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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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It’s an electric vehicle success story, but based on its new future guidance for investors, GM is still getting hammered by the shift in federal policy.
General Motors is on a hot streak with its electric cars. The Chevrolet Equinox EV topped 25,000 in sales during the third quarter of this year, becoming America’s best-selling electric vehicle that’s not a Tesla. The revived Chevy Bolt is due to arrive just after the new year at a starting price under $30,000, and the company promises that more low-cost EVs are on the way. And a variety of new electric offerings have, at the very least, breathed new life and intrigue into the struggling Cadillac brand.
With its Ultium platform helping GM to scale up production of these battery-powered cars, the Detroit giant seems well-positioned among the legacy carmakers to find success in the EV era. Yet last week, GM put out information for investors that predicted a loss of $1.6 billion compared to its previous outlook on the EV market.
Blame chaos. Automakers crave the boring and the predictable. It can take years to tweak the looks or the specs of an existing vehicle, to say nothing of the half-decade or more required to design and build a new car from scratch. With so much time and money on the line, car companies want to know what kind of world will greet their new creations.
But because of the shifting political winds in America, predictability has been hard to come by. Automakers planned and publicized big pushes into electric cars on the assumption that federal policy would continue to move the nation in that direction. They started to move manufacturing into the U.S. to satisfy Biden-era rules for tax credit eligibility. Then they were jerked in the opposite direction by a Trump administration that killed those federal incentives, slapped on haphazard new tariffs that penalize EVs, and got rid of the pollution penalties that nudged carmakers toward a cleaner future.
GM says its newly gloomy outlook is based partly on a decrease in predicted demand. In the absence of federal tax credits that made it more affordable for drivers to choose EVs (gone as of October 1), GM revised down the number of electric cars it expected Americans to buy. As the car market abruptly changes direction — again — GM must change plans to keep up, which means retooling factories to produce fewer EVs and more still-profitable ICE vehicles.
As GM says in its official investor release: “Following recent U.S. government policy changes, including the termination of certain consumer tax incentives for EV purchases and the reduction in the stringency of emissions regulations, we expect the adoption rate of EVs to slow. These charges include non-cash impairment and other charges of $1.2 billion as a result of adjustments to our EV capacity.” Another $400 million in estimated losses come from “contract cancellation fees and commercial settlements associated with EV-related investments,” which is how they arrive at the total of $1.6 billion.
The conglomerate says that this bit of bad news won’t affect its current lineups. But its predicament is emblematic of how the car giants find themselves stuck between the past and the future. In China and other nations around the world, EV adoption continues apace, but the established big automakers simply can’t compete there with the rock-bottom prices of Chinese-made EVs. In the West, meanwhile, the new wave of EV antagonism is pushing the industry back toward the fossil fuels that provided their profits in the past — despite the billions they’ve already invested in electrification.
GM is not alone in this, of course. Ford has gone through several rounds of whiplash during its electrification process — first losing billions on its early EVs, then slowing its EV development plans to retreat toward the easy profitability of combustion, before recently unveiling a different vision to make its EVs scalable and affordable. Companies like Hyundai, which tried to win the EV race, find themselves penalized for trying to qualify for the now-dead Biden tax incentives. Those that dragged their feet, like Toyota, are well-positioned to keep making money in this weird moment.
The end result is that for the sake of survival, companies like GM find themselves talking out of both sides of their mouth. At the end of the previous decade, when it looked as though the 2020s would be the era of EVs, GM pledged itself to a zero-emissions future. And while GM has been an EV success story of late, the Detroit giant also has spent enormous amounts to lobby the federal government against clean air regulations whose disappearance would make its combustion sector more profitable.
If there’s a positive sign from GM’s sour note, it is the statement from James Cain, executive director for finance and sales communications, that, regarding its stable of current EVs, “we will build them to demand.” In other words, it’s not as though GM is throwing in the towel — if Americans keep buying electric Cadillacs and Chevys despite the mess of a market, it’ll keep making them. Even if that means changing plans and retooling factories again.
