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From what it means for America’s climate goals to how it might make American cars smaller again
The Biden administration just kicked off the next phase of the electric-vehicle revolution.
The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled Wednesday some of the world’s most aggressive climate rules on the transportation sector, a sweeping effort that aims to ensure that two-thirds of new cars, SUVs, and pickups — and one-quarter of new heavy-duty trucks — sold in the United States in 2032 will be all electric.
The rules, which are the most ambitious attempt to regulate greenhouse-gas pollution in American history, would put the country at the forefront of the global transition to electric vehicles. If adopted and enforced as proposed, the new standards could eventually prevent 10 billion tons of carbon pollution, roughly double America’s total annual emissions last year, the EPA says.
The rules would roughly halve carbon pollution from America’s massive car and truck fleet, the world’s third largest, within a decade. Such a cut is in line with Biden’s Paris Agreement goal of cutting carbon pollution from across the economy in half by 2030.
Transportation generates more carbon pollution than any other part of the U.S. economy. America’s hundreds of millions of cars, SUVs, pickups, 18-wheelers, and other vehicles generated roughly 25% of total U.S. carbon emissions last year, a figure roughly equal to the entire power sector’s.
In short, the proposal is a big deal with many implications. Here are seven of them.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Every country around the world must cut its emissions in half by 2030 in order for the world to avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That goal, enshrined in the Paris Agreement, is a widely used benchmark for the arrival of climate change’s worst impacts — deadly heat waves, stronger storms, and a near total die-off of coral reefs.
The new proposal would bring America’s cars and trucks roughly in line with that requirement. According to an EPA estimate, the vehicle fleet’s net carbon emissions would be 46% lower in 2032 than they stand today.
That means that rules of this ambition and stringency are a necessary part of meeting America’s goals under the Paris Agreement. The United States has pledged to halve its carbon emissions, as compared to its all-time high, by 2020. The country is not on track to meet that goal today, but robust federal, state, and corporate action — including strict vehicle rules — could help it get there, a recent report from the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, found.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Until this week, California and the European Union had been leading the world’s transition to electric vehicles. Both jurisdictions have pledged to ban sales of new fossil-fuel-powered cars after 2035 and set aggressive targets to meet that goal — although Europe recently watered down its commitment by allowing some cars to burn synthetic fuels.
The United States hasn’t issued a similar ban. But under the new rules, its timeline for adopting EVs will come close to both jurisdictions — although it may slightly lag California’s. By 2030, EVs will make up about 58% of new vehicles sold in Europe, according to the think tank Transportation & Environment; that is roughly in line with the EPA’s goals.
California, meanwhile, expects two-thirds of new car sales to be EVs by the same year, putting it ahead of the EPA’s proposal. The difference between California’s targets and the EPA’s may come down to technical accounting differences, however. The Washington Post has reported that the new EPA rules are meant to harmonize the national standards with California’s.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
With or without the rules, the United States was already likely to see far more EVs in the future. Ford has said that it would aim for half of its global sales to be electric by 2030, and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler and Jeep, announced that half of its American sales and all its European sales must be all-electric by that same date. General Motors has pledged to sell only EVs after 2035. In fact, the EPA expects that automakers are collectively on track for 44% of vehicle sales to be electric by 2030 without any changes to emissions rules.
But every manufacturer is on a different timeline, and some weren’t planning to move quite this quickly. John Bozella, the president of Alliance for Automotive Innovation, has struck a skeptical note about the proposal. “Remember this: A lot has to go right for this massive — and unprecedented — change in our automotive market and industrial base to succeed,” he told The New York Times.
The proposed rules would unify the industry and push it a bit further than current plans suggest.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
The EPA’s proposal would see sales of all-electric heavy trucks grow beginning with model year 2027. The agency estimates that by 2032, some 50% of “vocational” vehicles sold — like delivery trucks, garbage trucks, and cement mixers — will be zero-emissions, as well as 35% of short-haul tractors and 25% of long-haul tractor trailers. This would save about 1.8 billion tons of CO2 through 2055 — roughly equivalent to one year’s worth of emissions from the transportation sector.
