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Which might make one wonder: Why is Subaru not the Subaru of EVs?
When the Rivian R3 rolled onto the stage in Orange County, car fans saw a flicker of the past. The truncated EV reminded automotive Twitter and Threads of throwback off-road hatchbacks with unusual shapes — the Lancia Delta, AMC Gremlin, Lada Niva, and even the maligned Yugo. It reminded me, in spirit more than silhouette, of the Subaru Outback from a quarter-century ago.
Remember the old Outback? Before it blew up and became just another crossover in a sea of indistinguishable cars, the Outback was a two-tone granola wagon with lesbian cred and font stylings borrowed from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was a cobbled-together quirky legend built for specific tribes, particularly those who wanted to traverse the craggy roads and highways of America’s backcountry. Its sluggish acceleration couldn’t compare with a futuristic torque monster like the R3 will be, yet it inspired a cult following among the road atlas generation of adventurers that Rivian hopes to duplicate in the age of massive touchscreens.
Even as its cars became more generic and ordinary in the 21st century, Subie kept its marketing efforts aimed at the outdoorsy, dog-loving folks who had become loyal to the brand. However, while its fans are the kind of people with a clear, vested interest in addressing climate change, the world’s “we love the parks” car company has dragged its toes on joining the electric vehicle revolution that hopes to slash the car industry’s carbon emissions. Subaru’s electric aversion left a giant hole in the market for an adventure EV, one that Rivian seeks to fill.
We’ve been hard on Toyota for coasting on the sustainability reputation of the Prius. The world’s largest automaker has been content to tout its “electrified” lineup of mostly hybrids and plug-in hybrids, waiting for EV technology and infrastructure to mature before it jumps in. Subaru, for all its exercises in Earth mother branding, has done the same.
To its credit, Subie made most of its cars follow “partial zero emissions” standards reflected by the PZEV badge you see on the back of a modern Forester. This means the engine burns normal gasoline, but is built with characteristics that reduce smog-forming air pollutants. PZEV tech does nothing to reduce a car’s greenhouse emissions, but it’s about the best a non-hybrid, plain-old combustion car can do.
But Subaru never bothered to build even a Prius-esque MPG-maximizer. And it has been even more reluctant than its partner, Toyota, to join the battery revolution. Subaru’s only entry, the now-canceled plug-in hybrid variant of the Crosstrek, posted a paltry 17 miles of electric range before reverting to gas. According to Green Car Reports, the hybrid Crosstrek was effectively a “compliance car” — something automakers build to satisfy stringent regulations like the state of California’s, not because they believe in the vehicle.
The Crosstrek PHEV can die because Subaru finally has an EV: the Solterra, built on the tech platform Subaru developed in cahoots with Toyota. It is the same car as Toyota’s debut EV, the bZ4x, but with Subaru badges. The Solterra’s angular looks surely will appeal to somebody, and the car will satisfy superfans’ desire for any fully electric Subaru. But the Solterra is an uninspired crossover with a 228-mile range that can’t compare with the current state of the art. It certainly hasn’t generated the reaction of the R3.
For those willing to ignore the climate crisis, the naked business case for ignoring zero-emission technology in the present is clear. Even as the EV age bubbles up around them, the least-electric car brands are selling lots and lots of cars. Americans bought more than 15 million vehicles in 2023, and 632,000 of them were Subarus, a 14% increase from the year before. Subaru didn’t lose money on EVs like Ford has as it tries to establish its battery business. With EVs now stuck between early adopters and the mainstream, it’s possible to make the case that the holdouts are cynical, but smart.
It’s also not easy to build an electric car that does what a Subaru is supposed to do. I’ve driven across the empty expanses of the American West in a two-wheel-drive Tesla Model 3 that started its life with an EPA-rated 240 miles per charge. It was challenging. Subzero temperatures at Bryce Canyon punished the battery. The craggy, icy road into Canyonlands National Park pushed the iffy ground clearance to its limit. The range was barely enough for us to tempt fate by leaving the interstate and crossing the rugged interior of Utah, a decision that saw me end up borrowing — you guessed it — a friendly stranger’s old Subaru Outback while my Tesla charged.
You’d want an small electric vehicle built for adventure to ride taller and go farther. Well, they built one. It’s a Rivian. The rally car-inspired R3 promises to pair fat tires and promising ground clearance with outdoorsy-minded details such as fold-flat seats, a movie-projecting rooftop tent, and a rear-mounted cargo box. The new Rivians should come with at least 300 miles of range, which ought to be enough to reach most far-flung locales as the map of fast-charging stations continues to fill in.
