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A conversation with Ben Goldfarb about his road ecology book Crossings.
An alternative title for journalist Ben Goldfarb’s fantastic new book, Crossings, could have been Squashings. “Wait a minute,” I thought to myself about 25 pages in. “Have I been duped into reading a book about … roadkill?!”
The answer wasn’t precisely no, although Crossings is also about so much more (its subtitle: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet). From cliff swallows that have evolved to have shorter wings to better avoid zooming cars, to Oedipal cougars stranded in the highway-wrapped Santa Monica Mountains, to the trials of one surprisingly charismatic anteater named Evelyn, Crossings observes that “the repercussions of roads are so complex that it’s hard to pinpoint where they end.”
Goldfarb, though, attempts valiantly to untangle them, and the result is as funny, heartbreaking, enraging, and enlightening as anything I’ve read this year. “There may be nothing humans do that causes more misery to more wild animals than driving,” he writes, but planet-warming emissions are only the most prominent part of that story. Ahead of Crossings’ publication next Tuesday, Goldfarb and I discussed the promise (and drawbacks) of the EV transition and autonomous cars on road ecology; the short-sightedness of infrastructure budgets; and how bad people are at driving. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
When you told people you were working on a book about road ecology, did they take it as an invitation to share their personal, unsolicited roadkill stories with you?
Absolutely, they did. I wouldn’t say it was unsolicited: I’m always — I don’t want to say I’m happy to hear roadkill stories — but I’m certainly interested in stories and there were lots of them. One of my favorite ones was a guy who told me that he’d recently hit a squirrel and he was so confused and upset and unhappy about it that he actually called 911. He didn’t know what else to do. And the 911 operator basically said, “Uh yeah, the squirrel is dead.” I mean, to me, that sort of gets at how viscerally upsetting and disturbing roadkill can be. It’s something we see constantly and ultimately take for granted in a lot of ways but committing it ourselves is, of course, a miserable feeling. I just hit an owl a few nights ago and I’m still losing sleep.
One of the things I was most astonished by while reading this book is how well-sourced it is — the texts and interviews you bring together are so broad and enriching. Do you have any idea how many books you read? Tell me a little about how you approached the research.
Oh, geez. Let’s see — two shelves of that bookshelf [behind me] are road ecology reference books. So, several dozen. I can’t claim that I read them all cover to cover, but certainly I drew a lot from other books. I think I ultimately had close to 300 sources in the book who were just invaluable founts of help and knowledge and information.
One of the challenges of writing about road ecology is it’s not necessarily a single discipline. It’s really an umbrella that covers many different disciplines. Roadkill science is its own sort of subset. The impact of forest service roads on contributing erosion to streams is a whole science unto itself. The impact of improperly built road culverts as fish passage barriers — I mean, there are 10,000 papers about that alone. So every chapter was sort of learning a new science unto itself.
You write that “among all the road’s ecological disasters … the most vexing may be noise pollution.” We do a lot of coverage of the future of driving here at Heatmap, and I suppose I was hoping to learn that electric vehicles and cutting-edge advances in automotive technology would help solve at least this problem. Can you tell me why you’re less optimistic?
EVs are much quieter; their engines are silent, which is helpful, especially in an urban context. They’ll ultimately reduce noise pollution and that’s profoundly important. We tend to overlook noise pollution because we’re so awash in it but it’s one of the great public health crises of our time. You read the literature about the health impacts of road noise and it’s horrifying — I mean, literally, it’s elevating our stress levels, it’s increasing our risk of heart attack and diabetes and stroke, it’s taking years off of our lives, mostly without our noticing it. So anything we can do to reduce noise is fundamentally positive. And EVs are part of that.
The drawback, the reason that EVs aren’t a panacea, is that engines aren’t the only thing that makes noise on a car. Above 35 mph, most of what you’re hearing is tire noise: the grinding of the tire itself against the pavement and the little air pockets in the tread popping — “pattern noise” is what that’s called. I wrote most of this book while living a half mile or so from I-90 in eastern Washington state and I could just hear, every time I stepped out of my house, that monotonous hiss of the interstate. That’s tire noise, not engine noise. And tires have gotten much quieter over time, which is good, and hopefully they’ll continue to get quieter, but just electrifying vehicles is not going to solve the problem of road noise even if it does help in urban settings.