But the proposal falls short of where the market is already headed, some environmental groups pointed out. “It’s not driving manufacturers to do anything,” said Paul Cort, director of Earthjustice’s Right to Zero campaign. “It’s following what’s happening in the market in a very conservative way.”
Last year, California passed rules requiring 60% of vocational truck sales and 40% of tractors to be zero-emissions by 2032. Daimler, the world’s largest truck manufacturer, has said that zero emissions trucks would make up 60% of its truck sales by 2030 and 100% by 2039. Volvo Trucks, another major player, said it aims for 50% of its vehicle deliveries to be electric by 2030.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
One of the more interesting aspects of the new rules is that they pick up on a controversy that has been running on and off for the past 13 years.
In 2010, the Obama administration issued the first-ever greenhouse-gas regulations for light-duty cars, SUVs, and trucks. In order to avoid a Supreme Court challenge to the rules, the White House did something unprecedented: It got every automaker to agree to meet the standards even before they became law.
This was a milestone in the history of American environmental law. Because the automakers agreed to the rules, they were in effect conceding that the EPA had the legal authority to regulate their greenhouse-gas pollution in the first place. That shored up the EPA’s legal authority to limit greenhouse gases from any part of the economy, allowing the agency to move on to limiting carbon pollution from power plants and factories.
But that acquiescence came at a cost. The Obama administration agreed to what are called “vehicle footprint” provisions, which put its rules on a sliding scale based on vehicle size. Essentially, these footprint provisions said that a larger vehicle — such as a three-row SUV or full-sized pickup — did not have to meet the same standards as a compact sedan. What’s more, an automaker only had to meet the standards that matched the footprint of the cars it actually sold. In other words, a company that sold only SUVs and pickups would face lower overall requirements than one that also sold sedans, coupes, and station wagons.
Some of this decision was out of Obama’s hands: Congress had required that the Department of Transportation, which issues a similar set of rules, consider vehicle footprint in laws that passed in 2007 and 1975. Those same laws also created the regulatory divide between cars and trucks.
But over the past decade, SUV and truck sales have boomed in the United States, while the market for old-fashioned cars has withered. In 2019, SUVs outsold cars two to one; big SUVs and trucks of every type now make up nearly half the new car market. In the past decade, too, the crossover — a new type of car-like vehicle that resembles a light-duty truck — has come to dominate the American road. This has had repercussions not just for emissions, but pedestrian fatalities as well.
Researchers have argued that the footprint rules may be at least partially to blame for this trend. In 2018, economists at the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley argued Japan’s tailpipe rules, which also include a footprint mechanism, pushed automakers to super-size their cars. Modeling studies have reached the same conclusion about the American rules.
For the first time, the EPA’s proposal seems to recognize this criticism and tries to address it. The new rules make the greenhouse-gas requirements for cars and trucks more similar than they have been in the past, so as to not “inadvertently provide an incentive for manufacturers to change the size or regulatory class of vehicles as a compliance strategy,” the EPA says in a regulatory filing.
The new rules also tighten requirements on big cars and trucks so that automakers can’t simply meet the rules by enlarging their vehicles.
These changes may not reverse the trend toward larger cars. It might even reveal how much cars’ recent growth is driven by consumer taste: SUVs’ share of the new car market has been growing almost without exception since the Ford Explorer debuted in 1991. But it marks the first admission by the agency that in trying to secure a climate win, it may have accidentally created a monster.
Heatmap Illustration/Buenavista Images via Getty Images
The EPA is trumpeting the energy security benefits of the proposal, in addition to its climate benefits.
While the U.S. is a net exporter of crude — and that’s not expected to change in the coming decades — U.S. refineries still rely on “significant imports of heavy crude which could be subject to supply disruptions,” the agency notes. This reliance ties the U.S. to authoritarian regimes around the world and also exposes American consumers to wilder swings in gas prices.
But the new greenhouse gas rules are expected to severely diminish the country’s dependence on foreign oil. Between cars and trucks, the rules would cut crude oil imports by 124 million barrels per year by 2030, and 1 billion barrels in 2050. For context, the United States imported about 2.2 billion barrels of crude oil in 2021.
