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Electric vehicles are heavy because batteries are heavy. But building a lighter battery is no easy feat.
The transition from gasoline to electric vehicles will be a massive one in more than just a metaphorical sense. EVs have a weight problem — one that could undo some of the good created by going electric and exacerbate a bunch of cascading problems.
Electric vehicles are heavy because batteries are heavy. There’s just no way around it. The lithium-ion packs in EVs are the state of the art in modern battery technology and can store far more energy in a given amount of space compared to other rechargeable battery types such as nickel-cadmium. But their energy density still pales in comparison to gasoline. So, giving a car hundreds of miles of driving range means slinging a huge, heavy battery along the bottom of the vehicle.
A simple way to see the difference is between two versions of the same vehicle, one electric and one not. Depending on the various configurations, the Ford F-150 Lightning EV outweighs the gas-powered version of the pickup by at least 1,000 lbs., and sometimes closer to a full ton. Differences aren’t always so dramatic, but adding a giant battery, even when it means losing a bunch of internal combustion components, typically inflates weight.
Electrics are also heavy because all cars are heavy. The story of the last half-century of the auto industry is the death of smaller passenger cars, with consumer preference and regulatory loopholes having now led to the utter dominance of SUVs and trucks. In the EV market, smaller and lighter vehicles like the Tesla Model 3 and Chevy Bolt sold in decent numbers by hitting the market early and meeting the car-buyers who don’t want a giant ride. Now, though, the EV space is going the same way as gas. With American car-buyers willing to pay more for the crossovers and pickups they desire, automakers are moving away from less profitable modestly sized EVs in favor of crossovers and pickups.
It adds up to a lot of extra bulk rolling down the streets and highways. The most pressing danger from all these oversized electric vehicles is the threat they pose to anybody outside the car. The extra mass, combined with additional safety tech that can be built into places where engines and hoses used to go, means a big EV’s passengers are inside a fortress. It’s not such good news for pedestrians, cyclists, and occupants of any vehicle that’s not a multi-ton tank. Pedestrian deaths, which had been declining for years, began to climb again in 2010 and have reached their highest point in 40 years. It’s more difficult to see out of our increasingly huge vehicles, and when accidents happen, they are deadlier.
That’s not the only weighty concern. Over time, heavy vehicles cause more damage to roadways, bridges, and other driving infrastructure, and require them to need maintenance more often — causing even more of those pesky construction zones that slow highway traffic. At the same time, electric vehicles don’t pay for gasoline taxes that fund road maintenance, something economists are trying to solve, fast. EVs and other new vehicles are so hefty, Slatereports, that those auto-hauler semi-trucks — the ones you see on the interstate ferrying a bunch of cars to their new homes — can carry fewer cars at once because of overall limits on their cargo weight.
There is also the question of energy use. The relative fuel efficiency of electric cars is a rarely discussed part of the discourse about climate, cars, and energy. Perhaps that’s because EVs don’t come with a handy metric everyone is accustomed to, like miles per gallon (EVs can deliver an equivalent, or Mpg-e, but it’s a murky number that requires some math). Perhaps it’s because so few Americans drive electric — or because the focus, from a national perspective, has been on convincing as many people as possible to go electric, even if it means selling them a war machine like the GMC Hummer EV.
But not all electric cars are created equal. Using its imperfect data, the EPA rates a smaller electric sedan like the Tesla Model 3 at about 140 Mpg-E. For bigger SUVs, that figure falls under 100, and as low as the 60s for the Porsche Taycan or the fully loaded F-150 Lightning. That mark is still better than what you could get from an ordinary gas or hybrid car. However, it means you’re using roughly twice as much energy to run errands in an Audi E-Tron as in a Chevy Bolt. From a climate perspective, we’re giving away much of the good of transitioning to electric cars by selling bigger, bulkier, more inefficient ones.
It’s not clear there’s an immediate fix to this problem. Carmakers will sell what car shoppers want to buy. Most Americans clearly want big vehicles, and no amount of climate scolding will change that. To convince car buyers who are already wary of range anxiety to switch to electric, new vehicles need as much range as they can get — and that means packing as much battery as possible into the bottom of the car.
