January, the most recent month for which there is data, stood at 7.7 million short tons, compared to 8.4 million short tons a year prior. Central Appalachia coal prices stand at $78 per short ton, compared to $77.35 a year ago.
If nothing else, the announcements provided Trump with the type of photo-op he craves. He even got the opportunity to bash Hillary Clinton. “One thing I learned about the coal miners … they want to mine coal. She was gonna put them in a high-tech industry where you make little cell phones and things,” he told the audience in the White House. Of course, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday touted the “army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones” that Trump’s tariffs will also help generate. But no matter what the president says or does, the coal industry may still be screwed.
Current conditions: States left flooded from recent severe storms are now facing freezing temperatures • Firefighters are battling blazes in Scotland due to unusually warm and dry weather • Hospitals in India are reporting a 25% rise in heat-related illnesses compared to last year. Yesterday the country’s northern state of Rajasthan reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit, about 13 degrees higher than seasonal norms.
President Trump’s sweeping new tariffs came into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, rattling the world’s markets and raising the risk of a global trade war. The levies, which include a 104% tariff on Chinese imports, triggered a mass sell-off in U.S. Treasury bonds, hiking yields as investors worry about a potential recession and flock to alternative safe-haven investments. The price of oil fell for the fifth day in a row to its lowest since 2021, with Brent futures at about $61 per barrel, well below the $65 level that oil producers need in order to turn a profit drilling new wells nationwide. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained recently, the tariffs are an outright catastrophe for the oil industry because they threaten a global downturn that would hurt oil demand at a time when oil cartel OPEC+ is increasing its output. Trump’s slate of tariffs will impact the cost of just about everything, from gasoline to e-bikes to LNG to cars. China imposed retaliatory tariffs, increasing them from 34% to 84% in response to the U.S. escalation. Meanwhile, the European Union will vote today on whether to impose its own retaliatory fees. European shares plummeted, as did Asian and Australian stocks.
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported today, a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that the transition to clean energy could create a world that is less exposed to energy price shocks and other energy-related trade risks than the world we have today. “We have such a concentration of fossil resources in a few countries,” Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study, told Pontecorvo. Transition minerals, by contrast, are less geographically concentrated, so “you have this ability to hedge a little bit across the system.”
The White House issued several executive orders on Tuesday aimed at boosting U.S. coal production and use, pointing to rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence. The series of orders direct federal agencies to:
Trump also said he plans to invoke the Defense Production Act to spur mining operations, “a move that could put the federal purse behind reviving the fading industry,” Reutersreported. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, and its use has been in decline since 2007. As of last year, wind and solar combined surpassed coal for U.S. electricity generation.
President Trump signed a separate executive order on Tuesday that targets climate laws at the state level and seeks to remove threats to U.S. “energy dominance,” including “illegitimate impediments to the identification, development, siting, production, investment in, or use of domestic energy resources — particularly oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.” The order references “state overreach” and suggests that some state and local governments are overstepping their constitutional authority in regulating energy through interstate trade barriers or fines on energy producers. It calls out New York and Vermont for their climate change superfund laws that require fossil fuel companies to pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. And it mentions California’s carbon cap-and-trade system.
The executive order directs the U.S. attorney general to compile a list of all state and local laws “purporting to address ‘climate change,’” along with ESG, environmental justice, carbon taxes, and anything involving “carbon or ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions,” and put a stop to their enforcement. “The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “We are a nation of states — and laws — and we will not be deterred. We will keep advancing solutions to the climate crisis that safeguard Americans’ fundamental right to clean air and water, create good-paying jobs, grow the clean energy economy, and make our future healthier and safer.”
Wood Mackenzie issued its annual U.S. wind energy report this week. It finds that 2024 marked the worst year for new onshore wind capacity in the past decade, with just 3.9 gigawatts installed. Through 2029, the firm expects developers to install another 33 gigawatts of onshore capacity, 6.6 gigawatts of offshore capacity, and carry out 5.5 gigawatts of upgrades and refurbishings. The five-year outlook marks “a 40% decrease quarter-on-quarter from a previous total of 75.8 gigawatts.” The report warns of enduring “uncertainty” thanks to the Trump administration’s attacks on the wind industry. “Growth will happen, but it’s going to be slower,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek. “[Trump] has managed to get some projects canceled, and he’ll make things more of a slog over the next few years.”
President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of international talks to decarbonize the shipping industry and vowed to reciprocate against any fees on U.S. ships, Politicoreported. The International Maritime Organization's Maritime Environmental Protection Conference is unfolding this week in London, where negotiators are trying to agree on a policy to curb shipping pollution through carbon taxation. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Trump reportedly sent a letter to the conference saying “the U.S. rejects any and all efforts to impose economic measures against its ships based on GHG emissions or fuel choice. Should such a blatantly unfair measure go forward, our government will consider reciprocal measures so as to offset any fees charged to U.S. ships and compensate the American people for any other economic harm from any adopted GHG emissions measures.”
“What’s next, a mandate that Americans must commute by horse and buggy?”
–Kit Kennedy, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in response to Trump’s executive orders aimed at revitalizing the U.S. coal industry.