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You probably know your car’s fuel economy. But do you know its emissions per mile?
If you drive a gas-powered car, you almost certainly know its fuel economy. But do you know how much carbon your car emits?
Probably not. Here in America, at least, it’s not something we think about in concrete terms, like miles per gallon or the money we save at the pump by buying a more efficient car — but it probably should be.
In general, there’s a direct correlation between fuel consumption and CO2 emissions: the more gas you use, the more CO2 your car produces. That means we often use miles per gallon as a shorthand for pollution. But if you’re concerned about your carbon footprint, there’s clarity in knowing the actual emissions produced by your car.
In other parts of the world, governments make sure people can turn knowledge of CO2 consumption into power. If you’ve ever been to Europe and seen a car ad anywhere, you’ve probably seen a “Closed course, professional driver”-style line of text detailing that vehicle’s CO2 emissions. That’s because they have to do this. The European Union has for years required automakers to disclose their cars’ emissions in ads across multiple platforms.
In America, these carbon-related metrics aren’t nearly as publicized. The closest equivalents we have are the metrics on a new car’s window sticker, which are required for consumer transparency purposes. Here you’ll find an important figure: CO2 emissions per mile. It’s tiny, like fine print, but it’s there. It’s essentially the same thing you see in those European ads, just not using the Metric system, obviously, and they go out of their way to drive this point home; us, not so much.
These ratings come from the EPA. The last major revision to how these labels look came about a decade back. But it’s also part of a bigger, more confusing package on the sticker. On one graph, you see a rating of fuel economy and CO2 emissions combined together, while the “smog rating” measures pollutants like nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulate matter. These are rated on a not-very-helpful scale of 1 through 10.
But unlike in Europe, our CO2 emissions figures aren’t really something we see or consider when buying a car; they don’t even appear in car reviews, generally. I’ve probably written thousands of those and I’ve never once included it.
Now, here’s what the label doesn’t say, but the EPA does: the average passenger vehicle in America emits about 400 grams of CO2 per mile. If you have the free time to go to FuelEconomy.gov, you can find out how your car ranks there and it could — should, I’d argue — help inform your next car purchase.
Take my car, a Mazda 3 hatchback with the model’s larger 2.5-liter engine. The EPA says it produces 301 grams of CO2 per mile, so better than average and way better than, say, a 2023 Bronco Raptor example, a high-performance off-road SUV that’s fun but emits 577 grams of CO2 per mile.
Let’s say I decide I can go a little greener than my car, but I’m not ready to completely break up with gasoline just yet; a new 2023 Toyota Prius hybrid puts out just 155 grams of CO2 per mile in its base trim. What a champion, and further proof that hybrids are a great tool for bringing down emissions right now.
Now, if I need more room for my 12-pound dog (he can take up a surprising amount of space when he wants to) I could get a Honda CR-V Hybrid, which puts out 237 grams of CO2 per mile. Not as good as the smaller Prius, but still better than average.
Internal combustion engines have gotten much cleaner over the years and smaller engines obviously emit less. A Chevrolet Equinox with a small, turbocharged four-cylinder engine puts out 310 grams of CO2 per mile, while a V8-powered Chevrolet Tahoe emits 527 grams of CO2 over a mile.
But car size matters here too. If I had purchased a bigger 2018 Mazda CX-5 crossover instead of my hatchback, I’d be putting out an extra 21 grams of CO2 per mile even though the cars have the same engine. Plenty of people might make the size tradeoff even if it meant a hit to fuel economy, but how might they feel if they knew the difference in CO2 as well?
Now let’s put all of those numbers into context. The EPA says the average American vehicle — something it claims does about 22.2 miles per gallon and drives 11,500 miles per year, which all tracks with my experience — emits about 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. That’s one vehicle, and just an average one to boot. In the grand scheme of things, that one vehicle contributed to what the U.S. Energy Information Administration claims was 1.476 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2022 from the entire transportation sector — or about 30% of total U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions that year. Granted, you can’t put that whole number on cars, but it’d be great if consumers knew more about what parts their purchases play in all of it.
Of course, there’s a clear winner here: electric vehicles. They all emit 0 grams of CO2 per mile, underscoring how important EVs are to decarbonization.
Still, that figure — while vital — elides a lot of differences. A Tesla Model 3 and a GMC Hummer EV both have no tailpipe emissions, which is true. But one is a compact sedan and the other is a 9,600-pound behemoth of an SUV; in fact, it’s so heavy it’s not even required to list such figures on its window sticker, so good luck finding it on the EPA’s website. The Hummer will clearly need much more energy to fully charge than a small Tesla. The two may be EVs but they are not created equal. It would be nice to see some kind of data tied to charging, despite the many variables involved there, particularly since 60% of our electricity is still generated by fossil fuels.
The only thing we have to easily compare them is MPGe, the deeply flawed, barely understood metric for ranking the energy consumption of hybrid and electric cars. That would be miles per gallon equivalent, an EPA-created metric that measures energy consumption in comparison to a gasoline vehicle. But how useful is that, really? Besides telling you the obvious, that EVs are more efficient at how they use energy overall than ICE vehicles, it doesn’t help you know anything about emissions or even energy costs. It’s also a terrible way to explain to someone what really matters, as The Drive pointed out last year: lower efficiency means charging more frequently.
Even better would be a rating that lets you compare life-cycle emissions — i.e. not just the emissions from tailpipes, but the emissions generated by the construction of a vehicle. Here, you’ll find some surprising data: while EVs overall have much lower life cycle emissions than gas cars, the biggest EVs end up just as polluting as small gasoline cars by that metric because they are so resource-intensive to make.
Yet most automakers don’t publish that data, even if they know it themselves. What we have are a handful of estimates cobbled together by enterprising researchers and journalists. There’s definitely no comprehensive database. And the EPA’s way of speaking to consumers still feels focused on what they’ll spend at the pump.
The point is, it would be amazing if customers were made more aware of the CO2 impact from their cars — from tailpipe emissions or from charging, although it’s been proven time and time again the latter is less harmful than the former long-term. I would love to see American buyers start to consider emissions the same way we have thought about fuel economy for decades. Perhaps this would entice people to make better purchasing decisions, even if they come down to slight differences between two competing vehicles.
I don’t love putting environmentalism solely on ordinary, individual people; our decisions matter, but arguably less so than major corporations. We purchase the cars we’re given, and thanks in part to our absurd regulations, small cars are dying and the market has shifted to SUVs and trucks. What’s worse, EVs are still mostly very expensive and not nearly enough places offer choices like safe bike lanes or widely available public transit.
But I think putting CO2 emissions, and their effects, more in front of drivers’ minds is a good start. It’s time for all of us to try and think beyond just saving on gas.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.