Are lighter EV batteries the solution, then? Well, lowering a car’s power-to-weight ratio has been an automotive obsession since the dawn of the industry, because getting more power from less weight makes a vehicle zoom-ier. As the industry transitions to electric power, lots of auto engineers are now focused on squeezing more juice out of batteries, while researchers like Kimberly See at Caltech experiment with new battery chemistries that could, one day, perhaps supplant the lithium-ion cells of today. [Editor’s note: Caltech is where I do my day job.]
It’s a tough problem, See told me. Some ideas for alternative battery chemistries potentially can store more energy per unit of mass, but their design is nascent compared to that of lithium-ion, which has been developed since the 1990s. Building an actual working battery always involves trade-offs between weight, safety, and power — and weight can’t always win.
“There are chemistries out there, like Li-S [lithium-sulfur], that would make packs much, much smaller,” See says. “But there are many fundamental science challenges.”
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A leaked internal memo reveals why the environmental group adopted President Trump’s new name.
The Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, was told by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration it had to rename a major conservation program as the “Gulf of America” or else lose federal funding, according to a leaked internal memo reviewed by Heatmap News.
For the last week, the Nature Conservancy has been pilloried by figures in the climate and environmentalist community for changing the name of its conservation program in the Gulf of Mexico region to being a “Gulf of America” restoration program, brandishing what President Donald Trump declared on his first day in office would be the new official U.S. term for the body of water. Trump’s new name has become a First Amendment firestorm as news organizations find themselves split on whether to adopt the term and the White House is punishing outlets — including the Associated Press — for continuing to use the Gulf of Mexico.
We can now exclusively reveal why the Nature Conservancy adopted this fresh Trump branding: They were allegedly pressured into it.
Jennifer Morris, CEO of the Nature Conservancy, sent an email to all staff at the organization this morning stating that the organization’s conservation program in the Gulf of Mexico was renamed to Gulf of America “after receiving clear directives from a federal agency.” “Please know that we did not make this decision lightly,” Morris wrote. Attached to the email was staff guidance claiming the nonprofit “received specific direction from NOAA that we must change all references to the new nomenclature in association with our NOAA funded work in the Gulf.”
“For example, all maps, reports, and other deliverables must use ‘Gulf of America,’ the memo stated. “We have at least $156 million in active federal grants in the region, including $45 million from NOAA alone.’ Federal funding makes up most of the organization’s work in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the memo.
In addition, the Nature Conservancy has “been advised that new proposals in the Gulf for US federal grants must conform” to Trump’s executive order adopting “Gulf of America” as the official U.S. name for that body of water, the memo stated. State governors in the Gulf region in charge of “disseminating” remaining BP oil spill recovery funds have “followed suit in support of these nomenclature changes” and there is fear a “failure to adjust” could also “jeopardize” state funding.
“Ultimately, this decision was made after reviewing all the facts and looking at what the organization felt was best to ensure we can continue our conservation programs and support our teams on the ground,” the memo stated.
Historically, NOAA has been more insulated than other agencies from political pressures like this, which has helped it maintain a global reputation as a world-class scientific meteorological body.
This ordeal, however, echoes the one other time Trump seemed to put his thumb on NOAA’s scales — an incident best known as Sharpiegate. In 2019 Trump incorrectly proclaimed Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama. He went so far as to draw on a giant map with a Sharpie in the White House to show his guestimated pathway for the storm. After the NOAA office in Alabama publicly sought to reassure residents that, no, a hurricane wasn’t on the way, Trump officials pressured NOAA into backing the president, leading to the agency issuing an unsigned statement backing the claim. An inspector general report – which Trump officials reportedly sought to obstruct from seeing the light of day – ultimately found the NOAA statement violated its scientific integrity policy.
If the Gulf of America is the beginning of NOAA subservience, I’m nervous to see what happens when Trump’s version of the agency – which any day now is expected to undergo mass layoffs – pivots to climate change and renewable energy.
The Nature Conservancy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “We can find no evidence of that, so far,” NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen said.