Not to keep raining on the parade, but you also write that autonomous vehicles could be “the gravest challenge to road ecology since, well, roads.” How do driverless cars change the road ecology calculus?
I think the answer is, we don’t know yet. From a large animal avoidance perspective, I think they’re ultimately going to be really helpful. Yes, it’s fun right now to dunk on Tesla and Waymo and all of these autonomous vehicle companies whose products are still very buggy, but, you know — probably there are people who will read this and take exception with this idea, but I’m ultimately pretty optimistic that the AVs will solve most of those problems and become better drivers than human beings.
And that’s the thing that always gets lost when somebody posts a video of an AV doing something stupid — human drivers do stupid things constantly, right? We’re horrifically bad drivers. Tens of thousands of people die in the U.S. every year because of it. And one of the things that we’re really bad at is avoiding large animals. We don’t see that well at night, they jump out unexpectedly, and our reflexes are too slow to slam on the brakes. I think that AVs will be much, much better at avoiding those deer and elk and moose than we are because those are large animals and all of [the AV] sensors that are designed to avoid pedestrians will be triggered by those large animals.
But, of course, that doesn’t really help a rattlesnake or a prairie dog or any smaller creature. I, for one, go out of my way to avoid hitting those animals, and when my car is piloted by a robot, that’s not going to help; that robot will have no reason to avoid those small animals if engineers don’t design it to do so.
And the broader problem is that autonomy is likely to lead to a whole lot more vehicles on the road. When you can get in your car and it drives itself and you can spend that time watching movies or doing work or what have you, commuting becomes a lot less onerous. Every autonomous vehicle could have a kid in it who’s not able to drive currently. Most of the modeling suggests that there’s going to be a dramatic increase in vehicle miles traveled as a result of autonomous cars. And that’s going to be bad for wildlife, that’s going to make the barrier effect of roads even more severe and make it even harder for animals to migrate across highways.
And commuting traffic, human traffic, is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to autonomy. The autonomous delivery fleet, in some ways, is the bigger concern. A lot of the early AVs are going to be delivery vehicles; it’s going to be so easy to summon products to us. So it’s hard to imagine a scenario where AVs lead to less driving rather than more of it, unfortunately.
How did you navigate striking the right balance between the ideals of conservation and the realities of politics and economics in this book? I found myself getting so frustrated reading about the frogs trying to cross Highway 30 in Portland, Oregon, only to then learn that SP-139 in Brazil actually closes a section between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., when animals are most active. I was like, “Why can’t we do that!”
We do have this very constrained idea of what is possible and that’s why I like drawing upon other countries. You mentioned that road in Brazil that is closed at night through a park; another great anecdote is that in India, they built a new highway through a tiger sanctuary and they just elevated the entire highway on pilings so that animals can come and go underneath the lifted freeway. Of course, that made the project vastly more expensive, but it’s ecologically the right thing to do and is much more radical than anything we’ve done in this country.
I was just talking about this the other day with somebody in the bird ecology world: how our sense of what we can afford is so skewed. I think that people hear the price tag of a wildlife crossing structure and they think, “Oh my gosh, $10 million just to help elk cross the highway, what an extravagant expenditure.” But that’s beyond nothing in the context of national, state, and federal transportation budgets. I mean, $10 million for a wildlife crossing, that’s not even a drop in the bucket. That’s like a molecule of H2O in the bucket. It costs a million dollars to pave a mile of highway, let alone add a bunch of lanes to it. So to me, the notion that we can’t make our infrastructure better for nature because it costs money is incredibly short-sighted and fails to consider how much money we’re spending on our roads already.
A great example of that was the Infrastructure Act, which contains $350 million for wildlife crossings — which is great and wonderful and a step in the right direction. But it also contains billions of dollars for highway expansions and repaving and bridge repairs. And one bird ecologist described that $350 million as “decimal dust,” you know, just nothing in the context of federal transportation. The politics of the possible can definitely be frustrating.
