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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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The EV-maker is now a culture war totem, plus some AI.
During Alan Greenspan’s decade-plus run leading the Federal Reserve, investors and the financial media were convinced that there was a “Greenspan put” underlying the stock market. The basic idea was that if the markets fell too much or too sharply, the Fed would intervene and put a floor on prices analogous to a “put” option on a stock, which allows an investor to sell a stock at a specific price, even if it’s currently selling for less. The existence of this put — which was, to be clear, never a stated policy — was thought to push stock prices up, as it gave investors more confidence that their assets could only fall so far.
While current Fed Chair Jerome Powell would be loath to comment on a specific volatile security, we may be seeing the emergence of a kind of sociopolitical put for Tesla, one coming from the White House and conservative media instead of the Federal Reserve.
The company’s high-flying stock shed over $100 billion of value on Monday, falling around 15% and leaving the price down around 50% from its previous all-time high. While the market as a whole also swooned, especially high-value technology companies like Nvidia and Meta, Tesla was the worst hit. Analysts attributed the particularly steep fall to concerns that CEO Elon Musk was spending too much time in Washington, and that the politicization of the brand had made it toxic to buyers in Europe and among liberals in the United States.
Then the cavalry came in. Sean Hannity told his Fox News audience that he had bought a Model S, while President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.” By this afternoon, Trump had turned the White House lawn into a sales floor for Musk’s electric vehicles. Tesla shares closed the day up almost 4%, while the market overall closed down after Trump and his advisors’ furious whiplash policy pronouncements on tariffs.
Whether the Tesla put succeeds remains to be seen. The stock is still well, well below its all-time highs, but it may confirm a new way to understand Tesla — not as a company that sells electric vehicles to people concerned about climate change, but rather as a conservative culture war totem that has also made sizable investments in artificial intelligence and robotics.
When Musk bought Twitter and devoted more of his time, energy, money, and public pronouncements to right wing politics, some observers thought that maybe he could lift the dreadful image of electric vehicles among Trump voters. But when Pew did a survey on public attitudes towards electric vehicles back in 2023, it found that “Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, younger adults, and people living in urban areas are among the most likely to say they would consider purchasing an EV” — hardly a broad swathe of Trump’s America. More than two-thirds of Republicans surveyed said they weren’t interested in buying an electric car, compared to 30% of Democrats.
On the campaign trail, Trump regularly lambasted EVs, although by the end of the campaign, as Musk’s support became more voluminous, he’s lightened up a bit. In any case, the Biden administration’s pro-electric-vehicle policies were an early target for the Trump administration, and the consumer subsidies for EVs passed under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act are widely considered to be one of the softest targets for repeal.
But newer data shows that the tide may be turning, not so much for electric vehicles, but likely for Tesla itself.
The Wall Street Journalreported survey data last week showing that only 13% of Democrats would consider buying a Tesla, down from 23% from August of 2023, while 26% of Republicans would consider buying a Tesla, up from 15%. Vehicle registration data cited by the Journal suggested a shift in new Tesla purchases from liberal urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, towards more conservative-friendly metropolises like Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Miami.
At the same time, many Tesla investors appear to be mostly seeing through the gyrations in the famously volatile stock and relatively unconcerned about month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter sales data. After all, even after the epic fall in Tesla’s stock price, the company is still worth over $700 billion, more than Toyota, General Motors, and Ford combined, each of which sells several times more cars per year than Tesla.
Many investors simply do not view Tesla as a luxury or mass market automaker, instead seeing it as an artificial intelligence and robotics company. When I speak to individual Tesla shareholders, they’re always telling me how great Full Self-Driving is, not how many cars they expect the company to sell in August. In many cases, Musk has made Tesla stockholders a lot of money, so they’re willing to cut him tremendous slack and generally believe that he has the future figured out.
Longtime Tesla investor Ron Baron, who bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares from 2014 to 2016, told CNBC Tuesday morning, that Musk “believes that digitization [and] autonomy is going to be driving the future. And he thinks we’re … on the verge of having an era of incredible abundance.”Baron also committed that he hasn’t, won’t, and will never sell. “I’m the last in, I’ll be the last out. So I won’t sell a single share personally until I sell all the shares for clients, and that’s what I’ve done.”
Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives, one of the biggest Tesla bulls on the street, has told clients that he expects Tesla’s valuation to exceed $2 trillion, and that its self-driving and robotics business “will represent 90% of the valuation.”
Another longtime Tesla bull, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, told clients in a note Monday that Tesla remained a “Top Pick,” and that his price target was still $430, compared to the stock’s $230.58 close price on the day. His bull case, he said, was $800, which would give the company a valuation over $2.5 trillion.
