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The Prius still lives large in the popular imagination.
A year ago, the Toyota Prius went from bulbous to badass. The hybrid icon got its most dramatic redesign in two decades, which dispensed with the familiar friendly and rounded look for an angular, almost menacing front end. The vehicle, which once again came in traditional hybrid and plug-in hybrid variants, earned enthusiasm from buyers and plaudits from the auto press. What Toyota didn’t do, curiously, was finally turn the Prius into a true battery electric vehicle.
The world’s largest car company has been among the slowest of the major automakers to embrace 100% electric propulsion. Yet, as Heatmap data shows, such heel-dragging hasn’t dinged Toyota’s green reputation. In our November 2023 survey, Toyota scored the second-highest on perceived sustainability of any automaker.
Audi’s E-Tron, VW’s ID.4, Kia’s Soul EV, BMW’s i3, and Hyundai’s Kona Electric were all on sale in the U.S. well before the bZ4X, Toyota’s first mass market EV. Yet none of those cars could transform American attitudes about companies that made them. While Tesla’s notoriety helped it to top our sustainability survey, the likes of Audi, Volkswagen, Kia, Hyundai, and BMW all scored below Toyota.
To be clear, Toyota certainly earned some sustainable bona fides. The Prius for years was the icon of conspicuous conscientious driving. Eventually, the car of the eco-minded became the car of anybody who wanted to get great gas mileage. In selling six million Priuses, Toyota helped countless drivers post far better mpg than they otherwise would have. And let us not forget the Toyota Mirai, which since 2014 has been the best mainstream option for anybody who wants to drive a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.
But the results go to show that even at the dawn of the mainstream EV era, more goes into the popular idea of “sustainability” than purely electric cars.
Volkswagen, for example, may have introduced a popular EV with the ID.4 crossover, but many respondents surely remember the scandal over VW’s diesel emissions and punished the German giant for its misdeeds.
Or consider the case of Subaru, which was not part of this survey. The brand incessantly advertises itself as a friend of the National Park System and touts its corporate donations to climate causes. Its car show launch events and television commercials depict Subarus in outdoor environments. Given its public image, I’d have to guess that Subaru would have scored highly. Yet none of its vehicles get particularly high gas mileage. (There is a Subaru commercial that drives my wife and me crazy, in which a teacher describes her 240-mile daily carbon-spewing commute like it’s a badge of honor.) Like Toyota, Subaru was slow into the EV market; its first, the Solterra, just came out last year. It was co-developed with Toyota and is fundamentally the same car as the bZ4X.
Despite leading the charge on hybrids and hydrogen, Toyota’s electric enthusiasm has been tepid at best. Whereas many auto giants have trotted out new electrics or teased battery-powered versions of their iconic gas vehicles, Toyota’s attitude more mirrored the general public’s: We’ll just wait until the charging infrastructure makes this more practical for daily driving, thank you very much. In the meantime, the brand touts its “electrified” lineup, which, aside from the bZ4X, is made up entirely of hybrids that also burn gasoline.
And to drive the point home, Toyota has also actively worked against emissions regulations, repeatedly lobbying against such efforts. In 2021, the company settled with the U.S. government for $180 million for failing to comply with Clean Air Act regulations. Hino, a truck- and bus-making division of Toyota, was caught falsifying engine emissions data going back decades.
Seeing the lukewarm reception given many legacy carmakers’ EV offerings, it’s hard to blame Toyota for languishing in the rear, content to keep selling fossil-fuel burning vehicles for as long as it’s profitable. It also must answer a tricky question: What is the EV Prius? The hybrid standard-bearer had a clear identity as an eggshell that delivered top gas mileage. In the EV space, where even big vehicles deliver excellent mileage equivalence, it’s unclear what the Prius brand name will mean.
But pretty soon, Toyota needs to pounce. The company is clearly getting a little closer to ready: A couple of months ago I came to praise the Hilux EV, a prototype fully electric version of Toyota’s global best-selling compact truck. That project was a one-off built by engineers overseas, but it points the way to how Toyota could flex its global muscles to help turn the world fleet over to EVs. Toyota is also seen as among the most reliable carmakers — for example, Toyota and its sub-brand Lexus topped the 2023 Consumer Reports reliability rankings. That, combined with its reputation for sustainability, could be enough to convince hesitant car shoppers to go fully electric once the brand finally rolls out EV editions of the Camry, RAV4, or, yes, the Prius.
