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It’s okay if rural America doesn’t want EVs.
Where I am from, people worry about making good time. Nebraska small talk regresses not to what route you took — the California concern — but how fast you got there. Rather than get on a plane, people from the Great Plains will undertake a 10-hour drive to Cousin Rob’s in Dallas and rue that they could’ve done it in nine and a half if not for all the construction. Dads refuse to stop on long drives for this very reason.
Electric cars aren’t great for making great time. Even though charging speeds are getting faster, the leisurely pace of the EV break can’t compare to the Cannonball Run pit stop: pump gas, use the restroom, and get back on the road within five minutes. EVs are not (yet) ideal for other, more practical rural concerns. The punishing winter temperatures of North Dakota can sap a battery’s driving range. So does towing the boat to the lake. Flyover country is full of state highways where there is nary a fast-charger in sight.
Those are among the reasons the residents of rural America hesitate to embrace the EV. There is a tribal impetus, too: Rural areas are heavily Republican and more likely to reject electric cars on the basis of political identity. This fact may spell trouble for the Detroit auto giants trying to sell EV pickup trucks to die-hard combustion loyalists and for goals of making America an all-EV nation anytime soon. But when it comes to climate, maybe it’s not a crisis.
Like any environmental issue, the EV question is about scale. To reduce the carbon pollution of the transportation sector, it’s not enough for a few people to trade in their gas-guzzling Ford Expeditions for Mustang Mach-Es. Most people need to do it to take a chunk out of emissions.
Fortunately, electric vehicles work best where people are concentrated. City dwellers generally drive shorter distances than rural residents during errands and commutes, meaning an EV with decent range can cover their everyday needs. Even those at the exurban extents of major metropolitan areas are generally close enough to city centers to make a round trip without charging in the middle.
Charging infrastructure follows the population maps, too. As the country scales up its supply of level 3 fast chargers, it still makes the most sense to put the vast majority of those plugs in cities and along the Interstate System where those urbanites do most of their driving. This drives a feedback loop that will continue to make electric driving more enticing to city people than country people.
For those rooting for mass adoption of EVs, this is good news. According to sustainability researchers at the University of Michigan, 83% of Americans now live in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950. That number could approach 90% by mid-century. The United States, despite its small town self-mythologizing, is an urban country that grows more urban by the day, and that means most people live in a location where an EV could meet their daily driving needs.
(Also, urban areas should embrace EVs to reduce the health-damaging air pollution from ICE tailpipes, which concentrates in places with lots of people, and therefore cars. In rural places where people are spread out and dozens of cars don’t sit idling as a herd during freeway traffic, this is a less pressing concern.)
The fact that electric driving would prove more challenging for rural America sounds like grim news for climate change, since according to one study, they have a 20% larger carbon footprint compared to their urban counterparts, a difference largely attributed to home heating and to driving longer distances. But, again, the question is about scale. Even though living in the boonies necessitates emitting more carbon, there are just so many more metropolitan Americans. The best way to make a big dent in transportation emissions is to get metro residents — the 83% — to embrace the life electric.
Eventually, the EV revolution will reach the countryside, but those who prefer combustion driving will be able to keep doing so for a long time to come. Even if the nation followed the California goal of making the light-duty vehicle market 100% electric by 2035, that’s only new cars. (California banned the sale of gas-powered lawn equipment, but I still hear plenty of small-engine leaf blowers at work around Los Angeles every afternoon.) Vehicles are better-built than they’ve even been and last on the road for more than a decade, meaning there’ll be plenty of gas-burners on the highway deep into the 2040s. It will just become more expensive to fuel and to service them as the country’s infrastructure and mechanic shops finally move away from combustion.
Just like America’s presidential elections, the country’s EV battle may be won or lost in the suburbs.
Consider one recent research project, which found that while rural residents emit more carbon than city-dwellers, it’s suburbanites who are the very worst. They drive more than those who live in the center city and might have access to decent public transportation. And, on average, they earn more than truly rural residents, which is correlated with a higher carbon footprint. That project studied Austria, but the Brookings Institute found the same thing in the United States: “In metropolitan regions, suburbs emit up to four times the household emissions of their urban cores. While households located in more densely populated neighborhoods have a carbon footprint 50% below the national average, those in the suburbs emit up to twice the average.”