On Interior’s permitting upset, a nuclear restart milestone, and destroying ‘superpollutants’
A tropical storm brewing in the Caribbean is likely to strengthen into a named storm in the coming days, bringing deadly flooding and powerful winds | Tropical storm Fengshen has killed at least eight in the Philippines as it barrels toward Vietnam and Laos | In Australia, record heat in the eastern Outback hit 113 degrees Fahrenheit.
Late last month, the Department of Energy clawed back $7.5 billion from 321 separate grants to clean energy projects. A week later, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo extensively reported, a list that included three times as many grants, including those that had already been canceled, began circulating. When the agency declined to confirm that the second list as real, speculation mounted that it was either an old document that the Trump administration was using as a threat for political leverage in ongoing negotiations over the government shutdown, or that the White House was staying mum to avoid conflicts over cuts in red districts. Recent events, however, seem to confirm that the longer kill list is precisely what it appears to be. On Monday, the Energy Department told E&E News that it had canceled $700 million in battery manufacturing projects, the first grants off the second list the agency confirmed were on the chopping block. The awards had gone to companies including Ascend Elements, American Battery Technology Co., Anovion, and ICL Specialty Products, as well as the glass manufacturer LuxWall.
Just because the U.S. is pulling back support for the production of batteries doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of purchasers. On Monday, BloombergNEF estimated that global energy storage additions are set to reach 92 gigawatts this year, up 23% from last year, according to the consultancy’s market forecast for the second half of 2025. Utility-scale projects made up 84% of the annual growth, and the U.S. market kept expanding despite federal funding cuts. BloombergNEF also said U.S. buyers were looking for more domestic manufacturers to weather rising tariffs, which might be tricky given recent trends in the space.

Despite the Trump administration’s promises to speed up permitting for energy projects, the Department of the Interior plans to fire more than 200 workers in state offices that manage federal licensing in key regions for fossil fuel, geothermal, and mining development. In a court filing Monday, the agency said it would cut as much as 12% of the staff at its Bureau of Land Management office in Utah, 9% in the California outpost, and 6% in Colorado. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s regional office for the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, was set to lose 5% of its employees. And those are just the local offices I found in the 35-page document that explicitly handled energy permitting. The cuts are part of a plan to “imminently” axe at least 2,000 jobs from the Interior Department overall, including — as NOTUS first reported — hundreds of National Park Service employees.
The administration’s tightened grip over the BLM office in Utah has already caused some headaches for next-generation geothermal companies, according to industry sources I spoke to earlier this year, as local officials who once had the autonomy to greenlight incremental permits for drilling exploration suddenly needed to report back to political officials in Washington. The Interior Department ultimately eased the issue, but the example illustrates what’s at stake when a state office that’s tasked with doing more as new projects proliferate has fewer people and resources.
A month after federal officers raided Hyundai Motor Group’s $26 billion factory in Ellabell, Georgia, shackling more than 300 South Korean workers the Trump administration accused of violating visa rules, the carmaker remains focused on expanding its U.S. production. Facing growing competition from Chinese cars in other markets, the Korean auto giant still sees the U.S. as its best market for growth, The New York Times reported Monday. “My top three priorities are U-S-A,” José Muñoz, chief executive of Hyundai Motor Company, the car-making subsidiary, said at the company’s annual investor gathering, reportedly pausing for effect after each letter. “If we do well here, it’s very good for Korea. It’s very good for the company.”
The chance to reap the fruits of what Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman called Hyundai’s “incredible timing” may be too tempting to pass up, even as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid sparked a diplomatic crisis involving South Korea’s foreign minister. The company spent three years working on the 2,900-acre campus near Savannah, and sought to make a public statement about its support for President Donald Trump’s re-industrialization plans by naming the facility Metaplant America. With tariffs now coming into force, Andrew argued, Hyundai is better positioned than most to supply the domestic market.
The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan received fresh nuclear fuel on Monday in what the facility’s owner called “a major milestone on the path to restarting” a permanently shuttered atomic station for the first time in the U.S. As I reported in this newsletter at the time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Holtec International the green light to restart the facility in July, setting a new precedent for reauthorizing operations at a plant that was already slated for decommissioning. The project faced some local opposition from not-in-my-backyard types backed by the anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear. But the Trump administration stood behind the project. The $1.5 billion loan granted by the Biden-era Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office to Holtec to fund the reopening was the only financing deal the agency maintained without any interruption through the change in leadership.
