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Fact-checking a Trump-inspired fear.
As someone on the “will this thing kill me” beat, I was paying close attention when the former president of the United States recently expressed concern about electric-powered boats — apparently, the new aquatic twist on his electric car rant. “Let’s say your boat goes down and I’m sitting on top of this big powerful battery and the boat’s going down,” Donald Trump mused to a group of supporters in the landlocked state of Iowa. “Do I get electrocuted?”
Trump then dramatically upped the stakes by imagining the sinking electric boat was also being circled by a shark. “So I have a choice of electrocution or shark,” he went on. “You know what I’m going to take? Electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time.”
I wanted to find out if it was actually possible for Trump to be electrocuted and/or eaten by a shark (you know, hypothetically). It was a question that inspired many related, obsessive searches: What about if you drive an electric vehicle into a lake — would that electrocute you? Are first responders afraid to help people in submerged EVs? Would they leave you inside to die?!
Like I said, I can be a little morbid.
Below, I attempt to sort electrocution fact from electrocution fiction, with a few detours thrown in.
People have been using electricity to power their boats for over 120 years. In fact, until the high-energy storage density of oil became obvious around the turn of the century, electric boats actually enjoyed a bit of a heyday. (RIP to the electric canoe).
Moreover, if you’ve ever been on a marine vessel with any more sophistication than a rowboat, it probably had a battery and an electrical system on board, even if it wasn’t powered by an electric motor. Standard 12-volt marine batteries are used for everything from starting the main engine to running the lights, radio, or a trolling motor on board.
The modern iteration of the fully electrified boat movement is still in its relative infancy and faces some big challenges. But the short version is, we’ve been using electricity at sea for a long time and have gotten pretty good at not electrocuting ourselves. And the potential electrocution problems that do exist usually aren’t exclusive to high-voltage electric boats, but gas-powered ones as well.
First of all, battery packs on electric boats are designed to be watertight — duh, because they’re
on a boat. Believe it or not, electric boat makers have taken into account the fact that their products could, in a worst-case scenario, end up underwater. A spokesperson for Arc Boat Company, a flashy new player in the electric boat space, pointed me to their FAQ which explains that “our fault table — a list of possible points of failure and what to do about each one — is hundreds of lines long, meaning we’ve thought about, tested, and planned for every scenario you might encounter on and off the water.” (This seems like a job I could be good at.)
In fact, all the electric boat manufacturers I was in touch with said they meet a waterproofing standard that is either at, or just below, what is required for a submarine. The high-voltage batteries are additionally kept in “puncture-resistant shells,” so even if the boat somehow got completely mangled, the battery won’t just be openly exposed to the water.
Still, you definitely don’t want to sit on an exposed “big powerful battery,” as Trump suggests in his scenario, since you could theoretically interrupt the closed loop of a DC battery’s electrical circuit and get shocked. But just being on an electric boat that is sinking does not inherently expose you to electrocution danger.
Electric shock drowning is caused by faulty wiring at a dock or a marina leaking 120-volt alternating current into the water. That electricity can potentially kill a nearby swimmer on its own, or cause them to become incapacitated and drown.
This overwhelmingly happens in lakes and rivers, since human bodies are a better conductor of electricity than fresh water but not saltwater. “In saltwater, the human body only slows electricity down, so most of it will go around a swimmer on its way back to ground unless the swimmer grabs hold of something — like a propeller or a swim ladder — that’s electrified,” BoatUS, a marine insurance company and safety advocacy group, explains in its publication Seaworthy. “In fresh water, the current gets ‘stuck’ trying to return to its source and generates voltage gradients that will take a shortcut through the human body.”
While it’s possible that a poorly maintained electric boat charging station could cause this sort of leak, it’s not a danger exclusive to the electric boat world; gas-powered boats hooked to shore power kill people every year, as well. Regardless, this is why you should never, ever swim around boat docks, especially at lakes.