Not to mention, you have a statistic in Crossings that animal crashes cost America something like $8 billion per year.
And that was $8 billion in 2009. So for inflation and accounting for increased collisions over time — yeah, it’s an enormous number that we’re not doing a whole lot about.
Your book is full of so much humor and cautious optimism but when I was reading it, I would sometimes get overwhelmed just thinking about how many roads exist and how many more roads are going to exist and the awful ends so many living things meet because of them. How did you stay hopeful while immersed in these stories?
I think that the book comes off as humorous and optimistic because that’s just my natural register as a writer, but I’m not sure I actually always feel that way. There are times that I feel totally desperate about the future of conservation. One of the challenges of writing about this topic is that there’s no perfect solution, there’s no panacea. We could say “we need more mass transit,” and certainly we need to get people out of cars, but I live in rural Colorado: It’s hard to imagine a public transportation system that is going to meaningfully change driving rates in this kind of very rural, dispersed area that was built around the automobile.
Wildlife crossings are the same thing. They help a specific set of problems, which is roadkill and the curtailment of animal migration. But they don’t reduce road noise, they don’t prevent tire particles from spewing into the environment and killing salmon, they don’t do anything about road salts being applied in ridiculous quantities and destroying freshwater ecosystems. So, again, there is no panacea here and it can be really challenging to confront the scale and the number of different solutions needed to make our roads lie more lightly on the planet.
Is there anything else you would want readers to know about Crossings?
You mentioned EVs in the context of road noise and one of the things that I almost wish I had emphasized more in the book is that when people tend to think about the environmental impacts of transportation, they think about the carbon emissions, right? And the solutions tend to be things like the electrification of vehicle fleets and fuel standards. And certainly, those are good things. But the electrification of the fleet is going to do absolutely nothing for wild animals. In fact, just as AVs could lead to more driving, EVs can do the same thing when it becomes much cheaper to drive your car because you just have to plug it in — the whole Jevons paradox idea that a million EV scholars have written about.
I feel like part of the purpose of the book is to say, look, the carbon emissions from transportation are an enormous problem. But they’re only one of the many, many ecological problems that our car-centered transportation network causes. You can strip the carbon out of our transportation and still not make it benign for the environment.
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Turns out, when you reduce electricity rates for heat pump owners, more people buy heat pumps.
One of the most significant actions a person can take to fight climate change is to swap out their fossil fuel-fired furnace or boiler for electric heat pumps. But while rebates and other subsidies can help defray the up-front cost of the switch, the price of electricity relative to natural gas is still a major deterrent in many places. Lower emissions for higher monthly bills is not much of a tradeoff.
Could the solution be as simple as utilities giving heat pump users a discounted rate in the winter?
There’s a growing consensus among climate and clean energy experts that this is a crucial and urgent step toward decarbonizing, at least in the near term. A number of recent reports make the case not just that discounted rates for heat pump users will help spur adoption of the technology, but also that these customers are currently being overcharged.
The reason why is that today, most utilities operate in “summer peaking” systems, where electricity demand is highest on the hottest days of the year. Utilities spend lots of money on infrastructure like power plants, substations, transformers, and wires to make sure they can deliver power reliably on those days. But in the winter, a lot of that stuff sits unused. So it doesn’t increase overall system costs for people to use more electricity in the winter.
In fact, “it’s less expensive to offer electricity in the winter in summer peaking systems,” Matthew Malinowski, who directs the buildings program at the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, told me. And yet a lot of utilities charge customers a flat rate, no matter the time of year. “It seems only fair to charge people less for the electricity they use in the winter,” Malinowski said.
Some utilities are already starting to do this. Malinowski and his colleagues published a study on Tuesday that used real utility rates to examine the current cost of operating heat pumps in four cold-weather states. Their modeling illustrates how heat pump-specific rates can make the technology much more attractive compared to natural gas-fired heating. (Households switching from fuel oil or propane heating to heat pumps will almost always save money.)