The bZ4X might have been uninspiring, but that’s not what really matters. What matters is that Toyota is finally moving into true EVs — and soon, we hope, it will do a lot more to back up its good name among climate-friendly companies.
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group via online panels from Nov. 6 to 13, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
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The administration argued in the name of national defense — but Orsted had receipts.
When the Trump administration ordered work on Orsted’s Revolution Wind offshore wind project to shut down in late August, it cited national security concerns as the reason for the delay.
Within weeks, a federal judge had lifted the stop work order, allowing construction to proceed.
What happened in between matters. In its rush to stop a wind project, the Trump administration exposed the first cracks in its anti-wind policy agenda — a loss that may embolden companies targeted by the crackdown on renewable energy development to fight back.
Orsted, the Danish wind giant, was more than halfway done building Revolution Wind by August 22, the day the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ordered an immediate stop to construction. In a one-page letter explaining the order, the agency dedicated a single paragraph to the rationale behind its decision: “BOEM is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas,” it said.
Orsted filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government within days and asked for a preliminary injunction against the stop-work order. The Trump administration had acted arbitrarily when it halted construction on Revolution Wind, the company argued, a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, which forces the government to have at least some sensible reason for its decision-making.
There were urgent financial stakes to the court’s decision, the company said. On top of strict timelines for completing the project that were laid out in power purchase agreements, the cable installation company working on Revolution Wind has just a brief window before it is booked for other projects through mid-2028. Unless the judge acted quickly, according to Orsted, Revolution Wind could face “project cancellation and termination of the enterprise,” at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion.
After Orsted filed its suit, the attorneys general of Connecticut and Rhode Island — two of the three states designated to receive electricity from Revolution Wind — soon followed course. The Trump administration responded by doubling down on its claims related to national defense. Revolution Wind, officials argued, would negatively impact radar detection and result in dangerous electromagnetic emissions. They also asserted that Defense Department officials were overruled or ignored when they raised concerns about this matter in the review process for the project, which received its final permits in 2023. (It’s worth noting the Trump administration’s legal filings refer to the military as the Department of War, or DOW.)
The Department of the Interior’s acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, Adam Suess, told the court on September 12 in a sworn declaration that Revolution Wind had not fully addressed a host of concerns. Suess elaborated on the stop work order, asserting that it concerned the project’s “continued inability to reach certain mitigation agreements” with the military and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Suess stated Revolution Wind was not in full compliance with the terms of its construction and operations plan, which are subject to government approval. He also said there were outstanding issues with Revolution Wind’s coordination with military operators at sea, and that there was still “risk from distributed optical fiber sensing and acoustic monitoring equipment.
“The Department has been in touch with NOAA and the DOW to gather more information,” the filing said, somewhat cryptically.
Suess also acknowledged that the Trump administration is reconsidering its prior green lights for Revolution Wind, including its approval of the construction and operations plan, linking this to a broader all-of-government review of the offshore wind industry Trump ordered on Day One via executive order.
In response, Orsted called the government’s bluff. The company submitted sworn declarations from top company officials who had worked on Revolution Wind, attesting to the fact that before Trump came into office, the military and NOAA were saying everything looked A-OK.
“Mr. Suess’ declaration makes new allegations against Revolution Wind that were not mentioned in the stop work order,” Orsted’s attorneys wrote in their reply. “These new allegations are factually inaccurate and controverted by Revolution Wind’s compliance with project requirements.”
One of Orsted’s declarations was from Melanie Gearon, the company’s head of northeast permitting. Suess had claimed that Revolution Wind was far from reaching a critical agreement with NOAA’s Fisheries division, known as the National Marine Fisheries Service, to mitigate the effects of sea surveys on fishing vessels. But Gearon painted a completely different picture, detailing years of negotiations with NOAA and BOEM about how to handle the surveys.