If you are worried about sea life getting electrocuted by a high-voltage shipwreck, don’t be. When a battery is underwater, its current will flow into the water between its two terminals. This is bad for the battery (it’ll cause it to rapidly discharge) but you don’t have to worry about the entire ocean or lake getting filled with charge and electrocuting everything in it; high-voltage batteries are powerful but not nearly that powerful. If a shark is in the immediate vicinity of the battery — like, trying to eat it — it might potentially get hurt, but this whole premise is also starting to get absurd with this many “what ifs” piled on top of each other. (Really, the environmental hazard of a leaking lithium battery on the seafloor is probably the greater cause for concern.)
You’ll have bigger problems than electrocution!
Like electric boats, EV batteries are obsessively insulated and the cars are designed with a number of fail-safes to isolate the battery in the case of an accident. Again, the people who thought up these things have already considered the worst-case scenarios. (Plus, getting sued for repeatedly electrocuting anyone who drives through a puddle is not good business).
What’s important to understand is that unlike the 12-volt batteries used in gas-powered cars, which are harmlessly grounded to the car’s large chassis, high-voltage systems in EVs use a floating ground, which helps prevent you from being electrocuted if the car becomes submerged. “It’s not grounded chassis — there is no return path for a vehicle that has been submerged to return that charge,” Joe McLaine, a safety engineer with General Motors, told me. “And if there [are] any faults or anomalies with the high voltage system, and it’s operating in normal functioning ranges, it’s going to shut off anyway.”
Yes — and it’s also true of driving in the rain, or washing your car, or charging in a downpour.
Trying to drive an EV through deep water is not a great idea for a number of very good reasons, but fear of electrocution isn’t one of them. The most likely scenario is that the water will cause any less-well-insulated electronic components to short out, causing the car to die — which is what happened when Motor Mythbusters tried to drive a Nissan Leaf through a water-filled trench.
Of course, gas-powered cars don’t love driving in floods, either, and there is some reason to believe that EVs might actually do better in flood conditions than their counterparts.
Back in 2016, Elon Musk tweeted that the “Model S floats well enough to turn it into a boat for short periods of time.” Just searching the words “EV” or “Tesla” and “flood” or “boat mode” will lead you to tons of videos of EVs plowing through deep bodies of water.
Don’t … do this. Most flood-related deaths occur in cars, and this fact doesn’t change just because your vehicle has a plug. Additionally, just because an EV drove through a flood successfully in a short video doesn’t mean there was no lasting damage from the water (which, it should be added, isn’t covered under warranty).
Florida’s State Fire Marshal’s Office reported there were at least 21 EV battery fires in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian in 2022. This is specifically a phenomenon caused by saltwater storm surge: When the car eventually dries out, the salt residue can remain behind on the battery, creating conductive “bridges” that lead to short circuits and fires.
This is still fairly rare: “The odds that your electric battery pack is on fire in Florida are about the same odds of you getting struck by lightning,” Joe Britton, the executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told Utility Drive. To be safe, FEMA recommends that any EVs flooded by saltwater be moved at least 50 feet away from any structures, other vehicles, or combustibles. And if you are expecting storm surge, move your EV preemptively to higher ground.
Tesla echoes this advice: “As with any electric vehicle, if your Tesla has been exposed to flooding, extreme weather events, or has otherwise been submerged in water (especially in salt water), treat it as if it’s been in an accident and contact your insurance company for support,” the company writes in its user manual.
“That is not true,” McLaine, the safety engineer with General Motors, told me. McLaine is responsible for GM’s Battery Electric Vehicle First Responder Training program, which has educated over 5,000 first- and second-responders in 25 different locations across the U.S. and Canada, and is focused on dispelling some of the rumors and misinformation around electric cars.
In addition to trainings like GM’s, a growing familiarity with the thousands of EVs now on the road has also made first responders more confident when responding to bad accidents. Orange cables are used to easily identify high-voltage components, which are placed “in areas and locations in the vehicle in which first responders typically wouldn’t have access to anyway,” McLaine explained.
First responders are trained to disable the high-voltage systems in an EV just like they would snip the cut loops around a 12-volt battery in a gas-powered vehicle accident. Additionally, most manufacturers make it extremely easy to find individual emergency response guides for their vehicles online, and there are various hotlines available for first- and second-responders when EV-related questions arise.
