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Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
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But this might all be moot thanks to the “major questions doctrine.”
Could President Trump’s expansive interpretation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act empower a future president to, gasp, tariff carbon intensive goods?
That’s the terrifying prospect Justice Neil Gorsuch, a staunch conservative who often votes in line with Trump and his administration’s positions, raised to Solicitor General D. John Sauer in Wednesday’s oral arguments in the federal court case seeking to throw out Trump’s tariffs.
In a series of questions designed to draw out what limits Sauer thought existed on executive power, Gorsuch asked, “Could the president impose a 50% tariff on gas-powered cars and auto parts to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad of climate change?” (This echoed the language of the statute the Solicitor General cited to justify the tariffs.)
“It’s very likely that could be done,” Sauer conceded.
“I think that would have to be the logic of your view,” Gorsuch replied.
“Obviously this administration would say that’s a hoax, this is not a real crisis,” Sauer said.
“I’m sure you would,” Gorsuch said to chuckles.
“But that would be a question for Congress, under our interpretation, not the courts,” Sauer said.
Gorsuch’s questioning touched on the “major questions doctrine,” first propounded in the court’s 2022 opinion in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. In that case, which resulted in the court striking down the Obama-era Clean Power Plan power plant regulations, the conservative majority argued that “given both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent, the agency must point to ‘clear congressional authorization’ for the authority it claims,” which it claimed the rules lacked.
In a note to clients following the emissions rules case, the white shoe law firm Davis Polk wrote that the majority opinion “does not provide guidance for applying the major questions doctrine in future cases,” but noted that a concurrence authored by Justice Gorsuch “attempted to provide such guidance for future cases.” In said concurrence, Gorsuch wrote that the major questions doctrine could be invoked when the executive branch is dealing with a question of “great political significance” or “a significant portion of the American economy.”
Hmm!
Some progressives flagged this aspect of the tariffs case as it worked its way through the courts, pointing out that it could call into question powers that future presidents may want to use to implement expansive industrial policy, including climate policy. Some of the broader legal arguments against the tariffs, Todd Tucker of the progressive Roosevelt Institute wrote in a brief, “tilt the scales overwhelmingly against progressive priorities.”
“Limits on Trump today will bind future presidents tomorrow. This could include centrists, progressives, MAGA types, or traditional conservatives, who will need or want robust executive tools to address ruinous competitiveness or climate emergencies.”
But in pursuit of their clients’ interests, advocates for striking down the tariffs were more than happy to pick up the thread dropped by Gorsuch to make libertarian-leaning arguments about presidential powers.
“It is simply implausible that in enacting” the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law Trump has used to justify his retributive import taxes, “Congress handed the president the power to overhaul the entire tariff system and the American economy in the process, allowing him to set and reset tariffs or any and every product from any and every country at any and all times,” Neal Katyal, the lawyer arguing on behalf of a beer and wine distributor and a longtime figure in Democratic legal circles, said in his oral argument.
Perhaps seeking to appeal to the Republican majority on the court, Katyal returned to Justice Gorsuch’s climate change example, arguing that “if the government wins, another president could declare a ’climate emergency’ and impose huge tariffs without floors or ceilings, as Justice Gorsuch said.”
“My friend’s answer,” Katyal said, referring to Sauer, “is, ‘This administration would declare it a hoax.’ The next president may not quite say that.”
Many legal experts thought that the administration got the worse of the oral arguments and questioning of the attorneys, with conservative Justices Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts all asking skeptical questions of Sauer, while Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito repeatedly threw the White House argumentative lifelines, including, in Alito’s case, suggesting other laws that could justify the tariffs.
Alito even gently mocked Katyal, a Democrat who served as acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, for blatantly using conservative-tinged legal arguments about the scope of executive authority over the economy.
“I wonder if you ever thought that your legacy as a constitutional advocate would be the man who revived the non-delegation argument,” referring to the idea that certain powers are too much akin to lawmaking to delegate to the executive branch, which in theory could vastly restrict the authority of regulators.
But Katyal resisted the implied contradiction and persisted in targeting the right wing of an already conservative Supreme Court.
“Heck yes,” Katyal said. “I think Justice Gorsuch nailed it on the head when saying that when you’re dealing with a statute that is this open-ended — unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”
On Massachusetts’ offshore headwinds, Biden’s gas rules, and Australia’s free power
Current conditions: The Pacific Northwest is getting blasted with winds of up to 70 miles per hour • Heavy snow is coming this week for the higher elevations in New England and upstate New York • San Cristóbal de La Laguna in the Canary Islands saw temperatures surge to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

Democratic candidates swept to victory in key races with implications for climate change on Tuesday night. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger — who vowed to push forward with offshore wind, new nuclear reactors, and fusion energy — seized the governor’s mansion in the first major race to be called after polls closed. In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, who campaigned on building new nuclear plants and pressing the state’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to cut electricity prices, trounced her Republican opponent. In New York City, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, who said little about energy during his campaign but came out in the last debate in favor of nuclear power, easily beat back his two rivals for Gracie Mansion. Yet the Georgia Public Service Commission's incumbent Republican Tim Echols lost his race against Democrat Alicia Johnson, a defeat for a conservative who championed construction of the only two nuclear reactors built from scratch in modern U.S. history. In what one expert called a sign of a “seismic shift” on the commission, Peter Hubbard, another Democrat running to flip a seat on the commission, also won.
At a moment when the Trump administration is “disassembling climate policy across the federal government,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, “state elections are arguably more important to climate action than ever.”