To put it another way: It’s suburbanites who could potentially do the most climate good by switching to EVs. Plus, they are potentially affluent enough to afford electric vehicles. They’re also likely to have garages and driveways to make charging at home a simpler affair compared to the apartment-dweller who has little control over whether their landlord puts plugs in the parking lot. (Mine didn’t.)
Certainly suburbia has its share of MAGA rank-and-file who dismiss EVs as the choice of the woke, as well as Towing Dads who’ll hold out until electric pickup range can match that of gas. Yet the politically purple ‘burbs may be ruled by the pragmatists, or people who’ll happily buy an EV — just as soon as they’re convinced it’s the right economic choice for their families, or, perhaps, as soon as everybody else at their kids’ school starts getting one.
Sources like David Rapson of the University of California, Davis have told me these buyers are the tipping point for the mass adoption of the electric vehicle. It makes sense: EVs may never convince their entrenched opponents to ditch internal combustion, but they don’t have to. If the bulk of Americans make the jump and begin driving the kids to practice on battery power, that’s an enormous chunk of carbon that’s simply not emitted.
Transportation is about the right technology for the right situation. EVs are a just-okay choice for dense urban centers — they’re better than gas cars, but thoughtful city planning could help people choose greener and better solutions such as cycling and mass transit. For car-reliant suburbs and exurbs, EVs hold the key to drastically reducing carbon emissions. In truly rural America, the best choice for years to come might be burning gasoline. And maybe that’s fine — as long as the country’s population centers get with the program.
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It’s known as the 50% rule, and Southwest Florida hates it.
After the storm, we rebuild. That’s the mantra repeated by residents, businesses and elected officials after any big storm. Hurricane Milton may have avoided the worst case scenario of a direct hit on the Tampa Bay area, but communities south of Tampa experienced heavy flooding just a couple weeks after being hit by Hurricane Helene.
While the damage is still being assessed in Sarasota County’s barrier islands, homes that require extensive renovations will almost certainly run up against what is known as the 50% rule — or, in Southwest Florida, the “dreaded 50% rule.”
In flood zone-situated communities eligible to receive insurance from the National Flood Insurance Program, any renovations to repair “substantial damage” — defined as repairs whose cost exceeds 50% of the value of the structure (not the land, which can often be quite valuable due to its proximity to the water) — must bring the entire structure “into compliance with current local floodplain management standards.” In practice, this typically means elevating the home above what FEMA defines as the area’s “base flood elevation,” which is the level that a “100-year-flood” would reach, plus some amount determined by the building code.
The rule almost invites conflict. Because just as much as local communities and homeowners want to restore things to the way they were, the federal government doesn’t want to insure structures that are simply going to get destroyed. On Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall, the base flood elevation ranges from 7 feet to 9 feet, meaning that elevating a home to comply with flood codes could be beyond the means — or at least the insurance payouts — of some homeowners.
“You got a 1952 house that’s 1,400 square feet, and you get 4 feet of water,” Jeff Brandes, a former state legislator and president of the Florida Policy Project, told me on Wednesday, explaining how the rule could have played out in Tampa. “That means new kitchens and new bathrooms, all new flooring and baseboards and drywall to 4 or 5 feet.” That kind of claim could easily run to $150,000, which might well surpass the FEMA threshold. “Now all of the sudden you get into the 50% rule that you have the entire house up to current code levels. But then you have to do another half-a-million above what [insurance] paid you.”
Simple probability calculations show that a 100-year flood (which is really a flood elevation that has a 1-in-100 chance of occurring every year) has a more than 25% chance of occurring during the lifetime of a mortgage. If you browse Siesta Key real estate on Zillow, much of it is given a 100% chance of flooding sometime over the course of a 30-year mortgage, according to data analysis by First Street.
