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Spoiler: None of them feels great.
“Delete, delete, delete,” Elon Musk reportedly told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, describing his approach to management. “Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.”
Musk has taken his own advice: He is slicing to the bone. Earlier this week, he dismissed the head of Tesla’s Supercharger network, Rebecca Tinucci, as well as her more than 500-person team. As of today, Tesla has only a barebones crew, at best, tasked with maintaining and expanding its high-speed car charging network. It has already pulled out of a planned expansion in New York City.
Musk also laid off what remained of the company’s policy and new vehicle teams. These severe cuts follow layoffs announced in March, when Musk dismissed about 10% of Tesla’s employees. According to Electrek, the two events may be related: Musk asked Tinucci to make deeper cuts in her team in April, she pushed back, and he fired her to set an example. The company has cut more than 14,000 employees worldwide since the beginning of the year.
The news is — and there is no way of sugarcoating this — either sort of stupid, bad, or very bad for the electric vehicle transition. Here are three ways of looking at it:
Over the past year, every other major automaker in the United States has switched to Tesla’s charging plug, the North American Charging Standard, or NACS. They have struck deals that will let them use much of Tesla’s existing Supercharger network; Ford is in the process of mailing its drivers a free NACs adapter plug. These agreements were meant to give consumers more certainty about the EV transition: No matter what car they bought, they would be able to use most of Tesla’s superior charging network.
Now, that certainty is gone. Which chargers will work in the future? How much more will the Tesla network expand? And what will happen to those deals with automakers now that the Supercharger team is gone? The employees laid off this week included those who worked closely with other companies.
At least publicly, Ford is keeping its cool. “Our plans for our customers do not change,” Marty Günsberg, communications director for Ford’s electric vehicle division, told Heatmap. And yet contractors and others with business in front of Tesla's charging team were left completely in the dark Tuesday, their emails bouncing back from addresses that no longer existed, according to E&E News. No other equivalent charging network exists in the U.S., meaning there's no other easy place for them to go.
Musk, for his part, has intimated that the company will begin to look into wireless charging. Although wireless charging may make slightly more sense for self-driving cars — the car could drive itself into a given spot, et voilà! — it is a puzzling decision from a man who has said the only real constraints are those imposed by the laws of physics. More than half of current and prospective EV owners say that they worry about charger availability and convenience, yet wireless charging is slower and less efficient than wired charging, meaning it will require more charging spots and each vehicle will have to stay there longer.
So again we must ask, why? The answer may lie in the animal spirits of the market — and Elon’s dependence on the market for his personal wealth. Tesla’s stock has more or less held steady since the cuts. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote, Musk has spun the layoffs as part of a corporate turn away from selling electric vehicles, chargers, and home batteries and toward achieving artificial intelligence and autonomous driving.
That is partly because Musk must keep justifying — or, if we really want to be blunt, propping up — Tesla’s astronomical share price, which itself is premised on the idea that Tesla is a technology company, not a car company. In order to do that, he must continually steer his sometimes-profitable company toward the buzziest, most hyped-up phenomenon in the economy. Never mind his actually existing EV charger business; that can’t justify the fantasy of the share price. He needs to find something new.
One of the more useful ways of understanding Elon Musk is that he seeks to create and control private infrastructure. SpaceX creates privatized access to rocket launches. Starlink allows for privatized access to the global, satellite-provided internet. The Hyperloop — to the degree that it existed at all — sought to create a privatized and individualized form of mass transit. (Musk, fittingly, hates public transit.) Even Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now rechristened X, reflected a desire to enclose the public sphere.
And for the past year, you could understand Tesla in the same light. Sure, Tesla was an electric vehicle company. But it was rapidly becoming an infrastructure company. Through its deals with other automakers, it was cementing itself as the premier provider of electric vehicle charging in the United States. It was also the part of the company that elicited the least suspicion from Tesla’s many critics. Drivers might not always be able to rely on a third-party charger, but a Tesla Supercharger? It worked.