Aside from the 68 fuel assemblies arriving, Holtec said “major equipment restoration work is progressing,” including the reassembly of the main turbine generator and the chemical cleaning of the steam generators. Once complete, the work will remake Holtec — until now primarily a manufacturer of casks to store nuclear waste and a decommissioning company — into an operator of an active power plant. In a press release, Holtec CEO Kris Singh called the “esprit de corps of our tirelessly toiling worker force” a “testament to the national consensus and our collective will to harness nuclear energy to meet the galloping demand for power in our country.”
Isometric bills itself as the world’s leading carbon registry, providing what it calls “scientifically rigorous carbon removal credits so companies can reliably meet their climate commitments.” Now the British company is expanding its operations to cover two climate superpollutants: landfill methane and hydrofluorocarbons. The startup plans to develop protocols for eliminating emissions of both superheating gases with its in-house science team and network of more than 300 outside researchers. Among its partners will be Recoolit, a company that collects and destroys refrigerants and previously partnered with Google to destroy the carbon dioxide equivalent of 250,000 metric tons of superpollutants. Another is Cool Effect, a California-based nonprofit that sells carbon credits for landfill gas collection projects. It worked with Google earlier this year to support the installation of methane destruction equipment at a landfill in Cuiabá, Brazil. “Superpollutants are responsible for nearly half of global warming,” Eamon Jubbawy, Isometric’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Isometric is entering this market to bring the scientific rigour needed to help this crucial climate solution scale, using the same transparent approach that is building the trust needed to scale the carbon removal market.”
Call the paradox of shrinking sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Overall, it’s a disaster. But the mass melting is fueling the engine of Arctic food chains: algae. A new study led by the University of Copenhagen suggests there will be more food for future marine life than previously thought. That will also improve the ocean’s carbon dioxide uptake, which the researchers said was “likely good news” for the climate. “But biological systems are very complex, so it is hard to make firm predictions, because other mechanisms may pull in the opposite direction,” Lasse Riemann, professor at the Department of Biology and senior author of the study, said in a press release. “We do not yet know whether the net effect will be beneficial for the climate.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify Cool Effect’s role in capturing landfill methane.
Riders in Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area are staring down budget crises, with deep service cuts not far behind.
Three of the country’s largest public transportation systems are facing severe budget shortfalls that have left them near a breaking point. Transit riders in Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area of California could see severe service cuts as soon as next year if their representatives don’t secure funding to fill significant gaps in their operations budgets, the result of dwindling ridership and federal aid.
Should these lawmakers fail or fall short, they could kick off what transit advocates refer to as a “death spiral,” where higher fares and worse service leads to lower ridership, which leads to more cuts, etc., until there’s effectively no service left.
“I think that in a lot of cases, the public, legislators, governors are maybe not aware of just how high the stakes are right now,” David Weiskopf, the senior policy director for Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that helps to elect climate-minded politicians, told me.
Public transit is a uniquely tricky, political issue, as it requires convincing elected officials from across a given state to address an issue that primarily affects people in one concentrated region — even if that region happens to be one of the main economic engines of the entire state economy. And yet transportation is the No. 1 way Americans contribute to climate change. While electric vehicles get a lot more attention as a climate solution, expanding public transit can also reduce emissions with the added benefits of minimizing the raw materials extraction and electricity demand that come along with EVs.
But that’s just a part of what Weiskopf is talking about in terms of the stakes. Millions of people rely on public transit to get themselves to work and their kids to school. Public transit also reduces local air pollution and traffic. Losing the services that already exist would surrender all of those benefits — worsening affordability and quality of life just as they have become top-tier political issues.
There’s a clear chain of events that led so many major transit systems to the brink of collapse this year. In the late 1990s, Congress eliminated federal funding for public transit operations in major cities, instead allocating all of its financial assistance to capital transit projects, such as new or improved infrastructure. Buses and metros began to rely more heavily on revenue from fares to cover operating expenses like staff and fuel. That became disastrous when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and cut ridership dramatically.
