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Biden’s fast-charging rollout is way behind. But slow-charging is still an option.
We’ve got a high-speed charging problem.
Without readily available high-speed charging, people will never let go of their range anxiety fears and buy electric; but unless you have people in EVs willing to pay to charge their cars, there’s no reason to build the chargers. The Biden administration thought it could solve the problem with money — that is, a big, federally funded build-out of chargers that can fill an EV’s battery in 20 to 30 minutes. But even breaking ground has been a slog. Years after Congress first approved giving billions of dollars to states so they could fill out America’s EV-charging corridors, few projects have made it all the way through the bureaucratic process to the point of construction.
The grant money from Biden’s laws is still flowing, and more high-speed chargers are in the pipeline. But federal dollars are likely to dry up in a Trump presidency that promises to attack climate achievements like the Inflation Reduction Act.
Things aren’t that much rosier in private industry. Trump’s ally Elon Musk built out the best EV charging network at Tesla and then opened it to other automakers. This year, though, he fired the Supercharger team amid mass layoffs. Now, at the moment Musk has Trump’s ear, EV charging simply doesn’t seem that important to him. And while groups of other car manufacturers have come together to promise more fast-charging stations of their own, those plans may be reconsidered in a more hostile climate for EVs.
If you’re feeling like charging gloom is a death knell for the EV revolution, I would ask you to remember one thing: This isn’t the way most people charge their cars.
Yes, you need DC fast chargers to take a road trip down the highway. And for those who can’t charge at home or at work, public high-speed charging becomes the default option — you’re not going to park at Whole Foods long enough to put on 200 miles. But a future with high levels of American EV adoption will be one in which most charging happens slowly, at Level 2 chargers in people’s garages, in parking lots, and on the sides of public streets. Expanding our focus to low-tech EV charging, then, is one way to make Americans more confident about ditching gas, even during the coming Trump era redux.
For one thing, lower-tech solutions are more affordable. As the Society of Automotive Engineers notes, slower AC chargers are much cheaper for cities or businesses to install compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for DC fast chargers. Appropriate electrical infrastructure already exists in many places — street lights, for example, use a 277-volt standard that could be repurposed for slow EV charging. All you need to do is run wires down to street level so cars can plug in.
You probably won’t fill up your car’s battery on streetside slow chargers. On my Tesla Model 3, this charging speed adds, at most, about 30 miles of driving range per hour. (That’s why home and office charging is so appealing: the eight hours you spend sleeping or working is about enough to fill up the battery.) Yet a world of ubiquitous Level 2 plugs would add peace of mind. Think of it like plugging in your phone at a bar or at the airport. Sometimes, a little extra juice is just what you need to get by.
Seeing these plugs everywhere would help drivers feel like it’s not an emergency every time the car gets a little low, and the big charging depot (where there might be a line of cars, anyway) is miles away. Slow chargers also put less pressure on our already-creaking electrical grid compared to DC fast-chargers, which unleash upwards of 350 kilowatts at once. They’re also considered to be better for the long-term health of a battery because fast-charging leads to faster degradation, though by how much is not clear.
“Slow plugs everywhere” isn’t a perfect solution. A few streetside plugs exist in my part of Los Angeles, but you’d need a lot to make a difference; it’s not until such plugs are the norm rather than the exception that you’d have a good chance of grabbing a spot when you need it. Plus, infrastructure left out on the street is susceptible to vandalism as well as normal wear and tear. That’s why some places in Europe have embraced the “bring your own cable” approach to such chargers so cords are not left on the sidewalk, sitting in the rain and getting in the way.
Despite the challenges, slow charging offers states and cities miffed by Trump’s election a low-tech way to make themselves more EV-friendly. They could also use the power of the legislative pen to mandate that apartment buildings and condominium developments install plugs in their parking lots, for example. Then, blue state residents and urban dwellers — the very people most likely to want EVs to fight climate change, but least likely to have the ability to put in their own home plugs – can buy an EV without also buying a lifestyle of inconvenience.