It hasn’t always been this way. For years, the Supercharger network seemed like Tesla’s key competitive advantage, its Warren Buffett-style moat. If you wanted access to America’s most famous and reliable fast-charging network, you had to buy a Tesla. But starting with Ford a year ago, Musk struck deals with other automakers allowing their cars to use some of its charger network. At the same time, Tesla also bowed to federal pressure and standardized its NACS charger with SAE International. That helped it win more than $17 million in grants from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build even more chargers.
Why pull back now? None of the options is very encouraging. The most hopeful answer is Tesla-specific: Maybe demand for the automaker’s vehicles is sinking so quickly that Musk is, in essence, reaching for things he can throw overboard. Tesla has historically relied on Chinese consumers to buoy its sales, but it has hemorrhaged market share in China as the country’s home-grown automakers have come out with newer and often superior EVs. But things there took a turn for the better earlier this week as Musk won approval (albeit conditional) to use Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving software on Chinese roads. And even if a sales slump were the explanation, why also ditch the team working on new vehicles at Tesla?
The other possibilities are bleaker. BloombergNEF has ballparked that Tesla’s charging business could generate $740 million in annual profits by 2030. But that relies on Musk’s estimate that the Supercharging business has a 10% margin. If that margin has since shrunk — or if its chargers just aren’t getting used as much as Tesla once anticipated — then further investment right now might not make sense.
That’s a problem, though, as most prospective buyers say that there need to be even more public chargers before they would consider buying an EV. If the economics don’t justify a further investment in chargers, however, even with all that apparently pent up demand, then the country is in a pickle. In that case, Musk’s decision looks self-defeating, a panicky and downturn-averse reaction that will ultimately undercut the market for Tesla’s cars.
About the only bright spot here is that Musk has surrendered hundreds of the most talented charging employees to the market. Tesla excelled at using a mix of policy and engineering prowess to integrate their chargers into local utilities’ systems and rate structures; other automakers can now snap up the people with those skills.
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On dry conditions in the Big Apple, biodiversity goals, and the future of the IRA
Current conditions: Schools are closed this week in Lahore, Pakistan, due to unprecedented pollution • An extreme red alert for torrential rain has been issued in Barcelona • A storm system in the Caribbean could strengthen into a hurricane by Wednesday.
The COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia came to a disappointing close over the weekend, with negotiators failing to agree on how the world can monitor and fund nature restoration. There were high hopes that the meeting would produce a roadmap for protecting large swathes of land, water, and degraded ecosystems by 2030, but rich nations blocked a proposal for a new fund to help pay for poorer nations’ efforts. “This COP was meant to be a status check on countries’ progress toward saving nature and all indicators on that status are blinking red,” said Crystal Davis, the World Resources Institute’s global director of food, land, and water. There were some bright spots, though, including the creation of a subsidiary body that will ensure Indigenous peoples have a seat at the negotiating table in future UN conservation talks, and a plan to encourage corporations that derive biotechnology products from nature to pay into a conservation fund.
New Yorkers are being asked to conserve water after Mayor Eric Adams placed the city under a drought watch. Last month was the driest NYC October on record, The Washington Postreported. Just 0.01 inches of rain fell in Central Park, far short of the 4 inches or so that usually fall during the month. Residents have been told to take shorter showers and fix leaks, and Adams called on the city’s agencies to draw up plans to conserve water. “Mother Nature is in charge, and so we must make sure we adjust,” he said. More than half the country was under drought conditions last month.
In case you missed it: Regulators from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Friday rejected a proposal to increase the load capacity of Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. The proposal was part of a deal to supply more power to a nearby Amazon data center. FERC voted 2-1 to block the move, citing concerns about grid reliability and rising energy bills for the public. FERC Chairman Willie Phillips dissented, and said the decision “fails to recognize the creative approach the agreement took and fails to demonstrate flexibility to ensure the grid can reliably and affordably handle rising demand.”
The CEO of oil giant TotalEnergies called for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to keep existing environmental laws in place if he wins this week’s election. Patrick Pouyanné told the Financial Times that revoking climate rules enacted under President Biden would create a “wild west” situation and hurt the oil industry’s reputation. “My view is that this will not help the industry, but on the contrary it will demonize, and then the dialogue will be even more antagonized,” Pouyanné said. Trump has promised to rescind much of the Inflation Reduction Act funding. Exxon’s chief financial officer Kathy Mikells told the FT that the IRA is helping support the economy, and “that gives a lot of people a lot of incentive to stand behind the IRA.”