This would also be a turning point for gas stations. Americans consumed about 135 billion gallons of gasoline in 2022. The rules would cut into gas sales by about 6.5 billion gallons by 2030, and by more than 50 billion gallons by 2050. Gas stations are going to have to adapt or fade away.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Although it may seem like these new electric vehicles could tax our aging, stressed electricity grid, the EPA claims these rules won’t change the status quo very much. The agency estimates the rules would require a small, 0.4% increase in electricity generation to meet new EV demand by 2030 compared to business as usual, with generation needs increasing by 4% by 2050. “The expected increase in electric power demand attributable to vehicle electrification is not expected to adversely affect grid reliability,” the EPA wrote.
Still, that’s compared to the trajectory we’re already on. With or without these rules, we’ll need a lot of investment in new power generation and reliability improvements in the coming years to handle an electrifying economy. “Standards or no standards, we have to have grid operators preparing for EVs,” said Samantha Houston, a senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from replacing gas cars will also far outweigh any emissions related to increased power demands. The EPA estimates that between now and 2055, the rules could drive up power plant pollution by 710 million metric tons, but will cut emissions from cars by 8 billion tons.
This article was last updated on April 13 at 12:37 PM ET.
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The CEO’s $1 billion share buy changes nothing — except in the eyes of his shareholders.
Elon Musk’s signature talent, the thing that made him the world’s richest man, has long been his ability to make Tesla’s stock price soar. It’s a superpower that manifests through a combination of financial lever-pulling and promises of world-changing innovations to come. For this reason, it leads to glaring disconnects such as Tesla having become the world’s most valuable automaker despite selling only a 10th as many vehicles as a true manufacturing superpower like Toyota.
By that yardstick, this week’s news might be his biggest achievement yet.
On Monday, headlines declared that Tesla has turned itself around. Its share price has rebounded after taking a nosedive early this year. In this case, the bullish stock market performance is divorced not only from the reality of the company’s electric car sales, but also from, well, everything else that’s happened lately.
Remember the protests? Remember the celebrities performatively selling their Teslas? The “I bought this before Elon went crazy” bumper stickers? With Musk having abandoned his dalliance with the Trump administration, other crises have taken over the spotlight. Even so, the echo of discontent is visible. Protests dogged the opening of the new Tesla Diner charging station here in Los Angeles, and plenty of Teslas in my neighborhood still have the apology stuck to their bumpers.
Most crucially for Tesla, the anger did real damage to its bottom line. The brand’s sales around the world fell dramatically as public disgust with Musk rose and EV shoppers ran toward a growing number of competitors, especially those from China. But even in the U.S., where cheap Chinese EVs are not an option, Tesla’s dominance has shrunk. In August 2025, the company’s share of the U.S. EV market fell to 38%. That was Tesla’s lowest figure since 2017, before the Model 3 or Model Y rolled off assembly lines. It was enough to inspire another round of speculation over whether the company might be better off freeing itself from the PR albatross that is Elon Musk.
Yet once again, the performance of Tesla’s stock would suggest that none of this had ever happened, or at least that it didn’t matter. Tesla offered Musk a trillion-dollar pay package — so absurd that even the pope felt compelled to condemn it. Musk then turned around and bought a billion dollars of Tesla stock to signal his self-confidence, which in turn propelled Tesla’s share price back up again and wiped out the losses from earlier this year.
The “why” of this financial madness is the same refrain that’s been playing for the past two years, ever since Musk rolled out the disastrous Cybertruck rather than building Tesla’s volume EV business. The man cares about robotics, AI, and autonomy — and decidedly not about building cars — and has convinced shareholders that his pivot in this direction will reap untold rewards. Once again, it’s possible that he’s right.
I am, admittedly, a cynic about Tesla and self-driving, for reasons personal and general. My Model 3 encounters the occasional worrisome blip with its relatively simpler Autopilot system, for instance on the part of Interstate 5 near Disneyland where it suddenly decides it’s on the 45 mile-per-hour access road rather than the freeway and hits the brakes.