The first state they looked at, Maine, has famously had a lot of success getting residents to switch to heat pumps. It turns out favorable rates may have been a big part of that. The cost of electricity there is not much higher than natural gas, so when a household there switches to heat pumps, its annual bills remain roughly the same. Additionally, Maine’s biggest utility recently ran a pilot program where it offered customers the option to sign up for a “heat pump rate,” giving them discounted electricity in the winter and slightly higher than normal electricity in the summer. The study estimated that an average household in Maine using this rate would save just over $200 per year compared to one that heats with natural gas.
Just 6% of households in Maine used heat pumps a decade ago, before the state began offering incentives. As of last year, that number had grown to 26%, although many homes still use natural gas boilers and furnaces as back-up systems.
The other three states the study focuses on — Minnesota, Colorado, and Connecticut — have much higher electricity rates relative to natural gas, and simply switching to a heat pump would not be economic. But Minnesota has a winter pricing program similar to Maine’s. The utility Xcel offers a deeply discounted rate to customers who heat their homes with electricity through the colder months, whether they use heat pumps or less efficient electric resistance systems. The report estimates that heat pump users who opt-in to this rate will save about $400 per year compared to if they heated their homes with natural gas.
Xcel is also the largest utility in Colorado, where it does not yet offer a winter discount rate. There, the authors calculate that heat pumps currently cost about $500 more per year than natural gas heating. But a new law in Colorado requires utilities to submit new heat pump-specific electric rates to regulators for approval by 2027. If Xcel offered the same discount as it does in Minnesota, that would bring heat pump operating costs roughly on par with gas heating.
Colorado isn’t the only state actively pursuing heat pump-specific rates to spur adoption. In Massachusetts, which the study did not look at, a small utility called Unitil began offering a discounted heat pump rate on March 1 of this year, and regulators are requiring National Grid, which serves about 15% of the state, to offer one beginning next winter.
Meanwhile, in Connecticut, electricity prices are so much higher than gas prices that the authors conclude that “rate interventions are ultimately not enough” to make heat pumps competitive. “The state needs deep investment in making electric power more affordable to its residents,” they write, such as “taking on some costs of grid maintenance and upgrades, putting a price on carbon, or implementing clean heat standards.”
One caveat to the study is that it uses electric rates in 2024 but meteorological data from 2018. Since the world was notably warmer last year than in 2018, the authors’ cost estimates are likely conservative. In reality, heat pumps may already be more affordable than the study makes them seem.
Another is that heat pump-specific rates are only really a solution for the next five to 10 years. As more households adopt heat pumps, the electric grid will begin to shift toward a winter-peaking system, and there won’t really be a case to charge heat pump users less. Massachusetts regulators have acknowledged they will need to monitor this and re-evaluate heat pump rates regularly as the situation evolves.
“We’re just responding to the situation today,” Malinowski told me. “Heat pump penetration is very small, and those users are overpaying based on the service they're demanding of the grid, and what they're providing to the grid, which is revenue during off-peak times when electricity is cheaper to provide.”
This is the first story in a Heatmap series on how clean energy has fared under Trump.
The renewables industry was struggling even before Donald Trump made his return to the White House. High interest rates, snarled supply chains, and inflation had already dealt staggering blows to offshore wind; California turned hostile to the residential solar market; and even as deployment of utility-scale solar accelerated, profits haven’t necessarily followed. (Those were still reserved for the fossil fuel industry.)
Then Trump came into office, issuing a barrage of executive orders that, at best, didn’t help, and at worst threatened to choke off the industry’s remaining avenues for growth. Now, Republican legislators are eyeing the Inflation Reduction Act for red meat to feed their tax cut machine; Elon Musk — himself the richest green tech entrepreneur of all time — is captaining an effort to slash the size of the federal government, particularly environmental programs; and the federal regulatory apparatus has essentially ground to a halt.
The early days of the Trump presidency have turned a clean energy slump into a kind of green freeze, with projects being cancelled and clean energy investors in many cases fixating on hypothetical policy changes, as opposed to the ins and outs of any given quarter. This creates a kind of trap for green energy companies, which are being punished in the immediate term for bad results while investors sit on the sidelines until the final resolution of the IRA comes into focus.
Speaking about the solar industry specifically, Morningstar analyst Brett Castelli told me that near term viability is not going to be about the specifics of any given company’s financial performance. “It’s going to be about how much the IRA is potentially changed.”