Canada, the fourth-largest oil producer in the world, will publish a proposal today to cap greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel energy production. Energy is Canada’s highest-polluting sector, with oil and gas accounting for a quarter of all emissions and producing “more than double the greenhouse gas pollution than all other industries combined,” according to Hermine Landry, a spokeswoman for Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault. Landry toldReuters that the cap-and-trade system would incentivize high-emitting companies to invest in projects that reduce pollution, though an earlier report from Deloitte said the cap would likely nudge companies to cut production. Canada has a goal of curbing emissions by at least 40% compared to 2005 levels by the end of the decade. Whether this new proposal comes into effect will depend largely on the outcome of the next election, set to be held in late 2025.
“This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.” –Tim Stevens at The Vergetries to describe the digital acceleration tone produced by Rolls-Royce’s first EV, the ultra-luxury Spectre, which starts at $420,000.
Rolls-Royce
Voters in the crucial swing state will also decide key questions on their — and our — climate future.
In four days, Pennsylvania will become just about the most important place on Earth.
It is unlikely that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump can reach the White House without carrying the Keystone State; winning Pennsylvania bumps either’s odds of prevailing in the whole election to over 90%, according to polling analyst Nate Silver’s models. The state will also play a deciding role in control of the U.S. House and Senate, which in turn will help or hamper the next president’s agenda. America’s domestic trajectory, its foreign policy decisions, and even its allies and enemies could all come down to the whims of the state’s 8.9 million registered voters.
But Pennsylvanians have other important choices to make on their ballots, too. “Pennsylvania is a major energy state, and its decisions — regardless of what type of energy it is — have a huge impact on America’s energy portfolio,” John Qua, the campaign manager of Lead Locally, which is supporting 17 down-ballot candidates in the state, told me.
As the nation’s second-biggest gas producer after Texas and third-biggest coal producer after Wyoming and West Virginia, Pennsylvania also holds the distinction of being the fifth-largest greenhouse gas-emitting state in the nation. Its state legislature hasn’t passed new climate legislation since 2008, in large part because of the influence of the fossil fuel industry over local politics. The American Petroleum Institute donates more to Pennsylvania lawmakers than those in any other state, and while fracking isn’t the decisive local issue it’s made out to be in the popular consciousness, it still employs around 100,000 people — more than made the difference in deciding the 2020 election in the state. (Harris notably reneged on her 2019 pledge to ban fracking if elected in an apparent overture to Pennsylvanians, although the state’s imperiled Democratic senator, Bob Casey, has been hammered by his Republican challenger over her prior position.)
Pennsylvania has a Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, until at least 2026, and Democrats hold slim control over the state House of Representatives by a margin of 102 to 101. The ambition this cycle is to keep the state House and flip the Republican-held state Senate. Picking up three seats there would earn Democrats a governing trifecta, with a tie-breaking vote going to Democratic Lt. Gov Austin Davis. Flip four seats, and they’d have the majority.
But “if you asked me to bet you $10 that the Democrats would win, I wouldn’t take the bet,” David Masur, the executive director of PennEnvironment, a green research and advocacy group that works in the state, told me. “I think it’s just a long shot.”
The path to winning the state Senate and achieving a governing trifecta clearly runs through three districts. The first and easiest pickup is in SD-15, around the state capital in Harrisburg, where the “map is much friendlier to Democrats,” according to Masur. The party would then need to win a competitive seat in SD-37, in the Pittsburgh suburbs, which has tilted blue recently and also seems theoretically within reach. But things get trickier in SD-49, Democrats’ “white whale” district in Erie County, which President Biden won by 2 points but where Republican senator Dan Laughlin remains well-liked. To wrest back the chamber, in other words, the Democrats would “have to run the table,” Masur said. “I don’t even think there’s another race where you could go, ‘Oh, they could get the majority by winning this other seat.’ There’s nowhere else to go. They have to win those three.”