This error alone is enough that I wouldn’t entrust my family’s safety to Tesla Full Self-Driving, to say nothing of Musk’s lifelong habit of overstating the abilities of his tech. But I know plenty of people who are already allowing versions of FSD to chauffeur them. Conversations with industry sources often settle on the inevitability of autonomy, if for no other reason than they worry about younger folks who can’t be bothered with learning to drive. Maybe Tesla will win the race to sell them self-driving electric cars. (Or, as a Bloomberg op-ed says, maybe the big buy is just window dressing, though a more apt metaphor might have been lipstick on a pig.)
Either way, it’s not great news for the here and now, the EV market of the present that Musk loves to neglect. South Korean competitors Hyundai and Kia — which are both building cool EVs for today that humans drive and trying to do much of their manufacturing in the United States — are nonetheless getting hammered by Trump tariffs and ICE raids. The federal tax credit set to expire at the end of this month is a particularly hard hit for forthcoming vehicles such as the new Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf, which could have reached compellingly cheap prices had the government not killed the incentive and slapped tariffs in its place.
Will Tesla, which has long teased an affordable EV, at least redouble its efforts to sell more cars? If anything can motivate Musk to refocus on Tesla rather than trolling on X, it’s money. To date, the company has sold a little more than 7 million vehicles; 20 million Tesla cars sold is one of the many strings attached to Musk actually earning the entire “trillion-dollar” deal.
Another condition is that he aid the company in its search for his successor, a sign that those who’ve always wanted to see a Tesla without Musk might get their wish sooner rather than later.
On Toyota’s recalls, America’s per-capita emissions, and Sierra Club drama
Current conditions: Drought is worsening in the U.S. Northeast, where cities such as Pittsburgh and Bangor, Maine have recorded 30% less rainfall than average • Temperatures in the Mississippi Valley are soaring into the triple digits, with cities such as Omaha, Nebraska and St. Louis breaking daily temperature records with highs of up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average • A heat wave in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, has sent temperatures as high as 114 degrees.
Orsted is offering investors a nearly 70% discount on the new shares issued to raise money to save its American offshore wind projects amid the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on the industry. The Danish energy giant won nearly unanimous approval from its shareholders earlier this month for a rights issue aimed at raising $9.4 billion. Shares in the company, which is half owned by the government in Copenhagen, closed around $32 each on Friday. But the offering of 901 million new shares came at a subscription rate of about $10.50 each. Orsted’s projects in the northeastern U.S. already “struggled” with what The Wall Street Journal listed as “supply-chain bottlenecks, higher interest rates, and trouble getting tax credits,” which culminated in the restructuring last year that saw the company “pull out of two high-profile wind projects off the coast of New Jersey.”
The offshore wind industry, as I noted in yesterday’s newsletter, is just starting to fight back. The owners of the Rhode Island offshore project Revolution Wind, which Trump halted unilaterally, filed a lawsuit claiming the administration illegally withdrew its already-finalized permits. After the administration filed a lawsuit to revoke the permits of US Wind’s big project off Maryland’s coast, the company said it intends “to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them.” But the multi-agency assault on offshore turbine projects has only escalated in recent months, as the timeline Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo produced shows. And Orsted is facing other headwinds. The company just warned investors of lower profits this year after weaker-than-forecast wind speeds reduced the output of its turbines.
Toyota issued a voluntary recall for some 591,000 Toyota and Lexus cars over a slight glitch in the display screen. The 12.3-inch screen could fail to turn on after the car started, or go black while driving. Toyota said it will begin notifying owners if affected vehicles by mid-November. The move came just days after the Japanese auto giant — which owns both its eponymous passenger car brand and the associated luxury line, Lexus — recalled 62,000 electric vehicles, including the Toyota bZ4X SUV and the Lexus RZ300e sedan and its luxury SUV, the RZ450. Subaru, in which Toyota owns a minority stake, is also recalling its electric SUV, the Solterra. With all four EVs, the issue revolved around a faulty windshield defroster that “may not remove frost, ice and/or fog from the windshield glass due to a software issue in the electrical control unit,” the company said in a press release..