That’s likely the case across the green energy sectors. The iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, which tracks a number of renewables companies, is down 14% since November 5, and down 20% in the past year. “All businesses like certainty,” Castelli said. “The renewables market right now is facing a high degree of uncertainty in regards to what changes are coming to the IRA.”
But not every company has been affected equally. Those that were already flagging have been quick to blame the political environment, while others have gamely tried to explain to investors and the public how their lines of business align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
Executives at the residential solar company Sunnova — whose stock has fallen to below a dollar a share since it issued a “going concern” notice, essentially notifying investors that its existence as a company was under threat — mentioned “policy” or “political” or “politicians” six times in its earnings call last week. Chief Executive John Berger told an analyst that the reason for the going concern notice was that “the overall environment is terrible. I mean, it’s the political environment, the capital markets,” and that the company “struggled to close some things after the election.”
Berger stepped down Monday, and Sunnova’s former chief operating officer Paul Mathews immediately took over. Mathews “will focus on disciplined growth, stronger cash generation, cost efficiency, and enhancing the customer experience,” the company said.
Other companies have told investors and the public that they’re scrapping expansion plans, in many cases due to a policy change or a market change running downhill from policy.
“Manufacturing is probably where we see the biggest concern,” Maheep Mandloi, a stock analyst at Mizuho Securities, told me. “A lot of solar and battery projects are getting pushed out.”
Among them, battery manufacturer KORE Power, said in February that it was canceling a $1 billion battery project in Arizona. The Arizona facility was going to be supported with federal financing, specifically a loan from the Energy Department’s Loan Program Office for up to $850 million, but theconditional commitment never turned into cash in hand before the end of the Biden administration. Its new chief executive, Jay Bellows, told Canary Media that the company wanted to retrofit an existing facility into a battery plant instead.
Aspen Aerogels, which makes thermal barriers for batteries in electric vehicles, told investors in February that it wouldn’t move forward with a planned new plant in Statesboro, Georgia, and would instead “maximize capacity” at its Rhode Island plant. The company’s chief financial officer noted that it had already “decided to right-time” its Statesboro project in early 2023, “pre-empting a reset in EV demand expectations.”
And just last week, Ascend Elements, a battery materials company, said it was scrapping plans to manufacture cathode active material at its Hopkinsville, Kentucky plant, the Times Leader reported Thursday. Ascend said that it had agreed with the Department of Energy to cancel a $164 million grant that would support cathode active material (a key battery component) manufacturing, although a separate, $316 million grant for cathode precursor technology “remains active.”
But optimism still abounds — and it has nothing to do with any hopes about the fate of grants and tax credits under the IRA. Regardless of the law’s fate, the exuberance over artificial intelligence may prove to be an even greater subsidy.
In contrast to Sunnova, Sunrun — another residential solar company whose stock price has flagged since the election, but whose ability to stay in business has not been questioned — put a much more neutral spin on the political environment. Chief Executive Mary Powell told investors during the company’s earnings call in late February, “The fundamental long-term demand drivers for our business are incredibly strong and unrelated to any political party affiliation. Americans want greater energy independence and control of their lives and their pocketbooks. The country also needs more power from all sources to fuel rapid growth in electrification and data centers, and our growing fleet of energy resources will be part of the solution.”
Where once executives focused their rah-rah optimism on the declining costs of renewables, today they’re talking up their products’ quick path to deployment. The speed with which renewables can be built and switched on — especially solar and storage — compares favorably to the four-to-five year development timelines for new gas-fired plants. NextEra chief executive John Ketchum told analysts in a January earnings call “you can build a wind project in 12 months, a storage facility in 15, and a solar project in 18 months.”
That’s either the light at the end of the tunnel or the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, depending on your level of fatalism or skepticism.
This oncoming demand could reignite the renewables industry even if it potentially loses access to generous IRA subsidies, Ben Hubbard, the chief executive of the infrastructure advisory firm Nexus Holdings, told me.