Because of recent redistricting, the climate groups working in the state are cautious about getting their hopes up too high. “Flipping the [state] Senate, which is currently held by Republicans, might be a two-cycle endeavor with these new maps,” Lead Locally’s Qua said. This doesn’t necessarily mean all is lost: Even maintaining control of two of the three levers of government in Pennsylvania would be a victory, and Democrats this summer managed to garner enough bipartisan support to pass legislation to bring solar panels to state schools.
But the stakes — and promises — of a trifecta feel crucial and tantalizingly close. According to a recent analysis by PennEnvironment, Pennsylvania is 48th in the nation for the percentage growth of total solar, wind, and geothermal in the past decade, and 46th in the nation for the percentage of growth in total solar over the past five years, generating less than its neighbors New Jersey, Maryland, and Ohio. “The fossil fuel industry is extremely moneyed and extremely influential, and it’s created a political reality where it’s very difficult to move good climate and clean energy policy forward in Harrisburg,” Flora Cardoni, PennEnvironment’s deputy director, told me. Climate obstructionists in the state Senate often refuse to call up good environmental policies for votes, leaving the state with “no laws on the books that require utility companies in Pennsylvania to increase the amount of clean renewable energy that they provide to their customers” which is “a huge impediment to progress.”
It’s not as if Democrats aren’t ready to go — they are. Shapiro is sitting on a two-bill plan for tackling climate change in the state. One would boost renewable energy to 35% of Pennsylvania’s total generation by 2035, which Cardoni described as “a huge step in the right direction, although we need to do much more.” The second bill would make polluters pay for their carbon emissions and spend the resulting money on clean air, water, and energy efficiency projects — essentially, a backup plan for if the state’s attempt to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative fails. (Owing to a question of constitutionality, RGGI is in limbo with the state’s Supreme Court.)
So, in a sense, you have to go for it. “Yeah, they’re really hard races,” admitted Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, which is supporting 26 candidates in the state. “But if you win,” she added, “you win the fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the country.” While she was loath to “compare our states against each other,” Spears pointed out that Pennsylvania’s emissions are about two and a half times those of Arizona, which makes it a much bigger opportunity for reductions.
Perhaps the most important point: No one really knows what’s going to happen. Not only are organizers working with new maps in the state due to 2022 redistricting, but state-level races also rarely attract substantial enough polling to make reliably predictive guesses, especially when there are so many toss-ups and razor-thin margins. Adding to the trickiness, Pennsylvania is one of the few states where residents still appear willing to split their tickets; in 2020, ticket-splitting between the president and the state Legislature was up to 15 points in places, which is part of why Climate Cabinet has targeted races in the state with margins of up to 10 points that other groups wouldn’t touch. “Folks have been like, ‘the Pennsylvania Senate’s not doable.’ That’s the word on the street,” Spears told me. “But I think people are forgetting a little bit that that was also the word on the street about the Minnesota Senate and the Michigan legislature,” which flipped during the 2022 midterms.
What’s encouraging is that Pennsylvania voters — contrary to their image of being fracking obsessives — have been curious or even enthusiastic about pivoting to clean energy when organizers have spoken with them. Following Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, which caused outages across the state, many residents now “recognize that the grid is outdated,” Julia Kortrey, the deputy state policy director at Evergreen Action, a national climate advocacy group, told me. There’s an acknowledgment among many that “the status quo is not working.”
As in many parts of the country this year, local races in Pennsylvania are mainly focused on battles over education, abortion access, immigration, and crime, not necessarily clean energy. But often, climate-related issues are bubbling just under the surface. “I’m not going to go up to someone’s door and ask ‘What issue is on your mind today?’ and have them say, ‘I’m really worried about the PM2.5 concentration or the Mauna Loa CO2 readings,’” Spears told me. “But if they’re like, ‘The cost of living is too high,’ I’m going to have a conversation about home insurance.”
A particularly good example of this is playing out in one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. House races, which will help determine the ultimate makeup of Congress. In the Lehigh Valley, Democratic Representative Susan Wild is attempting to hold off her Republican challenger, state Representative Ryan Mackenzie, who voted against the school solar bill and the state’s clean water act. Wild had been particularly instrumental in helping to replace lead pipes in the area, and she’s made her leadership on the issue prominent in her campaigning. “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and lead pipe removal can seem very — I don’t want to say national, but it can be hard to visualize,” Nate Fowler, the regional campaigns director of the League of Conservation Voters, told me. “But for voters in this part of the Commonwealth, it’s easy for them to understand why this is so important.”