States such as Mississippi and Idaho had the lowest drop in energy-related per-capita emissions.EIA
Americans who complain that the U.S. should bear less responsibility for mitigating climate change like to point out that China produces far more planet-heating emissions per year, and that India is not far behind. The cumulative nature of carbon in the atmosphere makes for an easy rebuke, since the U.S. and Western Europe are overwhelmingly responsible for the emissions of the past two centuries. But a less historically abstract response could be that Americans still have by far the highest per capita emissions of any large country. That doesn’t mean the U.S. isn’t making progress on a per capita level, though. Between 2005 and 2023, per capita emissions from primary energy consumption decreased in every U.S. state, with an average drop of 30%, even as the American population grew by 14%, according to a new analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The dip is largely thanks to the electric power sector burning less coal. Increased electricity generation from natural gas, which releases about half as much carbon per unit of energy when burned as coal, and the growth of renewables such as wind and solar have reduced the need for the dirtier fuel. But the EIA forecasts that overall U.S. emissions are set to climb by 1% as electricity demand increases.
For those keen to shrink their individual carbon output at a much faster pace than American society at large, Heatmap’s award-winning Decarbonize Your Life series walks through the benefits and drawbacks to driving less, eating less steak, installing solar panels, and renovating homes to be more energy efficient.
Following rebellions from various state chapters, the Sierra Club terminated its executive director, Ben Jealous, last month, as I reported here in this newsletter at the time. Now the group has named its new leader: Loren Blackford. The Sierra Club veteran, who served in various senior roles before taking on the interim executive director job last month, won unanimous support from the group’s board of directors on Saturday.
Jealous had previously served as a chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the 2018 Democratic nominee for Maryland governor before becoming the first non-white leader of the 133-year-old Sierra Club. His appointment marked a symbolic turning of the page from the group’s early chapters under its founder, John Muir, who made numerous derogatory remarks about Black and Native Americans. Jealous was accused of sexual harassment earlier this year.
Thermal battery company Fourth Power just announced $20 million in follow-on funding, building on its $19 million Series A round from 2023. While other thermal storage companies such as Rondo and Antora are targeting the decarbonization of high-temperature industrial processes such as smelting or chemical manufacturing, Fourth Power aims to manufacture long-duration energy storage systems for utilities and power producers.
“In our view, electricity is the biggest problem that needs to be solved,” Fourth Power’s CEO Arvin Ganesan told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. “There is certainly a future application for heat, but we don’t think that’s where to start.” The company’s tech works by taking in excess renewable electricity from the grid, which is used to heat up liquid tin to 2,400 degrees Celsius, nearly half the temperature of the sun’s surface. That heat is then stored in carbon blocks and later converted back into electricity using thermophotovoltaic cells. This latest funding will accelerate the deployment of the startup’s first one megawatt hour demonstration plant.
The tropical storm that later became Hurricane María formed exactly eight years ago today and went on to lay waste to Puerto Rico’s aging electrical system. The grid remains fragile and expensive, with frequent outages and some of the highest rates in the U.S. on the hours when the power is accessible. That has spurred a boom in rooftop solar panels. Now more than 10% of the island’s electricity consumption comes from rooftop solar power. Data released by the grid operator LUMA Energy showed approximately 1.2 gigawatts of residential and commercial rooftop solar had been installed under Puerto Rico’s net-metering regulations as of June 2025. New analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that is equal to about 10.3% of Puerto Rico’s total power consumption — and that’s not counting any off-grid systems.
Republicans are more likely to accuse Democrats, and vice versa, but there are also some surprising areas of agreement.
Electricity is getting more expensive. In the past 12 months, electricity prices have increased more than twice as fast as overall inflation — and the most recent government inflation data, released last week, shows prices are continuing to rise.
The Trump administration knows that power bills are a political liability. In a recent interview with Politico, Energy Secretary Chris Wright affirmed that power prices were rising, but blamed the surge on “momentum” from Biden and Obama-era policies. “That momentum is pushing prices up right now,” he said. But the Trump administration, he continued, is “going to get blamed because we’re in office.”