Sarasota County as a whole has around 62,000 NFIP policies with some $16.6 billion in total coverage (although more than 80% percent of households have no flood insurance at all). Considering that flood insurance is required in high-risk areas for federally-backed mortgages and for new homeowners insurance policies written by Florida’s state backed property insurer of last resort, Citizens, FEMA is likely to take a close interest in whether communities affected by Milton and Helene are complying with its rules.
If 2022’s Hurricane Ian is any indication, squabbles over the 50% rule are almost certain to emerge — and soon.
Earlier this year, FEMA told Lee County, which includes Fort Myers and Cape Coral, that it was rescinding the discount its residents and a handful of towns within it receive on flood insurance because, the agency claimed, more than 600 homeowners had violated the 50% rule after Hurricane Ian. Following an outcry from local officials and congressional representatives, FEMA restored the discount.
In their efforts to avoid triggering the rule, homeowners are hardly rogue actors. Local governments often actively assist them.
FEMA had initiated a similar procedure in Lee County the year before, threatening to drop homeowners from the flood insurance program for using possibly inaccurate appraisals to avoid the 50% rule before eventually relenting. The Fort Myers News Press reported that the appraisals were provided by the county, which was deliberately “lowering the amount that residents could use to calculate their repairs or rebuilds” to avoid triggering the rule.
Less than a month after Ian swept through Southwest Florida, Cape Coral advised residents to delay and slow down repairs for the same reason, as the rule there applied to money spent on repairs over the course of a year. Some highly exposed coastal communities in Pinellas County have been adjusting their “lookback rules” — the period over which repairs are totaled to see if they hit the 50% rule — to make them shorter so homeowners are less likely to have to make the substantive repairs required.
This followed similar actions by local governments in Charlotte County. As the Punta Gordon Sun put it, “City Council members learned the federal regulation impacts its homeowners — and they decided to do something about it.” In the Sarasota County community of North Port, local officials scrapped a rule that added up repair costs over a five-year period to make it possible for homeowners to rebuild without triggering elevation requirements.
When the 50% rule “works,” it can lead to the communities most affected by big storms being fundamentally changed, both in terms of the structures that are built and who occupies them.The end result of the rebuilding following Helene and Milton — or the next big storm to hit Florida’s Gulf Coast — or the one after that, and so on — may be wealthier homeowners in more resilient homes essentially serving as a flood barrier for everyone else, and picking up more of the bill if the waters rise too high again.
Florida’s Gulf Coast has long been seen as a place where the middle class can afford beachfront property. Elected officials’ resistance to the FEMA rule only goes to show just how important keeping a lid on the cost of living — quite literally, the cost of legally inhabiting a structure — is to the voters and residents they represent.
Still, said Brandes, “There’s the right way to come out of this thing. The wrong way is to build exactly back what you built before.”
The trash mostly stays put, but the methane is another story.
In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?
No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”
But just because a landfill won’t turn into a mass of airborne dirt and half-decomposed projectiles doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. Because landfills — especially large ones — often contain more advanced infrastructure such as gas collection systems, which prevent methane from being vented into the atmosphere, and drainage systems, which collect contaminated liquid that’s pooled at the bottom of the waste pile and send it off for treatment. Meyers told me that getting these systems back online after a storm if they’ve been damaged is “the most critical part, from our standpoint.”
A flood-inundated gas collection system can mean more methane escaping into the air, and storm-damaged drainage pipes can lead to waste liquids leaking into the ground and potentially polluting water sources. The latter was a major concern in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria destroyed a landfill’s waste liquid collection system in the Municipality of Juncos in 2017.
As for methane, calculating exactly how much could be released as a result of a dysfunctional landfill gas collection system requires accounting for myriad factors such as the composition of the waste and the climate that it’s in, but the back of the envelope calculations don’t look promising. The Southeast County Landfill near Tampa, for instance, emitted about 100,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2022, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (although a Harvard engineering study from earlier this year suggests that this may be a significant underestimate). The EPA estimates that gas collection systems are about 75% effective, which means that the landfill generates a total of about 400,000 metric tons of CO2-worth of methane. If Southeast County Landfill’s gas collection system were to go down completely for even a day, that would mean extra methane emissions of roughly 822 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. That difference amounts to the daily emissions of more than 65,000 cars.