Fast-charging still matters a lot. The rapid growth of DC stations over the past decade has created a country where nearly all the major interstate highways have enough plugs for EV drivers to get by. Many more are needed in cities, along state highways, and near far-flung destinations like the National Parks before most people will be confident an electric vehicle can take them anywhere they want to go.
As the refrain goes, though, most people do the vast majority of their driving within a few miles of their homes. If a rollout of slow plugs makes it possible for them to steal a few electrons while they go about their lives, American confidence in EVs will rise.
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On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
And how ordinary Americans will pay the price.
No one seems to know exactly how many employees have been laid off from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or, for that matter, what offices those employees worked at, what jobs they held, or what regions of the country will be impacted by their absence. We do know that it was a lot of people; about 10% of the roughly 13,000 people who worked at the agency have left since Donald Trump took office, either because they were among the 800 or so probationary employees to be fired late last month or because they resigned.
“I don’t have the specifics as to which offices, or how many people from specific geographic areas, but I will reiterate that every one of the six [NOAA] line offices and 11 of the staff offices — think of the General Counsel’s Office or the Legislative Affairs Office — all 11 of those staff offices have suffered terminations,” Rick Spinrad, who served as the NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told reporters in a late February press call. (At least a few of the NOAA employees who were laid off have since been brought back.)
Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in recent comments about the NOAA layoffs, “This is going to have profound negative consequences on the day-to-day lives of Americans.” He added, “This is something that [Elon Musk’s government efficiency team] just doesn’t even understand. They simply have no idea what they are doing and how it’s hurting people.”
There is the direct harm to hard-working employees who have lost their jobs, of course. But there is also a more existential problem: Part of what is driving the layoffs is a belief by those in power that the agency is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” according to the Project 2025 playbook. As one recently fired NOAA employee put it, “the goal is destruction,” and climate science is one of the explicit targets.
NOAA is a multifaceted organization, and monitoring climate change is far from its only responsibility. The agency researches, protects, and restores America’s fisheries, including through an enforcement arm that combats poaching; it explores the deep ocean and governs seabed mining; and its Commissioned Officer Corps is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States, alongside the Army, Marines Corps, and Coast Guard. But many of its well-known responsibilities almost inevitably touch climate change, from the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts and warnings to drought tools for farmers to heat forecasts from the National Weather Service issued on hot summer days. Cutting climate science out of NOAA would have immediate — and in some cases, deadly — impacts on regular Americans.
And it’s likely this is only the beginning of the purge. Project 2025 calls for the complete disbanding of NOAA. Current agency employees have reportedly been told to brace for “a 50% reduction in staff” as part of Elon Musk’s government efficiency campaign. Another 1,000 terminations are expected this week, bringing the total loss at NOAA to around 20% of its staff.
Here are just a few of the ways those layoffs are already impacting climate science.
NOAA collects more than 20 terabytes of environmental data from Earth and space daily, and through its paleoclimatology arm, it has reconstructed climate data going back 100 million years. Not even Project 2025 calls for the U.S. to halt its weather measurements entirely; in fact, Congress requires the collection of a lot of standard climate data.
But the NOAA layoffs are hampering those data collection efforts, introducing gaps and inconsistencies. For example, staffing shortages have resulted in the National Weather Service suspending weather balloon launches from Kotzebue, Alaska — and elsewhere — “indefinitely.” The Trump administration is also considering shuttering a number of government offices, including several of NOAA’s weather monitoring stations. Repairs of monitors and sensors could also be delayed by staff cuts and funding shortfalls — or not done at all.
Flawed and incomplete data results in degraded and imprecise forecasts. In an era of extreme weather, the difference of a few miles or degrees can be a matter of life or death.
In the case of climate science specifically, which looks at changes over much longer timescales than meteorology, “I think you could do science with the data we have now, if we can preserve it,” Flavio Lehner, a climate scientist at Cornell University who uses NOAA data in his research, told me.
But therein lies the next problem: the threat that the government could take NOAA climate data down entirely.