When the stock lags, Jonas wrote, investors see Tesla as a car company. “In December with the stock testing $500/share, the prevailing sentiment was that the company is an AI ‘winner’ with untapped exposure to embodied AI expressions such as humanoid robotics,” Jonas wrote. “Today with the stock down 50% our investor conversations are focused on management distraction, brand degradation and lost auto sales.”
In a note to clients Tuesday, Ives beseeched Musk to “step up as CEO,” and lamented that there has been “little to no sign of Musk at any Tesla factory or manufacturing facility the last two months.” But his bullishness for Tesla was undaunted. He argued that the scheduled launch of unsupervised Full Self-Driving in June “kicks off the autonomous era at Tesla that we value at $1 trillion alone on a sum-of-the-parts valuation.”
“Autonomous will be the biggest transformation to the auto industry in modern day history,” Ives wrote, “and in our view Tesla will own the autonomous market in the U.S. and globally.”
The most effective put of all may not be anything Trump says or does, but rather investors’ optimism about the future — as long as it’s Elon Musk’s future.
The uncertainty created by Trump’s erratic policymaking could not have come at a worse time for the industry.
This is the second story in a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
Climate tech investment rode to record highs during the Biden administration, supercharged by a surge in ESG investing and net-zero commitments, the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, and at least initially, low interest rates. Though the market had already dropped somewhat from its recent peak, climate tech investors told me that the Trump administration is now shepherding in a detrimental overcorrection. The president’s fossil fuel-friendly rhetoric, dubiously legal IIJA and IRA funding freezes, and aggressive tariffs, have left climate tech startups in the worst possible place: a state of deep uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is the enemy of economic progress,” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, told me.
The lack of clarity is understandably causing investors to throw on the brakes. “We’ve talked internally about, let’s be a little bit more cautious, let’s be a little more judicious with our dollars right now,” Gabriel Kra, co-founder at the climate tech firm Prelude Ventures, told me. “We’re not out in the market, but I would think this would be a really tough time to try and go out and raise a new fund.”
This reluctance comes at a particularly bad time for climate tech startups, many of which are now reaching a point where they are ready to scale up and build first-of-a-kind infrastructure projects and factories. That takes serious capital, the kind that wasn’t as necessary during Trump’s first term, or even much of Biden’s, when many of these companies were in a more nascent research and development or proof-of-concept stage.
I also heard from investors that the pace of Trump’s actions and the extent of the economic upheaval across every sector feels unique this time around. “We’re entering a pretty different economic construct,” Beebe told me, citing the swirling unknowns around how Trump’s policies will impact economic indicators such as inflation and interest rates. “We haven’t seen this kind of economic warfare in decades,” he said.
Even before Trump took office, it was notoriously difficult for climate companies to raise funding in the so-called “missing middle,” when startups are too mature for early-stage venture capital but not mature enough for traditional infrastructure investors to take a bet on them. This is exactly the point at which government support — say, a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office or a grant from the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations — could be most useful in helping a company prove its commercial viability.
But now that Trump has frozen funding — even some that’s been contractually obligated — companies are left with fewer options than ever to reach scale.
One investor who wished to remain anonymous in order to speak more openly told me that “a lot of the missing middle companies are living in a dicier world.” A 2023 white paper on “capital imbalances in the energy transition” from S2G Investments, a firm that supports both early-stage and growth-stage companies, found that from 2017 to 2022, only 20% of climate capital flowed toward companies at this critical inflection point, while 43% went to early-stage companies and 37% towards established technologies. For companies at this precarious growth stage, a funding delay on the order of months could be the difference between life and death, the investor added. Many of these companies may also be reliant on debt financing, they explained. “Unless they’ve been extremely disciplined, they could run into a situation where they’re just not able to service that debt.”
The months or even years that it could take for Trump’s rash funding rescission to wind through the courts will end up killing some companies, Beebe told me. “And unfortunately, that’s what people on the other side of this debate would like, is just to litigate and escalate. And even if they ultimately lose, they’ve won, because startups just don’t have the balance sheets that big companies would,” he explained.
Kra’s Prelude Ventures has a number of prominent companies in its portfolio that have benefitted from DOE grants. This includes Electric Hydrogen, which received a $43.3 million DOE grant to scale electrolyzer manufacturing; Form Energy, which received $150 million to help build a long-duration battery storage manufacturing plant; Boston Metal, which was awarded $50 million for a green steel facility; and Heirloom, which is a part of the $600 million Project Cypress Direct Air Capture hub. DOE funding is often doled out in tranches, with some usually provided upfront and further payments tied to specific project milestones. So even if a grant has officially been awarded, that doesn’t mean all of the funding has been disbursed, giving the Trump administration an opening to break government contracts and claw it back.