President Donald Trump is going to be talking rocks with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy during their Friday meeting in Washington, D.C., where they will sign a “very big agreement,” Trump said Wednesday.
As the Trump administration has ramped up talks to end the war in Ukraine, shift America’s strategic priorities away from Europe, and build a new relationship with Russia, it has also become intensely interested in Ukraine’s supposed mineral wealth, with Ukrainian and American negotiators working on a deal to create an investment fund for the country’s reconstruction that would be partially funded by developing the country’s mineral resources.
But exactly what minerals are in Ukraine and if they’re economically viable to extract is a matter of contention.
So-called critical minerals and rare earths have a way of finding themselves in geopolitical hotspots. This is because they’re not particularly rare, but the immense capital required to cost effectively find them, mine them, and process them is.
“A lot of countries have natural resources. We don’t mine everything that exists underground. We look for projects that are economically competitive,” Gracelin Baskaran, director of the critical minerals security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me.
Baskaran pointed out, it was precisely Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that kicked the United States’ interest in building up supplies of critical minerals and rare earths outside of China — which dominates the industry — into overdrive.
“It was a fortuitous moment in that way for Ukraine’s resources, because they weren’t necessarily being mined before,” she said.
And Ukraine has done its best to promote and take advantage of its mineral resources, even if there’s some ambiguity about what exactly they are, and if they can be profitably extracted at scale.
While often conflated, critical minerals and rare earths are distinct. The so-called “rare earths” are 17 similar elements, which the U.S. Geological Survey explicitly says are “relatively abundant,” like scandium and yttrium. Critical minerals are a more amorphous group, with the USGS listing out 50 (including the rare earths) as well as commonly known minerals like titanium, nickel, lithium, tin, and graphite, with uses in batteries, alloys, semiconductors, and other high value energy, defense, and technology applications.
When countries are desperate for outside assistance or their patrons are desperate to see some return on their “investments” in military and foreign aid,as Bloomberg’s Javier Blas has pointed out, the minerals tend to show up — just look at the “$1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits” the United States identified in Afghanistan in 2010. Ten years later when the USGS looked at Afghanistan’s mineral industries, the rare earths remained untapped and instead the country was largely exporting talc and crushed marble to its neighbors.
Ukrainians have been eager to show there are economically viable and valuable minerals in the country, including a claim by one Ukrainian official in early 2022 that “about 5% of all the world’s ‘critical raw materials’ are located in Ukraine,” while a pair of Ukrainian researchers claimed there was 500,000 tons of unmined lithium oxide resources. More recently the country has claimed to have rare earths, and that President Trump has taken a special interest in.
Many industry experts doubt there’s any significant reserves of rare earths in the country, with the exception of scandium, which is used in aluminum alloys and fuel cells. Ukraine does have a significant mining industry and has produced substantial amounts of iron ore and manganese, along with reserves of graphite, titanium, cobalt, and uranium, many of which are those so-called “critical minerals” with uses for energy and defense.
“There do not appear to be hardly any economically viable rare earths in the country – that was largely a misuse of a term someone heard,” Morgan Bazillian, director of the Payne Institute and a public policy professor at the Colorado School of Mines, told me in an email.
Blas has documented a game of telephone whereby rare earths and critical minerals are conflated to make it seem like the former exists in abundance underneath Ukraine. Despite the doubts, President Trump said on Wednesday during his cabinet meeting “we’ll be really partnering with Ukraine, [in] terms of rare earth. We very much need rare earth. They have great rare earth.”
While there’s disagreement about exactly what Ukraine has to offer in terms of minerals, the interest in building up supplies of minerals is part and parcel of what is now a bipartisan priority to build up supplies and the ability to process and refine minerals used for a variety of defense, industrial, and energy applications.
To the extent the United States is able to jumpstart any new mineral operations in postwar Ukraine, it would require first repairing the country’s greatly damaged infrastructure, which has been wrecked by the very conflict that has spiked interest in the country’s mineral sector.
“Their infrastructure is decimated. Rebuilding it will be the priority, getting industry moving again will take time – including from basic services like electricity,” Bazillian told me.