That’s a lot of math. But the takeaway is: Big landfills in the pathway of a destructive storm could end up spewing a lot of methane into the atmosphere. And keep in mind that these numbers are just for one hypothetical landfill with a gas collection system that goes down for one day. The emissions numbers, you can imagine, start to look much worse if you consider the possibility that floodwaters could impede access to infrastructure for even longer.
So stay strong out there, landfills of Florida. You may not be the star of this show, but you’ve got our attention.
On the storm’s destruction, wildlife populations, and shipping emissions
Current conditions: Large parts of Pennsylvania are under a frost advisory today and tomorrow • The remnants of Hurricane Kirk killed at least one person in France • A severe solar storm is expected to hit Earth today.
Hurricane Milton is headed out to the Atlantic after raking across Florida overnight, and as the sun comes up, residents are assessing the damage left in its wake. Milton made landfall near Sarasota as a Category 3 storm, bringing heavy rainfall, dangerous winds, and flooding. St. Petersburg reported 16 inches of rain, which meteorologists say is a 1-in-1,000-year event. The storm also triggered more than 130 tornado warnings, possibly a new record. The Tropicana Field Stadium in Tampa sustained significant damage. While deaths have been reported, it’s not yet clear how many. More than 3 million people are without power.
Before the storm hit, the Florida Department of Financial Services issued a rule that requires insurance claims adjusters to provide an explanation for any changes they make to a claimant’s loss estimate, The Washington Postreported, calling the move “a groundbreaking win for policyholders.”
The World Wide Fund for Nature published its 2024 Living Planet Report yesterday, which tracks nearly 5,500 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles all over the world. It found that wildlife populations plummeted by about 73% between 1970 and 2020, as illustrated in this rather bleak but very effective chart:
WWF
Latin America, which is home to some of the most biodiverse regions in the world, saw the worst losses, at 95%. Freshwater species experienced the greatest decline at 85%. There are some success stories, such as a 3% increase in the mountain gorilla population, and the incredible comeback of the European Bison, but generally the report is pretty heartbreaking. It underscores the interconnected nature of the climate crisis and nature destruction. “It really does indicate to us that the fabric of nature is unraveling,” said Rebecca Shaw, WWF’s chief scientist. The report comes days ahead of the start of the UN COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, where delegates will discuss concrete ways to stop biodiversity loss.
More than 100 CEOs from some of the world’s biggest corporations have published a letter urging governments and the private sector to boost efforts to keep Paris Agreement goals alive. The letter, signed by the heads of companies including Ikea, AstraZeneca, A.P. Moller-Maersk, Bain & Company, Iberdrola, Orsted, and Volvo Cars, calls for governments to:
The head of the International Maritime Organization this week called on the shipping industry to do more to cut emissions from the sector. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The IMO recently set a new industry-wide target of a 20% emissions reduction by 2030, and net-zero by 2050. But the IMO’s Arsenio Dominguez said there is more to be done to hit these goals. That includes “low hanging fruit” like reducing ship speed, charting routes according to the weather, and cleaning the hulls of ships to reduce friction, The Associated Pressreported. But in the long-term, he said, the industry will need to switch to cleaner fuels, which have yet to scale.
Long-duration energy storage startup Form Energy, closed a $405 million Series F funding round this week, bringing its total funding to more than $1.2 billion. Form uses a novel method for storing energy, combining iron and oxygen to make rust, a process that the company claims can be used to store and discharge up to 100 hours of battery power. As renewable energy production ramps up, new ways of storing variable energy from wind and solar is essential, and Form’s latest fundraising underscores this need. Canary Mediareported that Form’s technology isn’t proven at utility scale yet but the company is working on commercial deployments and broke ground on a project in August to provide energy to a utility in Minnesota.
Some dragonfly species have evolved to have darker wing spots as a breeding advantage. A new study finds these dragonflies have also evolved to be able to withstand higher temperatures.
Noah Leith