Kra told me that a few of his firm’s companies were on the verge of securing government funding before Trump took office, or have a project in the works that is now on hold. “We and the board are working closely with those companies to figure out what to do,” he told me. “If the mandates or supports aren’t there for that company, you’ve got to figure out how to make that cash last a bunch longer so you can still meet some commercially meaningful milestones.”
In this environment, Kra said his firm will be taking a closer look at companies that claim they will be able to attract federal funds. “Let’s make sure we understand what they can do without that non-dilutive capital, without those grants, without that project level support,” he told me, noting that “several” companies in his portfolio will also be impacted by Trump’s ever-changing tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China. Prelude Ventures is working with its portfolio companies to figure how to “smooth out the hit,” Kra told me later via email, but inevitably the tariffs “will affect the prices consumers pay in the short and long run.”
While investors can’t avoid the impacts of all government policies and impulses, the growth-stage firm G2 Venture Partners has long tried to inoculate itself against the vicissitudes of government financing. “None of our companies actually have any exposure to DOE loans,” Brook Porter, a partner and co-founder at G2, told me in an email, nor have they received government grants. If you add up the revenue from all of the companies in G2’s portfolio, which is made up mainly of sustainability-focused startups, only about 3% “has any exposure to the IRA,” Porter told me. So even if the law’s generous clean energy tax credits are slashed or the programs it supports are left to languish, G2’s companies will likely soldier on.
Then there are the venture capitalists themselves. Many of the investors I spoke with emphasized that not all firms will have the ability or will to weather this storm. “I definitely believe many generalist funds who dabbled in climate will pull back,” Beebe told me. Porter agreed. “The generalists are much more interested in AI, then I think in climate,” he said. It’s not as if there’s been a rash of generalist investors announcing pullbacks, though Kra told me he knows of “a couple of firms” that are rethinking their climate investment strategies, potentially opting to fold these investments under an umbrella category such as “hard tech” instead of highlighting a sectoral focus on energy or climate, specifically.
Last month, the investment firm Coatue, which has about $70 billion in assets under management, raised around $250 million for a climate-focused fund, showing it’s not all doom and gloom for the generalists’ climate ambitions. But Porter told me this is exactly the type of large firm he wouldexpect to back out soon, citing Tiger Global Management and Softbank as others that started investing heavily during climate tech’s boom years from 2020 to 2022 that he could imagine winding down that line of business.
Strategic investors such as oil companies have also been quick to dial back their clean energy ambitions and refocus their sights on the fossil fuels championed by the Trump administration. “Corporate venture is very cyclical,” Beebe told me, explaining that large companies tend to make venture investments when they have excess budget or when a sector looks hot, but tighten the purse strings during periods of uncertainty.
But Cody Simms, a managing partner at the climate tech investment firm MCJ, told me that at the moment, he actually sees the corporate venture ecosystem as “quite strong and quite active.” The firm’s investments include the low-carbon cement company Sublime Systems, which last year got strategic backing from two of the world’s largest building materials companies, and the methane capture company Windfall Bio, which has received strategic funding from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. Simms noted that this momentum could represent an overexuberance among corporations who just recently stood up their climate-focused venture arms, and “we’ll see if it continues into the next few years.”
Notably, Sublime and Windfall Bio both also have millions in DOE grants, and another of MCJ’s portfolio companies, bio-based chemicals maker Solugen, has a “conditional commitment” from the LPO for a loan guarantee of over $200 million. Since that money isn’t yet obligated, there’s a good chance it might never actually materialize, which could stall construction on the company’s in-progress biomanufacturing facility.
Simms told me that the main thing he’s encouraging MCJ’s portfolio companies to do at this stage is to contact their local representatives — not to advocate for climate action in general, but rather “to push on the very specific tax credit that they are planning to use and to talk about how it creates jobs locally in their districts.”
Getting startups to shift the narrative away from decarbonization and climate and toward their multitudinous co-benefits — from energy security to supply chain resilience — is of course a strategy many are already deploying to one degree or another. And investors were quick to remind me that the landscape may not be quite as bleak as it appears.
“We’ve made more investments, and we have a pipeline of more attractive investments now than we have in the last couple of years,” Porter told me. That’s because in spite of whatever havoc the Trump administration is wreaking, a lot of climate tech companies are reaching a critical juncture that could position the sector overall for “a record number of IPOs this year and next,” Porter said. The question is, “will these macro uncertainties — political, economic, financial uncertainty — hold companies back from going public?”