These talks had apparently continued months into the Trump administration. Orsted submitted an email from BOEM to the company dated July 9, in which an official explicitly says that agency staff were discussing scenarios where Orsted could just “state that they are continuing to work with [the National Marine Fisheries Service] on a Survey Mitigation agreement, which could still be submitted at a later date.” Gearon said the company had received “updated cost modeling” from the agency as recently as September 9, days before Suess’ comments were submitted in court.
Then came the comments from Orsted’s head of marine affairs, Edward LeBlanc, who served in the military for decades and worked on offshore energy oversight. He told the court that the Navy had never once raised any issues with the project’s export cable and that as recently as July 2025, no military officials had expressed lingering concerns about electromagnetic emissions, vessel collisions or other potential national security problems.
“To date, Revolution Wind has never received a notice or any indication that it has failed to coordinate with DOD regarding its offshore activities, or that the U.S. Navy or DOD has any concerns with the ongoing coordination,” LeBlanc stated.
It was after this filing that the justice overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, approved the preliminary injunction and lifted the stop-work order.
As long as offshore wind has existed there has been tension with the U.S. military over use of the sea, and it is true that turbines could hinder radar detection.
In 2011, the Defense Department established a “clearinghouse” to resolve any potential issues with ocean energy development of any kind, whether oil, gas, or wind power. The clearinghouse reviews more than 5,000 projects every year, and its activities include regular give and take with the Interior Department and Federal Aviation Administration. One of the many pieces of evidence Orsted submitted in the Revolution Wind case was a December 2024 letter from the clearinghouse stating the project “would not have adverse impacts to DOD missions in the area.”
Josh Kaplowitz, an environmental attorney who represents renewable energy companies including offshore wind developers, and who previously worked in the Interior Department solicitor’s office, told me: “There is not a single situation I am aware of where the Defense Department ever requested something and the approving agency said, ‘No, we’re going to do something else.’”
“There are some problems with coming in after the fact and coming up with post hoc national security rationalizations when the process of review was so rigorous,” Kaplowitz said.
Independent analysis has also cleared the military’s consultation with offshore wind permitting agencies of having any serious issues.
Earlier this year the Government Accountability Office — a quasi-independent watchdog under the control of Congress — released a detailed review of the offshore wind industry’s federal permitting process. The review was requested by one of the sector’s biggest adversaries in Congress, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, who has been heavily involved in fighting offshore wind development in his home state.
Smith, a Republican, ultimately celebrated the review’s publication because it pointed out certain ways offshore wind could impact radar detection and military readiness. IIn his public statements, however, the lawmaker left out a key detail of the report — that it raised no issues with interactions between the military and offices involved in greenlighting offshore wind projects. In fact, it went into great detail on the lengths researchers and government officials had gone toward solving these potential problems.
“We didn’t have any recommendations there,” Frank Russo, director of GAO’s natural resources department, told me in an interview. “It seemed like coordination was going well, that DOD was satisfied with what was going on, and if there were concerns they could be mitigated.”
Russo said that Defense officials had for years been involved in offshore wind leasing, meaning that military staff from the Navy and Coast Guard had already weighed in on potential safety and readiness problems before companies even knew where they were allowed to build, and certainly prior to the project-specific permitting stage.
“At the very start of it, they know where their main concerns are,” Russo said of the Defense Department’s role in offshore wind development.
The Interior Department normally declines to comment on pending litigation. But I still wanted to ask Interior to comment on the assertions from Russo that the Interior Department and military were previously not properly handling the security implications of offshore wind. It felt especially important to ask them about this because Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last month explained the Revolution Wind stop work order on national TV by claiming radar interference would leave the country vulnerable to “swarm attacks” from underwater drones.
Interior did not provide comment in time for publication.
Packed hearings. Facebook organizing. Complaints about prime farmland and a disappearing way of life. Sound familiar?
Solar and wind companies cite the rise of artificial intelligence to make their business cases after the United States government slashed massive tax incentives for their projects.
But the data centers supposed to power the AI boom are now facing the sort of swift wave of rejections from local governments across the country eerily similar to what renewables developers have been dealing with on the ground over the last decade. The only difference is, this land use techlash feels even more sudden, intense, and culturally diffuse.