What First Responders Do in an EV Accidentwww.youtube.com
As for first responders handling cars that have been fully or partially submerged: Pretty much all of the emergency response documents I could find stated some version of “A submerged electric vehicle does not have a high voltage potential on the metal vehicle body, and is safe to touch” (this one specifically comes from the papers for the RAV 4 EV). Though first responders need to be careful with cutting into crushed cars, there are no shocking surprises when it comes to simply handling a submerged EV.
Are you kidding me? Electrocution would at least be quick! Trump got that part right: In this round of “would you rather,” you should take electrocution every time.
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On a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits
Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas • French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in Europe • Great fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.
The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.
GOP leadership had worked through the evening to convince holdouts, with my colleagues Katie Brigham and Jael Holzman reporting last night that House Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman of North Carolina said he planned to advance the legislation after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, particularly for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version phases out more slowly than House Republicans wanted. “It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally ‘deal with’ tax credits already codified into law,” Brigham and Holzman write, although another Republican holdout, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, made similar allusions to reporters on Wednesday.
Tesla delivered just 384,122 cars in the second quarter of 2025, a 13.5% slump from the 444,000 delivered in the same quarter of 2024, marking the worst quarterly decline in the company’s history, Barron’s reports. The slump follows a similarly disappointing Q1, down 13% year-over-year, after the company’s sales had “flatlined for the first time in over a decade” in 2024, InsideEVs adds.
Despite the drop, Tesla stock rose 5% on Wednesday, with Wedbush analyst Dan Ives calling the Q2 results better than some had expected. “Fireworks came early for Tesla,” he wrote, although Barron’s notes that “estimates for the second quarter of 2025 started at about 500,000 vehicles. They started to drop precipitously after first-quarter deliveries fell 13% year over year, missing Wall Street estimates by some 40,000 vehicles.”
The European Commission proposed its 2040 climate target on Wednesday, which, for the first time, would allow some countries to use carbon credits to meet their emissions goals. EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero, and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra defended the decision during an appearance on Euronews on Wednesday, saying the plan — which allows developing nations to meet a limited portion of their emissions goals with the credits — was a chance to “build bridges” with countries in Africa and Latin America. “The planet doesn’t care about where we take emissions out of the air,” he separately told The Guardian. “You need to take action everywhere.” Green groups, which are critical of the use of carbon credits, slammed the proposal, which “if agreed [to] by member states and passed by the EU parliament … is then supposed to be translated into an international target,” The Guardian writes.
Around half of oil executives say they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than they’d planned for at the start of the year, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. Of the respondents at firms producing more than 10,000 barrels a day, 42% said they expected a “significant decrease in the number of wells drilled,” Bloomberg adds. The survey further indicates that Republican policy has been at odds with President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric, as tariffs have increased the cost of completing a new well by more than 4%. “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and D.C. rhetoric could have been for U.S. E&P companies,” one anonymous executive said in the report. “We were promised by the administration a better environment for producers, but were delivered a world that has benefited OPEC to the detriment of our domestic industry.”
Fine-particulate air pollution is strongly associated with lung cancer-causing DNA mutations that are more traditionally linked to smoking tobacco, a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Cancer Institute has found. The researchers looked at the genetic code of 871 non-smokers’ lung tumors in 28 regions across Europe, Africa, and Asia and found that higher levels of local air pollution correlated with more cancer-driving mutations in the respective tumors.
Surprisingly, the researchers did not find a similar genetic correlation among non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. George Thurston, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University, told Inside Climate News that a potential reason for this result is that fine-particulate air pollution — which is emitted by cars, industrial activities, and wildfires — is more widespread than exposure to secondhand smoke. “We are engulfed in fossil-fuel-burning pollution every single day of our lives, all day long, night and day,” he said, adding, “I feel like I’m in the Matrix, and I’m the only one that took the red pill. I know what’s going on, and everybody else is walking around thinking, ‘This stuff isn’t bad for your health.’” Today, non-smokers account for up to 25% of lung cancer cases globally, with the worst air quality pollution in the United States primarily concentrated in the Southwest.
EPA
National TV news networks aired a combined 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage about the record-breaking late-June temperatures in the Midwest and East Coast — but only 4% of those segments mentioned the heat dome’s connection to climate change, a new report by Media Matters found.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Collective put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”