As with so many economic downturns and periods of instability, investors also see this as a moment for the true blue startups and venture capitalists to prove their worth and business acumen in an environment that’s working against them. “Now we have the hardcore founders, the people who really are driven by building economically viable, long-term, massively impactful companies, and the investors who understand the markets very well, coming together around clean business models that aren’t dependent on swinging from one subsidy vine to the next subsidy vine,” Beebe told me.
“There is no opportunity that’s an absolute no, even in this current situation, across the entire space,” the anonymous climate tech investor told me. “And so this might be one of the most important points — I won’t say a high point, necessarily — but it might be a moment of truth that the energy transition needs to embrace.”
On the energy secretary’s keynote, Ontario’s electricity surcharge, and record solar power
Current conditions: Critical fire weather returns to New Mexico and Texas and will remain through Saturday • Sharks have been spotted in flooded canals along Australia’s Gold Coast after Cyclone Alfred dropped more than two feet of rain • A tanker carrying jet fuel is still burning after it collided with a cargo ship in the North Sea yesterday. The ship was transporting toxic chemicals that could devastate ecosystems along England’s northeast coast.
In a keynote speech at the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told executives and policymakers that the Trump administration sees climate change as “a side effect of building the modern world,” and said that “everything in life involves trade-offs." He pledged to “end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change” and insisted he’s not a climate change denier, but rather a “climate realist.” According toThe New York Times, “Mr. Wright’s speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause.” Wright also reportedly told fossil fuel bosses he intended to speed up permitting for their projects.
Other things overheard at Day 1 of CERAWeek:
The premier of Canada’s Ontario province announced he is hiking fees on electricity exported to the U.S. by 25%, escalating the trade war kicked off by President Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources. The decision could affect prices in Minnesota, New York, and Michigan, which get some of their electricity from the province. Ontario Premier Doug Ford estimated the surcharge will add about $70 to the monthly bills of affected customers. “I will not hesitate to increase this charge,” Ford said. “If the United States escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely.” The U.S. tariffs went into effect on March 4. Trump issued another 30-day pause just days later, but Ford said Ontario “will not relent” until the threat of tariffs is gone for good.
There was a lot of news from the White House yesterday that relates to climate and the energy transition. Here’s a quick rundown:
The EPA cancelled hundreds of environmental justice grants: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency nixed 400 grants across environmental justice programs and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs worth $1.7 billion. Zeldin said this round of cuts “was our biggest yet.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rescinded Biden memos about infrastructure projects: The two memos encouraged states to prioritize climate change resilience in infrastructure projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and to include under-represented groups when planning projects.
The military ended funding for climate studies: This one technically broke on Friday. The Department of Defense is scrapping its funding for social science research, which covers climate change studies. In a post on X, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said DOD “does not do climate change crap. We do training and war fighting.”
Meanwhile, a second nonprofit – the Coalition for Green Capital – filed a lawsuit against Citibank over climate grant money awarded under the Inflation Reduction Act but frozen by Zeldin’s EPA. Climate United filed a similar lawsuit (but targeting the EPA, as well as Citibank) on Saturday.
A new report from the Princeton ZERO Lab’s REPEAT Project examines the potential consequences of the Trump administration’s plans to kill existing EV tax credits and repeal EPA tailpipe regulations. It finds that, compared to a scenario in which the current policies are kept in place:
“In other words, killing the IRA tax credits for EVs will decimate the nascent renaissance in vehicle and battery manufacturing investment and employment we’re currently seeing play out across the United States,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor and expert in energy systems engineering and policy at Princeton University and head of the REPEAT Project. (Jenkins is also the co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.)
REPEAT Project
The U.S. installed nearly 50 gigawatts of new solar power capacity last year, up 21% from 2023, according to a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie. That’s a record, and the largest annual grid capacity increase from any energy technology in the U.S. in more than 20 years. Combined with storage, solar represents 84% of all new grid capacity added in 2024.
SEIA and Wood Mackenzie
Last year was “the year of materialization of the IRA,” with supply chains becoming more resilient and interest from utilities and corporate buyers growing. Installations are expected to remain steady this year, with little growth, because of policy uncertainty. Total U.S. solar capacity is expected to reach 739 GW by 2035, but this depends on policy. The worst case scenario shows a 130 GW decline in deployment through 2035, which would represent $250 billion in lost investments.
“Last year’s record-level of installations was aided by several solar policies and credits within the Inflation Reduction Act that helped drive interest in the solar market,” said Sylvia Levya Martinez, a principal analyst of North America utility-scale solar for Wood Mackenzie. “We still have many challenges ahead, including unprecedented load growth on the power grid. If many of these policies were eliminated or significantly altered, it would be very detrimental to the industry’s continued growth.”
Tesla shares plunged yesterday by 15%, marking the company’s worst day on the market since 2020 and erasing its post-election stock bump.