This isn’t to say Subie doomed itself by dithering. For all the excitement over Rivian’s new offerings, the R2 remains at least two years away from realization, and the little R3 even longer. Besides, Rivian’s biggest obstacle isn’t Subaru, but survival. The startup burns through billions of dollars each year and needs to persist on sales of its large, expensive R1 SUVs and trucks until the mass-market models go on sale.
In the meantime, Subaru could trot out a battery-powered Crosstrek and sell a bunch of them to people who’ve been buying fossil fuel Subies for decades. That looks like the plan: The brand now says it will launch a quartet of EV crossovers (possibly the current Crosstrek-Outback-Forester-Ascent lineup, but electric) by 2026, just in time to compete with the R2 and R3, and build 400,000 EVs per year by 2028.
Yet something has been lost. Every time Subaru trots out a new gas-burning vehicle on a stage meant to mimic the high desert or advertises its corporate contributions to the National Park system, it tries to reinforce its status as the car for the Earth-conscious. Stalling on EVs may have been the easy business decision, but the brand has given away excitement that it could have owned, if only they’d trotted out an EV with the spirit of that quirky old Outback.
Or do an Impreza hot hatch EV. As the response to the R3 demonstrated, we’re ready.
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On the looming climate summit, clean energy stocks, and Hurricane Rafael
Current conditions: A winter storm could bring up to 4 feet of snow to parts of Colorado and New Mexico • At least 89 people are still missing from extreme flooding in Spain • The Mountain Fire in Southern California has consumed 14,000 acres and is zero percent contained.
The world is still reeling from the results of this week’s U.S. presidential election, and everyone is trying to get some idea of what a second Trump term means for policy – both at home and abroad. Perhaps most immediately, Trump’s election is “set to cast a pall over the UN COP29 summit next week,” said the Financial Times. Already many world leaders and business executives have said they will not attend the climate talks in Azerbaijan, where countries will aim to set a new goal for climate finance. “The U.S., as the world’s richest country and key shareholder in international financial institutions, is viewed as crucial to that goal,” the FT added.
Trump has called climate change a hoax, vowed to once again remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, and promised to stop U.S. climate finance contributions. He has also promised to “drill, baby, drill.” Yesterday President Biden put new environmental limitations on an oil-and-gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The lease sale was originally required by law in 2017 by Trump himself, and Biden is trying to “narrow” the lease sale without breaking that law, according to The Washington Post. “The election results have made the threat to America's Arctic clear,” Kristen Miller, executive director of Alaska Wilderness League, toldReuters. “The fight to save the Arctic Refuge is back, and we are ready for the next four years.”
Another early effect of the decisive election result is that clean energy stocks are down. The iShares Global Clean Energy exchange traded fund, whose biggest holdings are the solar panel company First Solar and the Spanish utility and renewables developer Iberdola, is down about 6%. The iShares U.S. Energy ETF, meanwhile, whose largest holdings are Exxon and Chevron, is up over 3%. Some specific publicly traded clean energy stocks have sunk, especially residential solar companies like Sunrun, which is down about 30% compared to Tuesday. “That renewables companies are falling more than fossil energy companies are rising, however, indicates that the market is not expecting a Trump White House to do much to improve oil and gas profitability or production, which has actually increased in the Biden years thanks to the spikes in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and continued exploitation of America’s oil and gas resources through hydraulic fracturing,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin.
Hurricane Rafael swept through Cuba yesterday as a Category 3 storm, knocking out the power grid and leaving 10 million people without electricity. Widespread flooding is reported. The island was still recovering from last month’s Hurricane Oscar, which left at least six people dead. The electrical grid – run by oil-fired power plants – has collapsed several times over the last few weeks. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said yesterday that about 17% of crude oil production and 7% of natural gas output in the Gulf of Mexico was shut down because of Rafael.
It is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the warmest year on record, according to the European Copernicus Climate Change Service. In October, the global average surface air temperature was about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than pre-industrial averages for that month. This year is also on track to be the first entire calendar year in which temperatures are more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. “This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming climate change conference,” said Copernicus deputy director Dr. Samantha Burgess.
