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Electric Vehicles

Tesla Is Delaying the Robotaxi Reveal

On Musk’s latest move, Arctic shipping, and China’s natural disasters

Tesla Is Delaying the Robotaxi Reveal
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Heavy rains triggered a deadly landslide in Nepal that swept away 60 people • More than a million residents are still without power in and around Houston • It will be about 80 degrees Fahrenheit in Berlin on Sunday for the Euro 2024 final, where England will take on Spain.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Biden administration announces $1.7 billion to convert auto plants into EV factories

The Biden administration announced yesterday that the Energy Department will pour $1.7 billion into helping U.S. automakers convert shuttered or struggling manufacturing facilities into EV factories. The money will go to factories in eight states (including swing states Michigan and Pennsylvania) and recipients include Stellantis, Volvo, GM, and Harley-Davidson. Most of the funding comes from the Inflation Reduction Act and it could create nearly 3,000 new jobs and save 15,000 union positions at risk of elimination, the Energy Department said. “Agencies across the federal government are rushing to award the rest of their climate cash before the end of Biden’s first term,” The Washington Post reported.

DOE

2. Tesla delays robotaxi unveiling

Tesla is delaying the much-anticipated unveiling of its robotaxi by about two months until the prototype design can be improved and finalized, Bloombergreported. The initial date for the autonomous taxi to make its first public appearance was August 8 but it’s looking more like October now. Tesla shares fell about 8% on the news, bringing an end to an 11-day streak of gains.

3. Study: Climate change shortening Northwest Passage shipping season

There’s a convenient theory that climate change will make Arctic shipping routes more accessible as sea ice melts. But new research published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment suggests the opposite is true. The authors found that between 2007 and 2021, the ice-free shipping seasons in the Northwest Passage – which runs through northern Canada and connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans – actually shortened significantly because warmer temperatures are causing some of the thickest, oldest Arctic sea ice to flow south into the passage’s “choke points,” posing a high risk to ships. “The variability of shipping season and, in particular, the shortening of the season will impact not only international shipping but also resupply and the cost of food in many Arctic communities, which require a prompt policy response,” the authors wrote.

Broken sea ice in Baffin Bay, in the Northwest Passage. Alison Cook

4. Natural disasters cost China $13 billion already this year

Natural disasters have caused $13 billion in direct economic losses in China just in the first six months of 2024, according to the Chinese government. That’s up from about $5 billion in losses in the same period last year. The disasters run the gamut from floods to drought to heavy snow to landslides, plus a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. The country’s weather bureau warned recently that climate change could raise maximum temperatures across the country by 5 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 30 years. Rainfall is also increasing. Earlier this month China evacuated a quarter of a million people from the eastern provinces as torrential rain caused flooding. The extreme weather is threatening production of food crops including rice, wheat, soybeans, and corn.

5. Marathon and EPA reach record settlement over Clean Air Act violations

Oil giant Marathon must pay a $64.5 million fine for violating the Clean Air Act at its oil and gas operations in North Dakota as part of a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department announced. The company also has to invest $177 million in cleaning up those operations, which could result in the equivalent of 2.3 million tons of reduced pollution over the next five years. The EPA accused Marathon of violating the Clean Air Act at 90 facilities in the state, resulting in huge amounts of methane emissions, as well as illegal pollution linked to respiratory disease. The case is “the largest of 12 similar efforts by the Biden administration to target emissions from the oil and gas industry,” according toThe Associated Press.

THE KICKER

“We want to give future generations as much glaciological knowledge as possible in case they need it.” –Douglas MacAyeal, a professor of geophysical sciences with the University of Chicago, who is part of a group of scientists calling for more research into whether glacial geoengineering could help prevent catastrophic ice melt caused by climate change.

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Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

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Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

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Adaptation

Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

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Green