And after that, much basic work needs to be done before any mining can happen, like an updated geological survey of the country, which hasn’t been done since the country was part of the Soviet Union. And all that’s before starting the process for opening a mine, something that on average takes 18 years to do.
“You need to have a geological mapping. You need to identify investors who want to go in. You need to build infrastructure,” Baskaran said.
“Ukraine has undeveloped or untapped potential that could be utilized. And the question is whether that untapped potential is economically viable, and we don’t know yet.”
Current conditions: Firefighters contained a blaze in South Africa’s Table Mountain National Park that was creeping towards Cape Town • Moroccans are being asked not to slaughter sheep during Eid al-Adha this year because ongoing drought has caused a drop in herd numbers • Most of the U.S. will see “well above-average” temperatures through the end of this week.
The House voted yesterday to repeal a Biden-era fee on methane emissions generated by oil and gas operations. The Senate is likely to follow suit with a vote as soon as today. The rule, which was only finalized in November, charges producers per metric ton of excess methane released, and provides grants for infrastructure improvements to prevent leaks. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas responsible for roughly one third of the global temperature rise since the pre-industrial era. The EPA estimated the policy would prevent 1.2 million metric tons of methane from entering the atmosphere, which is roughly equivalent to taking nearly 8 million gas-powered cars off the road for a year. Congress will also vote this week on a measure repealing another recently implemented rule regarding efficiency standards for tankless gas water heaters.
President Trump said yesterday that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is aiming to cut 65% of the agency’s workforce. The EPA currently has about 15,000 employees, and E&E News reported that such a cut “would put the agency close to the numbers it had when it was created by President Richard Nixon.” According toReuters, the news came as a surprise to EPA union leaders. “Mr. Zeldin stated during his confirmation testimony that he pledged to enthusiastically uphold the EPA’s mission,” said Joyce Howell, executive vice president of AFGE Council 238 representing EPA employees. “So which is it? Upholding the EPA mission or imposing a reduction in force that makes upholding the EPA mission an impossibility?”
BP confirmed it will cut its investments in renewables and shift its strategy back to ramping up fossil fuel production. The radical shift represents “a major break from five years in which BP was the oil industry’s most ardent pursuer of net zero emissions and the transition to clean energy,” reportedBloomberg. BP had planned to have 50 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity by 2030 and cut oil and gas production by 40%, but CEO Murray Auchincloss said the company’s “optimism for a fast transition was misplaced.” Here is some early reaction and analysis:
New research suggests the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is not likely to fully collapse any time soon, but it could weaken significantly. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange explained recently, AMOC is a current system sometimes described as the oceanic conveyor belt responsible for influencing the climate of the Northern Hemisphere. Its full collapse, triggered by rising temperatures and Arctic meltwater – would cause dramatic cooling across Europe, and scientists have been debating the likelihood of such an event for years. A recent paper predicted it could happen even within the next three decades. This new analysis from the UK’s Met Office used 34 climate models to test future warming scenarios and concluded that AMOC would still keep moving through 2100. But it also showed the current could slow down significantly, which would still have serious side effects like changing rain patterns, disrupting ocean ecosystems, and rising sea levels.
A study out this week finds that exposure to extreme heat makes older people age faster. Researchers from USC examined blood samples from 3,600 individuals aged 56 or older, looking specifically at markers indicating biological age, which is “a measure of how well the body functions at the molecular, cellular, and system levels.” The team compared this information to six years of climate data and found evidence that people exposed to repeated heat waves age more quickly. “Participants living in areas where heat days, as defined as Extreme Caution or higher levels (≥90°F), occur half the year, such as Phoenix, Arizona, experienced up to 14 months of additional biological aging compared to those living in areas with fewer than 10 heat days per year,” said USC’s Eunyoung Choi, a co-author on the study. “Even after controlling for several factors, we found this association. Just because you live in an area with more heat days, you’re aging faster biologically.”
The company behind the UK’s first new nuclear plant to be built in 20 years is considering installing 288 underwater speakers in a nearby river to deter fish from entering the plant’s water intake system. This “fish disco” would generate sounds that are louder than a jumbo jet 24 hours a day for 60 years.