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Tesla Superchargers are — finally — coming to some of our most remote National Parks.
The closest I came to battery oblivion happened in Bryce Canyon City, Utah.
Up above 7,600 feet, the December evening temperatures dipped to 10 below zero Fahrenheit as I pulled my Tesla Model 3 into Ruby’s Inn. Tesla’s website listed the hotel as a place with destination chargers that could refill the battery overnight. That guarantee did little good, since other EVs had snagged the few working plugs by the time we arrived. My car’s remaining range, suffering in the bitter cold, dropped below 20 miles as I scoured the sprawling hotel campus for other EV hookups the receptionist had marked on a paper map of the premises.
Finally, out in the middle of the snow, I saw the plug that was promised: a post with a single 120-volt outlet meant for the RVs that visit in sunnier months. My extension cord reached, barely. My battery would live through the night.
If you drive an electric vehicle to see the eerie hoodoos of Bryce Canyon National Park next year, you’ll have a far less anxious time than I did. The area recently won a Tesla contest in which drivers could vote for future Supercharger locations. Its prize was a promise that a fast-charging station would come to Bryce Canyon City. Last Sunday, a website that tracks permits and public records to discover the location of future Superchargers indicated one will be built right there at Ruby’s Inn, the site of my struggle.
Bryce isn’t alone. As charging stops fill in the map of the U.S., Tesla is racing to build fast chargers near the remote National Parks of the West. Because just about every automaker is starting to use Tesla’s NACS plug, EVs of all sorts will be able to stop there. It’s about to become realistic to visit some of America’s most jaw-dropping scenery in an electric car.
When I started electric road-tripping in 2019 and 2020, only the superstars of the National Park System were truly accessible. High-speed charging stations existed in the tourist trap towns of Tusayan, Arizona, and West Yellowstone, Montana, giving Tesla drivers access to the Grand Canyon and to Yellowstone with little range anxiety. A site in Fish Camp, California, provided enough electrons to gaze upon El Capitan in Yosemite, while the baby Supercharger in Moab, Utah, powered you toward the Delicate Arch trail. Parks that happened to be located near an Interstate highway, like Petrified Forest and Zion, lay within reach for an EV.
Yet striking out for America’s more isolated wonders was a dicey proposition, one that relied upon hoping the slower chargers at hotels and visitor’s centers would be operational and unoccupied. Let me tell you: This is not a safe assumption.
To reach Crater Lake in 2022, we stayed 55 miles away in Klamath Falls, site of the nearest Supercharger. I pulled into the gift shop near the park’s entrance, hoping to add some safety juice for the day with the available Level 2 destination charger, but it was busted. No matter. Thanks to driving slowly around the lake and minding the speed limit back to Klamath (through a cloud of specific local midges that entirely glazed the front of the car in gelatinous bug guts), I completed the round trip back to the Supercharger station — only to find that the busted charger I tried to tap earlier in the day had bent a prong inside my Tesla port, rendering it unusable. We happened to be in the parking lot of a Fred Meyer home store at the time of this disastrous realization. In the moments before closing, I ran inside and procured the necessary hand tool to bend my metal back into shape. (Note to readers: Do not do this.) The DIY fix worked; the trip was saved.
You won’t need to resort to such extreme measures, however, because reliable and fast chargers are coming. Tesla has a permit to build a Supercharger at a highway junction within 25 miles of Crater Lake, and given the park’s soaring popularity, that surely won’t be the last. Nor will you need to retreat from the heart of Death Valley to recharge in remote Beatty, Nevada because you couldn’t snag a plug at the park’s luxury hotel (though if you do go to Beatty, get the BBQ at Smokin’ J’s.). A Supercharger is coming to the closer town of Pahrump, and surely more are on their way.
Look at the map and you’ll see many more examples. The arid expanses of southeastern New Mexico are charging desert now, but a planned Supercharger in Alamogordo will send EV drivers on their way to White Sands. Terlingua, Texas will provide a way to reach previously unreachable Big Bend along the Rio Grande River. Kalispell, Montana; Ely, Nevada; and Vernal, Utah will help electric drivers reach Glacier National Park, Great Basin National Park, and Dinosaur National Monument, respectively. More sites may come if the third-party charging companies or the automakers building their own chargers expand their offerings beyond the country’s most well-traveled highways.
It is a cruel twist of fate that traveling to some of the planet’s most majestic spots has, for so long, meant spewing carbon dioxide into its atmosphere. National parks, monuments, and forests are, by their very nature, far from population centers, and thus far from where most charging infrastructure grew up in the early years of this EV era. The treasures of the American West, especially, may be hours from the freeway and hundreds of miles from the nearest big city.
At last, the proposition of zero-emissions driving to America’s best idea is about to shift from fraught to ordinary. With longer driving ranges in new EVs and new fast chargers available en route to the parks, you won’t need to sit down with a map and a calculator, meticulously charting a strategy to see Wizard Island without running out of miles. You’ll just pack the car and go.