Congress passed a series of pandemic relief laws that provided substantial funding for transit operations, keeping them afloat to shuttle essential workers. But that money dried up, and in many places, ridership has remained stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels for reasons including the rise in remote work. Meanwhile, transit systems continued to age, and the cost of labor and materials rose.
State lawmakers have been slow to act, allowing their biggest cities’ transit systems to inch dangerously close to the edge of a fiscal cliff. In Illinois, the legislature has just a few days left in its session to find the money to prevent layoffs and service cuts across Chicago’s three transit systems next year. In California, the state is hammering out a stopgap loan to keep Bay Area operators funded through 2026, while betting the longer-term health of the system on a ballot measure next fall. The split Pennsylvania legislature is at a total impasse on the issue. Governor Josh Shapiro recently authorized transit agencies to dip into their capital budgets to prevent immediate service cuts, but there’s no longer-term solution in sight.
These three states are not entirely unique — almost every public transit system in the country is dealing with the same challenges. But they’re useful case studies to illustrate just how high the stakes are, and what kinds of solutions are on the table.
Prior to the pandemic, two of San Francisco’s regional rail systems — Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, and Cal Train — were covering upwards of 70% of their operating costs with fares, Sebastian Petty, the senior transportation policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, told me. In 2024, however, fare revenue was roughly half of what it was in 2019, covering just under a third of the cost of running the system, with the rest filled in by emergency federal assistance. “There’s no real, obvious path to financial sustainability that doesn't involve some longer source of sustained new public funding,” Petty said.
BART now projects that its COVID relief funding will be gone by spring of next year, after which it will face a deficit of $350 million to $400 million per year. The implications are catastrophic. The fixed costs of operating the system are so high that service cuts alone can’t make up the shortfall. BART estimates that even if it cut service by 90% — including closing at 9 p.m., cutting frequency from every 20 minutes to once an hour, shutting down two full train lines, laying off more than 1,000 workers — that would not be enough to close the gap.
The legislature decided on a regional sales tax as the best way to fund the system, but has left the final say in the matter up to voters. In September, lawmakers passed a bill that authorized a ballot measure in five Bay Area counties next year. Voters will be asked to approve a sales tax increase of half a cent — or a full cent, in the case of San Francisco — for a period of 14 years.
Regardless of whether the ballot measure is successful, however, the transit system still faces a fiscal cliff next year without some kind of bridge funding. A separate bill requires the state Department of Finance to propose a solution for short-term financial assistance for Bay Area transit agencies to bridge the roughly $750 million budget gap for the next year to prevent immediate service cuts. The department has a deadline of January 10, after which the legislature will have to vote on the proposal.
“To be frank, this is not a great position to be in,” Petty said. “People are really, really worried.” But he said this still seems like the best path forward given how large the scale of money needed is. “I say this as someone who’s worked in transit for a while,” Petty told me. “Transit seems to be in some degree of perpetual funding challenge, but this one really is different.”
Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority, which governs the area’s three transit companies, says that it faces a $230 million budget shortfall next year, which could increase nearly fourfold in 2027 without new funding. The agency has warned that it will begin cutting paratransit service for people with disabilities as soon as April, which will expand to main line service and layoffs over the summer if the legislature can’t agree on a new revenue source this month.
Amy Rynell, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance, a Chicago-based nonprofit, told me the uncertainty alone has hurt the transit operators’ ability to plan. “The agencies are having to spend a lot of time putting forth multiple budgets to figure out what to do in this moment,” she said. “That’s detracting from the ability to build for the future and develop new projects. People are having to look at keeping the doors open versus making transit better.”
Lawmakers in Illinois spent much of the first half of the year trying to nail down a deal, but they prioritized working on reforms to the regional transit system before figuring out how to fund it. On May 31, during the final hours of the regular legislative session, the state Senate passed a bill that would create several revenue raisers for public transit, such as a statewide $1.50 “Climate Impact Fee” on retail deliveries, a statewide electric vehicle charging fee, a real estate transfer tax, and a tax on rideshare services like Uber and Lyft. But lawmakers in the House claimed they didn’t have enough time to review the implications of such measures. An earlier idea to increase tolls died in the face of opposition from lawmakers representing the suburbs as well as labor groups.