C3S
The world is falling short of its goal to double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030, the International Energy Agency said in its new Energy Efficiency 2024 report. Global primary energy intensity – which the IEA explained is a measure of efficiency – will improve by 1% this year, the same as last year. It needs to be increasing by 4% by the end of the decade to meet a goal set at last year’s COP. “Boosting energy efficiency is about getting more from everyday technologies and industrial processes for the same amount of energy input, and means more jobs, healthier cities and a range of other benefits,” the IEA said. “Improving the efficiency of buildings and vehicles, as well as in other areas, is central to clean energy transitions, since it simultaneously improves energy security, lowers energy bills for consumers and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.” The group called for more government action as well as investment in energy efficient technologies.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon fell by 30.6% in the 12 months leading up to July, compared to a year earlier. It is now at the lowest levels since 2015.
State-level policies and “unstoppable” momentum for clean energy.
As the realities of Trump’s return to office and the likelihood of a Republican trifecta in Washington began to set in on Wednesday morning, climate and clean energy advocates mostly did not sugarcoat the result or look for a silver lining. But in press releases and interviews, reactions to the news coalesced around two key ways to think about what happens next.
Like last time Trump was elected, the onus will now fall on state and local leaders to make progress on climate change in spite of — and likely in direct conflict with — shifting federal priorities. Working to their advantage, though, much more so than last time, is global political and economic momentum behind the growth of clean energy.
“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable,” former White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said in a statement.
“This is a dark day, but despite this election result, momentum is on our side,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous wrote. “The transition away from dirty fossil fuels to affordable clean energy is already underway.”
“States are the critical last line of defense on climate,” said Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, a group that campaigns for local climate leaders, during a press call on Wednesday. “I used to work in the solar industry under the Trump administration. We still built solar and it was on the back of great state policy.”
Reached by phone on Wednesday, the climate policy strategist Sam Ricketts offered a blunt assessment of where things stand. “First things first, this outcome sucks,” he said. He worried aloud about what another four years of Trump would mean for his kids and the planet they inherit. But Ricketts has also been here before. During Trump’s first term, he worked for the “climate governor,” Washington’s Jay Inslee, and helped further state and local climate policy around the country for the Democratic Governors Association. “For me, it is a familiar song,” he said.
Ricketts believes the transition to clean energy has become inevitable. But he offered other reasons states may be in a better position to make progress over the next four years than they were last time. There are now 23 states with Democratic governors and at least 15 with Democratic trifectas — compare that to 2017, when there were just 16 Democratic governors and seven trifectas. Additionally, Democrats won key seats in the state houses of Wisconsin and North Carolina that will break up previous Republican supermajorities and give the Democratic governors in those states more opportunity to make progress.
Spears also highlighted these victories during the Climate Cabinet press call, adding that they help illustrate that the election was not a referendum on climate policy. “We have examples of candidates who ran forward on climate, they ran forward on clean energy, and they still won last night in some tough toss-up districts,” she said.
Ricketts also pointed to signs that climate policy itself is popular. In Washington, a ballot measure that would have repealed the state’s emissions cap-and-invest policy failed. “The vote returns aren’t all in, but that initiative has been obliterated at the ballot box by voters in Washington State who want to continue that state’s climate progress,” he said.
But the enduring popularity of climate policy in Democratic states is not a given. Though the measure to overturn Washington’s cap-and-invest law was defeated, another measure that would revoke the state’s nation-leading policies to regulate the use of natural gas in buildings hangs in the balance. If it passes, it will not only undo existing policies but also hamstring state and local policymakers from discouraging natural gas in the future. In Berkeley, California, the birthplace of the movement to ban gas in buildings, a last-ditch effort to preserve that policy through a tax on natural gas was rejected by voters.
Meanwhile, two counties in Oregon overwhelmingly voted in favor of a nonbinding ballot measure opposing offshore wind development. And while 2024 brought many examples of climate policy progress at the state level, there were also some signs of states pulling back due to concerns about cost, exemplified by New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s major reversal on congestion pricing in New York City.
The oft-repeated hypothesis that Republican governors and legislators might defend President Biden’s climate policies because of the investments flowing to red states is also about to be put to the test. “I think that's going to be a huge issue and question,” Barry Rabe, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, told me. “You know, not only can Democrats close ranks to oppose any changes, but is there any kind of cross-party Republican base of support?”
Josh Freed, the senior vice president for the climate and clean energy program at Third Way, warned that the climate community has a lot of work to do to build more public support for clean energy. He pointed to the rise of right-wing populism around the world, driven in part by the perception that the transition away from fossil fuels is hurting real people at the expense of corporate and political interests.