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On executive orders, the Supreme Court, and a “particularly dangerous situation” in Los Angeles.
Current conditions:Nearly 10 million people are under alert today for fire weather conditions in southern California • The coastal waters off China hit their highest average temperature, 70.7 degrees Fahrenheit, since record-keeping began • A blast of cold air will bring freezing temperatures to an estimated 80% of Americans in the next week.
High winds returned to Los Angeles on Monday night and will peak on Tuesday, the “most dangerous” day of the week for the city still battling severe and deadly fires. In anticipation of the dry Santa Ana winds, the National Weather Service issued its highest fire weather warning, citing a “particularly dangerous situation” in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties for the first time since December 2020.
A new brush fire, the Auto Fire, ignited in Oxnard, Ventura County, on Monday evening. It spread 55 acres before firefighters stopped it. Meanwhile, investigators continue to look for the cause of the Palisades Fire, which ignited near a week-old burn scar, a popular partying spot, and damaged wooden utility poles, according to a New York Times analysis.
National Weather Service
Trump is planning an executive order banning offshore wind developments on the East Coast, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported Monday. The news came from New Jersey Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew, who said he’s working with Trump’s team to “to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
Van Drew’s press release also said that this order is “just the beginning,” and that it would be finalized “within the first few months of the administration,” a far cry from the Day One action Trump has promised. Van Drew had earlier told New Jersey reporters that the ban would last six months.
Meanwhile, in other executive order news, Biden issued an order on Tuesday directing the Energy and Defense departments to lease federal lands for “gigawatt-scale” data centers, according to E&E News, but only if they bring online enough clean energy to match their facilities’ needs.
On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to hear a lawsuit brought by Utah attempting to seize control of the “unappropriated” federal lands in the state. Opponents argued that the lawsuit, if successful, would have put public lands across the West on the path to privatization since Utah and other states likely couldn’t afford to manage them and would have had to sell off much of them. However, “while the Court’s decision denying original review of Utah’s claims is welcome news for our shared public lands, we fully expect Utah’s misguided attacks to continue,” Alison Flint, the senior legal director at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.
As I reported last month, the Utah lawsuit organizers “seem prepared to make an appeal to Congress or the Trump administration if the Supreme Court doesn’t make a move in their favor,” given that “funding for the messaging for Stand for Our Land, the publicity arm of the lawsuit, has reportedly outpaced the spending on lawyers.
Also on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a fossil fuel industry argument to block states, municipalities, and other groups from seeking damages for the harms caused by climate change. The appeal by Sunoco, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and others stemmed from a high-profile lawsuit in Honolulu that seeks to hold energy companies accountable for causing “a substantial portion” of the effects of climate change. Had the Supreme Court taken up the case, similar lawsuits by California and others likely would have been paused during deliberations. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, responded to Monday’s decision by claiming activists will now “make themselves the nation’s energy regulators.”
A little over a week after the start of New York City’s congestion pricing, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released data showing significant decreases in the amount of time passengers spend in inbound traffic. On average, during the morning commute, traffic times have decreased by 30% to 40%; in some cases, such as during rush hour in the Holland Tunnel, travel time has been cut in half, going from over 11 minutes to under five. Due to the traffic reductions, some bus routes are up to 28% faster now than at the same time last year. “It has been a very good week here in New York,” MTA deputy chief Juliette Michaelson said in a news conference.
So far, the MTA has seen an average of 43,000 fewer drivers entering the congestion pricing zone, which begins below 60th St. and costs $9 during the day. While Gothamist notes that this is only a 7.3% reduction compared to last January, many New Yorkers say congestion pricing effects are visibly noticeable in the streets of lower Manhattan.
The Brooklyn Bridge as congestion pricing went into effect. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Oil and gas magnate Harold Hamm is throwing a “swanky party” to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump, on whose campaign he spent more than $4.3 million, according to the research group Fieldnotes and The New York Times. Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum was among the invitees, although an advisor has said he does not plan to attend; one of the party’s several major oil and gas industry sponsors, Liberty Energy, was founded by Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary.
In May, Trump met with oil and gas executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort and promised industry-friendly tax and regulatory policies and an aggressive stance against wind energy if they helped fund his White House bid. The oil and gas industry ultimately invested some $75 million in efforts to help re-elect the former president and contributed millions to his legal defense.
25% — That’s the level of tariff Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said Canada should prepare for after a meeting with incoming President Trump — and not expect exceptions for its crude oil exports to the U.S., per Bloomberg’s Javier Blas.
Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
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Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “Super Scooper” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the Super Scooper collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the Super Scooper collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the Super Scooper, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Québécois firefighting planes are called Super Scoopers, not super soakers.