Though data collection is in many cases mandated by Congress, Congress does not require that the public have access to that data. Though NOAA’s climate page is still live, the Environmental Protection Agency has already removed from its website the Keeling Curve tracker, the daily global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measurement that Drilled notes is “one of the longest-running data projects in climate science.” Many other government websites that reference climate change have also gone dark. Solutions are complicated — “downloading” NOAA to preserve it, for example, would cost an estimated $500,000 in storage per month for an institution to host it.
“At the end of the day, if you’re a municipality or a community and you realize that some of these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, you’ll want to adapt to it, whether you think it’s because of climate change or not,” Lehner said. “People want to have the best available science to adapt, and I think that applies to Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of communities across the country.” But if the Trump administration deletes NOAA websites, or the existing measurements it’s putting out are of poor quality, “it’s not going to be the best possible science to adapt moving forward,” Lehner added.
I wouldn’t want to be a NOAA scientist with the word “climate” attached to my title or work. The Trump administration has shown itself to be ruthless in eliminating references to words or concepts it opposes, including flagging pictures of the Enola Gay WWII airplane for removal from the Defense Department’s website in an effort to cut all references to the LGBT community from the agency.
“Climate science” is another Trump administration boogey-word, but the NOAA scientists who remain employed by the agency after the layoffs will still have to deal with the realities of a world warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. “Ultimately, what we’re dealing with are changes in our environment that impact ecosystems and humans, and whether you think these changes are driven by humans or not, it’s something that can now be seen in data,” Lehner told me. “From that perspective, I find it hard to believe that this is not something that people [in the government] are interested in researching.”
Government scientists who want to track things like drought or the rapid intensification of hurricanes going forward will likely have to do so without using the word “climate.” Lehner, for example, recalled submitting a proposal to work with the Bureau of Reclamation on the climate change effects on the Colorado River during the first Trump administration and being advised to replace words like “climate change” with more politically neutral language. His team did, and the project ultimately got funded, though Lehner couldn’t say if that was only because of the semantics. It seems likely, though, that Trump 2.0 will be even stricter in CTRL + F’ing “climate” at NOAA and elsewhere.
Climate research will continue in some form at NOAA, if only because that’s the reality of working with data of a warming planet. But scientists who don’t lose their jobs in the layoffs will likely find themselves wasting time on careful doublespeak so as not to attract unwanted attention.
Another major concern with the NOAA layoffs is the loss of expert knowledge. Many NOAA offices were already lean and understaffed, and only one or two employees likely knew how to perform certain tasks or use certain programs. If those experts subsequently lose their jobs, decades of NOAA know-how will be lost entirely.
As one example, late last year, NOAA updated its system to process grants, causing delays as its staff learned how to use the new program. Given the new round of layoffs, the odds are that some of the employees who may have finally figured out how to navigate the new procedure may have been let go. The problem gets even worse when it comes to specialized knowledge.
“Some of the expertise in processing [NOAA’s] data has been abruptly lost,” Lehner told me. “The people who are still there are scrambling to pick up and learn how to process that data so that it can then be used again.”
The worst outcome of the NOAA layoffs, though, is the extensive damage it does to the institution’s future. Some of the brightest, most enthusiastic Americans at NOAA — the probationary employees with under a year of work — are already gone. What’s more, there aren’t likely to be many new openings at the agency for the next generation of talent coming up in high school and college right now.
“We have an atmospheric science program [at Cornell University] where students have secured NOAA internships for this summer and were hoping to have productive careers, for example, at the National Weather Service, and so forth,” Lehner said. “Now, all of this is in question.”
That is hugely detrimental to NOAA’s ability to preserve the institutional knowledge of outgoing or retiring employees, or to build and advance a workforce of the future. It’s impossible to measure how many people ultimately leave the field or decide to pursue a different career because of the changes at NOAA — damage that will not be easily reversed under a new administration. “It’s going to take years for NOAA to recover the trust of the next generation of brilliant environmental scientists and policymakers,” Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, said.