“We’ve seen, in many places, a backlash against adopting electric vehicles,” he told me. “We’ve seen, at the local county level, opposition to siting of renewables. People perceive a push for eliminating natural gas from cooking or from home heating as an infringement on their choice and as something that’s going to raise costs, and we have to take that seriously.”
One place Freed sees potential for continued progress is in corporate action. A lot of the momentum on clean energy is coming from the private sector, he said, naming companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google that have invested considerable funds in decarbonization. He doesn’t see that changing.
A counterpoint, raised by Rabe, is those companies’ contribution to increasing demand for electricity — which has simultaneously raised interest in financing clean energy projects and expanding natural gas plants.
As I was wrapping up my call with Ricketts, he acknowledged that state and local action was no substitute for federal leadership in tackling climate change. But he also emphasized that these are the levers we have right now. Before signing off, he paraphrased something the writer Rebecca Solnit posted on social media in the wee hours of the morning after the electoral college was called. It’s a motto that I imagine will become something of a rallying cry for the climate movement over the next four years. “We can’t save everything, but we can save some things, and those things are worth saving,” Ricketts said.
Rob and Jesse talk about what comes next in the shift to clean energy.
Last night, Donald Trump secured a second term in the White House. He campaigned on an aggressively pro-fossil -fuel agenda, promising to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark 2022 climate law, and roll back Environmental Protection Agency rules governing power plant and car and truck pollution.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob pick through the results of the election and try to figure out where climate advocates go from here. What will Trump 2.0 mean for the federal government’s climate policy? Did climate policies notch any wins at the state level on Tuesday night? And where should decarbonization advocates focus their energy in the months and years to come? Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: You know the real question, I guess — and I just, I don’t have a ton of optimism here — is if there can be some kind of bipartisan support for the idea that changing the way we permit transmission lines is good for economic growth. It’s good for resilience. It’s good for meeting demand from data centers and factories and other things that we need going forward. Whether that case can be made in a different, entirely different political context is to be seen, but it certainly will not move forward in the same context as the [Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024] negotiations.
Robinson Meyer: And I think there’s a broad question here about what the Trump administration looks like in terms of its energy agenda. We know the environmental agenda will be highly deregulatory and interested in recarbonizing the economy, so to speak, or at least slowing down decarbonization — very oil- and gas-friendly.
I think on the energy agenda, we can expect oil and gas friendliness as well, obviously. But I do think, in terms of who will be appointed to lead or nominated to lead the Department of Energy, I think there’s a range of whether you would see a nominee who is aggressively focused on only doing things to support oil and gas, or a nominee who takes a more Catholic approach and is interested in all forms of energy development.
And I don’t, I don’t mean to be … I don’t think that’s obvious. I just think that’s like a … you kind of can see threads of that across the Republican Party. You can see some politicians who are interested only, really, in helping fossil fuels. You can see some politicians who are very excited, say, about geothermal, who are excited about shoring up the grid, right? Who are excited about carbon capture.
And I think the question of who winds up taking control of the energy portfolio in a future Trump administration means … One thing that was true of the first Trump administration that I don’t expect to go away this time is that the Trump policymaking process is extremely chaotic, right? He’s surrounded by different actors. There’s a lot of informal delegation. Things happen, and he’s kind of involved in it, but sometimes he’s not involved in it. He likes having this team of rivals who are constantly jockeying for position. In some ways it’s a very imperial-type system, and I think that will continue.
One topic I’ve been paying a lot of attention to, for instance, is nuclear. The first Trump administration said a lot of nice things about nuclear, and they passed some affirmatively supportive policy for the advanced nuclear industry, and they did some nice things for small modular reactors. I think if you look at this administration, it’s actually a little bit more of a mixed bag for nuclear.
RFK, who we know is going to be an important figure in the administration, at least at the beginning, is one of the biggest anti nuclear advocates there is. And his big, crowning achievement, one of his big crowning achievements was helping to shut down Indian Point, the large nuclear reactor in New York state. JD Vance, Vice President-elect JD Vance, has said that shutting down nuclear reactors is one of the dumbest things that we can do and seems to be quite pro, we should be producing more nuclear.
Jenkins: On the other hand, Tucker Carlson was on, uh …
Meyer: … suggested it was demonic, yeah.
Jenkins: Exactly, and no one understands how nuclear technology works or where it came from.
Meyer: And Donald Trump has kind of said both things. It’s just super uncertain and … it’s super uncertain.
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.