“The hyperscale datacenter demand is pretty massive, and when you have to really start massively upgrading your transmission and distribution infrastructure, those rates get passed on, unfortunately, to the average ratepayer like me and you and everybody else.” With higher rates, renewables could become profitable and investable on their own, without IRA subsidies, Hubbard said.
NextEra, a major renewables developer that also operates a natural gas fleet, has been one of the main promoters of the “speed to power” narrative. In its January earnings call, Ketchum told analysts, “We’re expecting load demand to increase over 80% over the next five years, six-fold over the next 20 years. And if you think about generation types and needing all of the above, they’re not all created equally in terms of timing.”
Although the Trump administration is seeking to unleash fossil fuel development, power plants don’t build themselves. They need, at the very least, turbines, and those gas turbines are not easy to get your hands on. As Heatmap has reported, manufacturer GE Vernova has only modest plans to increase capacity, and is already getting reservations for turbine slots in 2027 and 2028.
“With gas-fired generation, the country is starting from a standing start,” NextEra CEO Ketchum said on the earnings call. “We need shovels in the ground today because our customers need the power right now.”
Developers and investors hope this means that data center developers and utilities will become both voracious and omnivorous in their power demand.
“I think what you’re going to see is the big tech companies, especially, are going to just have to eat the cost if they want to win the AI race,” Hubbard told me. “They’re going to take natural gas fuel, and they’re going to take biomass power, and they’re going to take solar. They’re going to take it all, because it’s almost insignificant relative to getting ahead of AI demand.”
Most of the industry, however, is gamely working through an environment where their day-to-day business may be fine, but their investors are still in wait-and-see mode.
“The common feedback we hear from a lot of investors is, 'I’ll just probably come back once the dust settles and I know exactly what things are going to change,” Mandloi told me.
That’s even as executives point to a glorious future of AI-driven electricity demand. But investors may be waiting to count their chips from the IRA before they’re willing to take a flyer on powering data centers that are yet to be built.
And there’s nothing certain about the AI boom, either. More computationally efficient Chinese models have thrown that energy narrative into doubt, driving down the share price of Nvidia, which makes the chips that consume all that data center power (along with the share prices of power companies with large natural gas fleets). That stock is down by almost 20% so far this year. If the chip designer’s AI profits are less than previously thought, the electron providers may have to settle for less, as well. Renewables companies are hoping the data center boom will be a case of “if you build it, they will come,” but investors aren’t yet quite willing to buy it.
For those keeping score, that’s three more than wanted to preserve them last year.
Those who drew hope from the letter 18 House Republicans sent to Speaker Mike Johnson last August calling for the preservation of energy tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act must be jubilant this morning. On Sunday, 21 House Republicans sent a similar letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith. Those with sharp eyes will have noticed: That’s three more people than signed the letter last time, indicating that this is a coalition with teeth.
As Heatmap reported in the aftermath of November’s election, four of the original signatories were out of a job as of January, meaning that the new letter features a total of seven new recruits. So who are they?
The new letter is different from the old one in a few key ways. First, it mentions neither the Inflation Reduction Act nor its slightly older cousin, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, by name. Instead, it emphasizes “the importance of prioritizing energy affordability for American families and keeping on our current path to energy dominance amid efforts to repeal or reform current energy tax credits.” The letter also advocates for an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy development that has long been popular among conservatives but has seemed to fall out of vogue under Trump 2.0.
Lastly, while the new letter repeats the previous version’s emphasis on policy stability for businesses, it adds a new plea on behalf of ratepayers. “As our conference works to make energy prices more affordable, tax reforms that would raise energy costs for hard working Americans would be contrary to this goal,” it reads. “Further, affordable and abundant energy will be critical as the President works to onshore domestic manufacturing, supply chains, and good paying jobs, particularly in Republican run states due to their business-friendly environments. Pro-energy growth policies will directly support these objectives.”
As my colleagues Robinson Meyer and Emily Pontecorvo have written, tariffs on Canadian fuel would raise energy prices in markets across the U.S. That includes some particularly swingy states, e.g. Michigan, which perhaps explains Rep. James’ seeming about-face.
Republicans’ House majority currently stands at all of four votes, so although 21 members might not be huge on the scale of the full House, they still represent a significant problem for Speaker Johnson.