Climate change is a global problem, and NOAA has historically worked with partner agencies around the world to better understand the impacts of the warming planet. Now, however, the Trump administration has ordered NOAA employees to stop their international work, and employees who held roles that involved collaboration with partners abroad could potentially become targets of Musk’s layoffs. Firing those employees would also mean severing their relationships with scientists in international offices — offices that very well could have been in positions to help protect U.S. citizens with their research and data.
As the U.S. continues to isolate itself and the NOAA layoffs continue, there will be cascading consequences for climate science, which is inherently a collaborative field. “When the United States doesn’t lead [on climate science], two things happen,” Craig McLean, a former assistant administrator of NOAA for research, recently told the press. “Other nations relax their own spending in these areas, and the world’s level of understanding starts to decline,” and “countries who we may not have as collegial an understanding with,” such as China, could ostensibly step in and “replace the United States and its leadership.”
That leaves NOAA increasingly alone, and Americans of all political stripes will suffer as a result. “The strategy to erase data and research, to pull the rug from under activism — it’s time-tested,” Lehner, the Cornell climate scientist, said. “But that’s where it’s very infuriating because NOAA’s data is bipartisanly useful.”
Rob and Jesse talk with Heatmap senior reporter Jael Holzman.
Donald Trump’s second term has now entered its second month. His administration is doing much to slow down renewables, and everything it can to slow down offshore wind. Jael Holzman is a senior reporter at Heatmap and the author of our newsletter, “The Fight,” about local battles over renewable permitting around the country.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Jael about the bleak outlook for offshore wind, the use of presidential authority to impede energy development, and why solar has been spared — so far. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It seems like there’s a mix here of, you know, some projects are now facing active legal trouble because they still had major permits to secure and the Trump administration is now denying those permits. But some projects, as you were saying, seemed safe, but now they’re not. They’re worried about getting these kind of iterative findings from the government that you need to conduct any major work in federal waters.
How much of the chill that we’re seeing is about active permitting denials, versus how much of it is developers being like, we don’t want to risk getting a permit denied, or asking for something that would be very normal to get a normal approval in the course of normal business operations, getting it rejected and then just being stuck. And so we’d rather just pause, not ask for anything for four years, and then come back and start asking again?
Jael Holzman: Offshore wind industry executives won’t say this on the record, but they have anonymously told me, in many words, that they view what is happening to them in the federal permitting system as not only a barometer check for where the energy transition is, but even broader, it is a risk, it is a challenge, it is a threat to integrity.
With respect to our federal permitting processes, generally what we’re seeing here is, I’ve had some folks in conservative energy circles compare it to the Keystone XL-ification of the energy sector, where the political party that doesn’t like a particular technology weaponizes the permitting system against one particular sector. Now, obviously, it’s politically advantageous for conservatives to describe it this way, but I actually find it to be very useful because what it means is as the politics becomes more fraught for the party in power around a technology, there’s increasingly a willingness to step beyond the realm of what the permitting system is legally supposed to do. And that’s a danger if it’s weaponized against an entire sector.
You know, Keystone pipeline, that was one project. It was exemplary — there was a lot of fervor around that one project — that is not an entire sector having the thumb put on its scale by political officials to derail it, especially one that had been a decade-plus in the works and is required for the energy grids to remain stable in various parts of our country. You know, what we’re seeing here is federal officials not even being willing to schedule meetings for permitting processes that are legally required under the law.
For example, my reporting indicated that at least one project that was prioritized under a permitting reform law to have at least an idea public and put out there for when they would expect to get all their permits — this was the Blue Point Wind offshore wind proposal off the coast of New England and New Jersey, New York. And what we’re seeing here is essentially the obscuring of even what permitting reform ostensibly was supposed to do, right?
There was this conversation in D.C. before Trump took office that maybe if you couple statutory reforms that streamline the processes that currently exist, and you put some sort of timetable into the statute, and you combine that with some gimmes to the oil and gas people, right, at least you could grease the skids enough to have everyone benefit. But my reporting on what’s happened to offshore wind has truly revealed that in many respects, “all of the above” is really a Lucy-with-the-football moment for many proponents of an energy transition.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.