Is he right? Who do Americans blame for rising power prices?
It might not be who you think.
A new Heatmap Pro poll of more than 3,700 registered voters across the United States finds that Americans tend to look beyond national politics for at least some of the causes of electricity price inflation.
When asked who they blame for rising power prices, Americans are more likely to say that rising energy demand, their local utility, and their state government are to blame than they are to cite the Trump or Biden administrations.
Americans also blame extreme weather and the oil and gas industry at least somewhat for electricity inflation. Only then do they blame a national political party.
Beyond those, other trendy national topics made only a dent in how Americans think about rising power prices. About 28% of Americans said that the construction of new data centers bears “a lot” of the blame for spiking power prices. Forty-three percent of Americans said that the data center buildout should get “a little” of the blame, and about a quarter of Americans said data centers were “not at all” responsible.
The renewable energy industry, which President Trump has claimed is causing the surge, also failed to get much traction among Americans. More than a third of respondents said that renewables were “not at all” responsible for rising electricity prices, while 27% said that they bore “a lot” of responsibility. At the same time, Americans aren’t pinning the increase on tariffs: 40% of registered voters said that in their view, the new trade levies were not the cause of higher bills.
In general, Americans aren’t wrong to look to their state government when thinking about their power bills. Although many states participate in regional electricity markets, electricity is primarily regulated at the state level by public utility commissioners. States really do bear more responsibility for power prices than they do over, say, the price of a loaf of bread — or a gallon of gasoline.
No matter their self-reported political affiliation, Americans still tend to blame their state government, rising demand, and their local utility for rising power bills.
But there are trends. Democrats, of course, are far more likely to blame the Trump administration and Republicans — as well as tariffs — for electricity inflation. Republicans likewise blame the Biden administration and Democrats in much greater numbers.
Nearly 80% of Republicans say the renewable energy industry bears some amount of blame for rising prices, although only 36% of GOP respondents said it bore “a lot” of responsibility. But more than half of Republicans also allocated “a lot” or “a little” blame to the oil and gas industry.
Some causes seemed to unite respondents across the parties. Roughly the same share of Democrats, Republicans, and independents said that the buildout of new data centers was putting upward pressure on power prices.
Independent voters turned to the same big three explanations as other registered voters. But they were much more likely to blame Trump, tariffs, and the oil industry than Republicans were. Only a little more than a quarter of independents said that the renewable energy industry bore “a lot” of the blame for power price spikes as well.
In my reporting, I’ve found that surging investment in the local distribution grid — literally, the small-scale poles, wires, and transformers that get electricity to businesses and households — is the biggest driver of rising power prices. Extreme weather, higher natural gas prices, and — in some markets — rising power demand, especially from data centers, also play a role.
Some experts blame those drivers of higher bills on underlying failures — such as too little oversight from state-level regulators or excessive investment from utilities — that show up in this poll result. But just at a mechanical level, many Americans did cite some of the same causes that utility researchers themselves do. Most Americans, for instance, said that extreme weather and especially “investments in the local electric grid” are driving rising bills, although they didn’t assign it the same prominence that I would. About three quarters of respondents said that those causes bore “a lot” or “a little” of the blame.
Of course, just because rising grid spending, extreme weather, and higher gas prices have driven electricity inflation so far doesn’t mean that they will continue to do so. The Energy Information Administration projects that demand will keep rising, especially if the artificial intelligence boom continues. The Trump administration’s decision to hike taxes on electricity equipment — via tariffs and recent changes in President Trump’s spending bill — may eventually push up costs as well. So too will the Trump administration’s regulatory war on some types of new electricity infrastructure, including offshore wind farms and long-distance transmission lines.
Those policies may eventually hit voters — and their wallets. But right now, Americans aren’t looking at Washington, D.C., when thinking about their power bills.
The Heatmap Pro poll of 3,741 American registered voters was conducted by Embold Research via text-to-web responses from August 22 to 29, 2025. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.
Interested in more exclusive polling and insights? Explore Heatmap Pro here.