A federal judge in Washington ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration can reconsider the Biden-era approval of SouthCoast Wind off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. The decision, reported in The New York Times, is a setback for the joint venture between EDP Renewables and Engie, and handed the White House a victory in what we’ve called here the administration’s “total war on wind.” Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the project developers would not “suffer immediate and significant hardship” if the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management were allowed to reevaluate the project’s construction and operation permits.
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Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld Biden-era Department of Energy efficiency rules for gas-fired residential furnaces and commercial water heaters in a ruling that rejected the gas industry’s challenge on Tuesday. “Overall, we find that DOE’s economic justification analysis and conclusions were robust,” the panel ruled, according to Bloomberg Law. The decision will maintain the status quo of how the agency enforces energy efficiency rules for the appliances. Under standards updated in 2021 and 2023, the Biden-era bureaucrats proposed raising efficiency levels to 95% for furnaces and using condensing model designs to heat water.
White House budget officials pressed the Environmental Protection Agency to expand its rollback of tailpipe regulations this summer as the agency sought to repeal the foundational policy that undergirds federal climate rules, E&E News reported. Documents the green newswire service obtained showed the White House Office of Management and Budget pushed the environmental regulator to weaken limits on vehicular pollution, including soot and smog-forming compounds in addition to planet-heating carbon. The EPA initially pushed back, but the documents revealed the staffers at OMB demanded the agency pursue a more aggressive rollback.
Australia launched a new plan to force energy companies to offer free electricity to households during the day to use excess solar power and push the grid away from coal and gas. The policy, called the “Solar Sharer” plan, aims to take advantage of the country’s vast rooftop solar panels. More than 4 million of Australia’s 10.9 million households have panels, and the capacity has overtaken the nation’s remaining coal-fired power stations. The proposal, the Financial Times reported, would also extend the benefits of distributed solar resources to the country’s renters and apartment dwellers.
For years, nuclear scientists have dreamed of harnessing atomic energy from thorium, potentially shrinking radioactive waste and reducing the risk of weapons proliferation compared to uranium. In the West, that has remained largely a dream. In China, however, researchers are vaulting ahead. This week, Chinese scientists announced a major breakthrough in converting thorium to uranium in a reactor. “This marks the first time international experimental data has been obtained after thorium was introduced into a molten salt reactor, making it the only operational molten salt reactor in the world to have successfully incorporated thorium fuel,” Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
Rob and Jesse touch base with WeaveGrid CEO Apoorv Bhargava.
Data centers aren’t the only driver of rising power use. The inexorable shift to electric vehicles — which has been slowed, but not stopped, by Donald Trump’s policies — is also pushing up electricity use across the country. That puts a strain on the grid — but EVs could also be a strength.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Apoorv Bhargava, the CEO and cofounder of WeaveGrid, a startup that helps people charge their vehicles in a way that’s better and cleaner for the grid. They chat about why EV charging remains way too complicated, why it should be more like paying a cellphone bill than filling up at a gas station, and how the AI boom has already changed the utility sector.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: In your experience, are consumers willing to make this deal, where they get some money off on their power bill in order to change how their car works? Because it does seem to include a mindset change for people, where they’re going from thinking of their car as a machine — I mean, this is part of the broader transition to EVs. But there’s an even further mindset shift that seems to me like it would be required here, where you go from thinking about your car as a machine that you wholly own — that enables your freedom, that is ready to drive a certain amount of miles at any time — to a machine that enables you to have transportation services but also is one instantiation of the great big cloud of services and digital technologies and commodity energy products that surround us at any time.
Apoorv Bhargava: Yeah, I mean, look, I think we have seen faster adoption rates than any other consumer-side resource participating in energy has. So I feel very good about that. But ultimately, I think of this as a transition to the normal experience for folks who are going through what is a new experience altogether.
Again, similar to my cell phone plan, if this was just offered to me as a standard offering — you buy an EV, your utility offers you a plan, it’s called the EV plan — in the same way that we have EV time-of-use rates, quote-unquote. If you’re just offered an EV plan where it’s exactly the same thing — I’m going to make sure you’re fully charged every night in the way you want it to be charged, with the cleanest, cheapest, most reliable charging possible, and it’s just being taken care of.
I think what’s so hard for most folks to grok, is that the way this experience works is it’s supposed to be completely frictionless, right? You’re really supposed to not think about it. It’s actually only in the few moments where you need to change your 99% behavior to the 1% behavior — where you’re like, Oh, I need to go to the airport, or, Oh, I need to go on a road trip. That’s where you need to think about it. It’s flipped from thermostat management programs where you actually need to think about it actively in the moments where the grid is really strained.
Where we’ve overinvested, in my view —and this is a controversial view — we’ve overinvested in trying to make EVs be like gas stations or like the gas station model. We keep talking about it all the time. We’ve over-talked about range anxiety. The fact of the matter is 80% of charging still happens at home. Even in the long run, 30% of charging will happen in the workplace. 50- plus-percent will happen at home. It’s very little charging that’s gonna happen on fast charging. But we’ve talked so much, ad nauseam, about fast charging that we’ve actually forgotten that underpinning the iceberg of the electrification cost is the grid itself. And never before has the grid been so strained.
Mentioned:
Rob on how electricity got so expensive
Utility of the Future: An MIT Energy Initiative response to an industry in transition, December 2016
Previously on Shift Key: Utility Regulation Really Sucks
Jesse’s downshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
Uplight is a clean energy technology company that helps energy providers unlock grid capacity by activating energy customers and their connected devices to generate, shift, and save energy. The Uplight Demand Stack — which integrates energy efficiency, electrification, rates, and flexibility programs — improves grid resilience, reduces costs, and accelerates decarbonization for energy providers and their customers. Learn more at uplight.com/heatmap.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.