What’s happening is simple: Data centers are now routinely being denied by local governments in zoning and permitting decisions after local residents turn against them. These aggrieved denizens organize grassroots campaigns, many with associated Facebook groups, and then flood city council and county commission hearings.
Just take this past week. Last Thursday, Prince George’s County, Maryland, paused all data center permitting after a campaign against converting an abandoned mall into a data center gained traction online, with a petition garnering more than 20,000 signatures. On Monday, faced with a ferocious public outcry, Google rescinded a proposal to build what would’ve been its second data center in Indiana in Franklin Township, a community in southeastern Indianapolis – a withdrawal requested mere minutes before the township council was reportedly going to reject it.
That same day, the rural Illinois town of DeKalb denied a solar company’s request to build a “boutique data center” on the same site as a previously-permitted solar farm. And on Tuesday, the small city of Howell – located smack between Lansing and Detroit, Michigan – denied a data center proposed by an anonymous Fortune 100 company. Apparently, so many people showed up to voice their opposition to the project that the hearing was held in a high school gymnasium.
Opponents cite many things in their arguments against development, some unique to the sector like energy and water use, and others familiar to the solar and wind industry, like preserving prime farmland or maintaining a way of life.
These arguments are incredibly salient, as polling conducted by Heatmap News has revealed: less than half of Americans would ever support a data center coming near them, and this technology infrastructure is less popular than any form of renewable energy. Digging into the cross-tabs of that poll, data centers are unpopular with essentially all age demographics, and arguments against the facilities – like “they use too much water” or “they consume too much electricity” – get relatively similar agreement from registered Democrats and Republicans alike.
Ben Inskeep, a clean energy advocate in Indianapolis, told me he started fighting data centers last year after he became aware of the total power needed to fuel the rising number of projects in the state. His advocacy organization, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, previously weighed in on rate hikes and electricity generation decisions. Now, they’re tracking more than 40 data center projects they say are proposed in the state and getting involved in the fight on the ground against them.
Inskeep told me that, from his point of view, the primary support for data centers comes from local governments and municipally-funded works like schools and health facilities that are facing slashed budgets. In some cases the projects are being rejected despite representing millions – even billions – in capital investments and potential tax revenues so large that municipal governments are put between a rock and a hard place as they’re pressured by a weakening economy and state funding cuts.
That’s what happened in Indianapolis. Earlier this month the school district that would’ve been funded by the now-rejected Google data center came out in support of the project, declaring it would welcome new tax revenue, and said it would also lead to new educational partnerships with the tech giant. But none of that mattered. Some local officials even lambasted their colleagues' support as unwarranted, a lashing out that reminds me of what happens to pro-solar officials in Ohio.
Heatmap News has been tracking contested data center projects since the spring of this year and has found almost 100 projects under development across the country that are being actively fought by local organizers, citizens advocacy groups, and environmental organizations. The data is preliminary and likely an undercount.
Still, there’s lots to glean from it. Crucially, as we’ve seen with renewable energy development, data center opposition crops up most often in tandem with the number of projects proposed and constructed. This is only logical: the more of something that is built in a place, the more likely people are to say, “We’ve built enough of that.” This is why Virginia is the top state when it comes to data centers being opposed – it’s a hub that’s seen development spike for far longer than elsewhere in the United States.
I believe that as data center project proposals continue to rise across the country, we’ll see in parallel rising hostility to their development – potentially much larger than anything renewable energy has ever faced. It will undoubtedly also be a problem for anyone in solar or wind who is riding on an AI boom to add demand for their projects.
And more of the week’s most important news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Pulaski County, Arkansas – The attorney general of Arkansas is reassuring residents that yes, they can still ban wind farms if they want to.
2. Des Moines County, Iowa – This county facing intense pressure to lock out renewables is trying to find a sweet spot that doesn’t involve capitulation. Whether that’s possible remains to be seen.
3. Fayette County, Tennessee – This county just extended its solar energy moratorium for at least the next 18 months after pressure from residents.
4. McCracken County, Kentucky – It’s not all bad news this week, as a large solar project in Kentucky appears to be moving forward without fomenting difficulties on the ground.