It won’t be until after the dust from Tuesday settles — when Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes have been allocated, and its U.S. House and Senate races decided — that national attention will turn to the consequences of the state’s down-ballot races, if it ever does. But whether Democrats run the table or Republicans eat into their opponents’ grip on the legislature, Pennsylvania’s elections will be pivotal to the nation’s greater evolving energy story.
“So much of what we can accomplish in Pennsylvania will lay the groundwork for what is accomplished across the country,” Kortrey, of Evergreen Action, said. “I tell folks, ‘If we can do it in Pennsylvania, we can do it anywhere.’”
On an EV production pause, a fancy new chart, and positive emissions news from the EU.
Current conditions:New York City, Long Island, and the Lower Hudson Valley, along with much of the Northeast Corridor, are under red flag warnings for fire after a month of dry weather • Typhoon Kong-rey made landfill in Taiwan with winds over 125 miles per hour, injuring more than 500 and killing two • The first snow of the year showed up in Iowa and, yes, Hawaii.
Ford is planning a temporary shutdown of the plant that produces its fully electric truck, the F-150 Lightning. The shutdown will last seven weeks, Bloomberg reported. Earlier this week, Ford told investors that its profits had fallen in part due to a $1 billion charge it had taken after overhauling its electric vehicle strategy earlier this year. Ford sold just over 7,000 Lightnings in the third quarter of this year, more than double its sales in the third quarter of last year, but just about 3.5% of its total F-150 sales. Overall, electric vehicle sales rose in the third quarter, but when it came to trucks, consumers preferred the Tesla Cybertruck to the Lightning.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
The Department of Energy announced Thursday that it would award $45 million in funding for eight electric vehicle battery recycling programs. The projects “will advance research, development, and demonstration of recycling and second-life applications for batteries once used to power EVs,” the DOE said. The programs include money for diagnostics, automatic sorting for used batteries, and automated battery dissembling. The projects being funded are in Southern California, Michigan, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Tennessee.
Microsoft will use wood to build two data centers in Northern Virginia, the company announced Tuesday. Use of “cross-laminated timber” will reduce the carbon footprint of the data centers’ construction by about a third compared to steel and almost two-thirds compared to concert, the company said. This is just the latest move by Microsoft to try to reduce emissions associated with construction — the company is also working on developing a market for buying environmental attributes of low-carbon cement, Heatmap reported earlier this month. Microsoft’s “indirect” emissions of greenhouse gases rose by over 30% last year, largely thanks to the massive data center building binge it’s been on, along with the rest of Big Tech.
While plans to build data centers are creating electricity demand anxiety all over the country, the boom may not disrupt or strain New York’s grid, at least for a while, New York Focus reports. “Despite mounting pressures due to the state’s climate law and a burst in new manufacturing and tech facilities, New York has enough power plants operating or planned to meet statewide demand over the next decade,” the news nonprofit reported, citing an analysis by NYISO, which operates New York’s electricity market.
This finding is important because it means that not every carbon-emitting power plant has to stay open to meet new demand, which may let New York get closer to achieving its emissions targets. The reason for the more optimistic forecast is that some of the largest loads in the state like crypto mining or hydrogen told NYISO they can shut down during times of high demand on the grid.
European Union greenhouse gas emissions fell 8.3% in 2023, according to the European Commission’s annual climate report. It was the largest fall in emissions “in several decades,” not counting 2020, when economic activity plummeted due to Covid-19. Annual emissions have fallen by more than a third since 1990, while economic activity has increased by two-thirds since then. The report attributed much of the drop to the continent’s energy sector, whose emissions dropped 18%.
“This drop was due to a substantial increase in renewable electricity production (primarily wind and solar), at the expense of both coal and gas and, to a lesser extent, a decrease in both electricity and heat supply compared with 2022, and to the recovery of hydro and nuclear power.” The drop in EU emissions stands in contrast to rising emissions globally in 2023, according to the United Nations.
To the delight of energy nerds, the Energy Information Administration has published a new Sankey diagram showing how energy gets used in the U.S. economy.