The legislature has just three days left — October 28 through 30 — in a special veto session to reach an agreement on transit funding. Rynell was optimistic that it would get there. “It remains a priority of the House, Senate, and governor’s team,” she said. “People have put a lot of time and effort into getting a good package because the legislative leaders don’t want to be back in the same place in five or 10 years.”
For two years in a row, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, has narrowly avoided a fiscal crisis with stopgap solutions from the governor’s office after the legislature failed to secure any transit funding. In November 2024, Governor Shapiro got approval from the Biden administration to transfer $153 million in federal capital highway funds to SEPTA, preventing immediate service cuts and postponing a 21% fare hike. But the agency still anticipated a $213 million gap, and said it would have to implement both the rate hike and service cuts this fall unless it secured additional funding.
The funding never came. The Pennsylvania legislature, paralyzed by a one-seat Democratic majority in the House and a Republican Senate, let a June 30 state budget deadline come and go. “Five of these funding bills, sort of different permutations, passed the State House that would have given sustainable revenue for transit,” Stephen Bronskill, the coalition manager at Transit Forward Philadelphia, told me. “All these bills were bipartisan. They failed in the State Senate.”
Weeks of uncertainty and chaos followed. In late August, SEPTA followed through with raising fares and began cutting service. Just two weeks later, however, a court sided with consumer rights advocates who argued that the cuts disproportionately impacted people of color and low-income riders, and ordered SEPTA to restore service.
During those two weeks, residents got a taste of what the future could hold: workers late to work, students late to class, overcrowded buses and trolleys, confusion about which routes were still operating. After the court order, SEPTA turned to a desperate measure — a request to use up to $394 million of state funds designated for capital expenditures on its operations, instead. The move would preserve full service for two years, but at the expense of infrastructure repairs and upgrades. Governor Shapiro approved the request.
“It’s a Band-Aid solution, and no new money for transit has been allocated,” Bronskill said. It’s also a particularly terrible time to deplete SEPTA’s capital budget, as its aging railcars are becoming dangerous to operate. There have been five fires on SEPTA railcars in 2025 alone. A recent report from the National Transportation Safety Board found that the Authority’s 1970s-era “silverliner” cars, which make up about 60% of the fleet, predate federal fire safety hazards and require either extensive retrofits or replacement.
The money will also only benefit transit systems in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Bronskill noted. “Every other transit agency across the state faces the same cliff of having to cut service in the face of the deficits. So we are continuing this fight.”
Pennsylvania lawmakers have proposed some of the same ideas that have been floated in Illinois to raise money for transit. They’ve also considered a car rental and lease tax, diverting funding from the state sales tax, taxing so-called “skill games” common at bars and convenience stores, and legalizing recreational marijuana.
To Justin Balik, the state program director for the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, the challenge is not so much about coming up with revenue options as mustering “political will and urgency and prioritization.”
But more than anything, Pennsylvania suffers partisan politics and total paralysis due to its split legislature, which is now more than 100 days past the deadline to set even a basic state budget for next year. “I think once that is done, we all have our work cut out for us to tell the story in a compelling way of why the problem isn't solved and why we need faster action on this,” Balik said.
Evergreen is part of a new coalition of environmental and transit advocacy groups and think tanks called the Clean RIDES Network, which stands for Responsible Investments to Decrease Emissions in States, that’s trying to engender the political will for and prioritization of clean transportation solutions in statehouses around the country. The group is advocating for “a more holistic plan for transportation advocacy” that brings together ideas like avoiding highway expansions, improving transit access and efficiencies, and investing in vehicle electrification. Over 100 organizations are involved, including national groups like RMI, Sierra Club, and the NRDC, as well as state advocacy outfits like the Clean Air Council in Pennsylvania and Active Transportation Alliance in Illinois.
Advocates like Balik and Weiskopf, of Climate Cabinet, argued that it’s the right time to put transportation at the front and center of the climate fight. While there’s little state leaders can do to counter President Trump’s actions to weaken U.S. climate policy, public transit is one of the few areas they control. “This is a place that all of these lawmakers have the opportunity to do something meaningful and effective,” Weiskopf said, “even if it is just to prevent another thing from becoming much worse.”