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Elon Musk’s cars are woke now?
If you ever get the sudden, inexplicable urge to give yourself a headache, try searching for “woke electric cars” or “woke electric vehicles.” Whether your preferred flavor of headache involves articles, YouTube videos, or just memes, you’re in for an endless sea of anti-EV screeds — often fueled by misinformation or outright disinformation — on social media or on right-leaning news outlets.
Their arguments usually go something like this: EVs are “a tool of tyranny” being “forced” on us as the government takes away our precious gas cars; they run out of power too easily and will leave you stranded at the first sign of bad weather; they’ll leave the U.S. in permanent thrall to China, or kill our auto industry outright; and they’re worse for the environment than internal combustion engines, and thus aren’t going to fix climate change — which isn’t real anyway. (I think that about sums it up.)
I never see this sort of “content” coming from people with a deep understanding of the evolution of automotive technology, or batteries, or anything else that might qualify them to weigh in here. Usually, they’re from your garden-variety opinion-section cranks, or cynical grifters who make a living off their viral hits, or 40-year veterans of oil industry comms. You know the type. But they’re all very vocal in saying that electric cars, essentially, are woke. And while none of them can define what that means, it is clearly very bad.
The sentiment is spreading into our wider consciousness now, and that goes for the whole world, as The Guardian pointed out recently. Here in America, look no further than our presidential race to find examples. Former President Donald Trump — despite having once touted an electric-car startup as a savior of jobs in the Midwest — has railed against EVs as something that will “decimate” auto manufacturing states like Michigan. And amid the rallies he holds in between his various court dates, he’s taken to delivering rants like this one, about a “friend” who needed “two hours” to charge an electric car on a road trip.
Trump’s knowledge of the workings of the auto industry is suspect on a good day. But as goes Trump, so goes the rest of the field. Republican candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley have lashed out against EVs in similar ways. This summer, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed a Republican-sponsored bill back home designed to save the state $277 million by adding EVs to government fleets. DeSantis went this route, as many critics pointed out, really only after Trump stepped up his anti-EV rhetoric; last year the governor was happy to award nearly $70 million to secure fleets of electric transit buses in his state.
DeSantis must have seen the way the wind is blowing on the right, and it’s toward making sure EVs are portrayed as rolling symbols of a failing Biden administration. That’s part of it, for at least some conservatives; but another part is a general disdain of anything seen as “green,” or the continued perception that EVs are just golf cars, unlike manly, macho, V8-powered cars. (That argument also doesn’t hold up when an electric Kia can hang with a Lamborghini in a drag race.) Either way, cars that run on electrons have become embroiled in our never-ending culture wars, and that will only get worse as this election cycle continues.
But there are countless reasons that framing the auto industry’s gradual move to EVs as a cultural issue simply doesn’t hold up:
EVs are just technology, nothing more. An evolution in how cars work, in line with the same trajectory gasoline cars took for decades: more powerful, more efficient, more high-tech. And yes, those moves often followed stricter fuel economy and emissions regulations here and abroad. But most car companies now are global entities; to compete, they have to offer the newest and best or they’ll be left behind. You might even call it the free market at work and right now, the market is speaking: Though many buyers are currently deterred by the high price of this new technology, this year is still on track to be a record one for EV sales as more and more car companies offer new options.
If EVs are woke, then so is electronic fuel injection, forced induction, airbags, power steering … how back in time do we need to go until the cars aren’t woke? Hand-crank starters? The Model T?
America has always subsidized or protected its car industry. Many Republican politicians are angry about the EV tax credit scheme. But while EV tax credits on the consumer side feel relatively new, that’s not the case with the industry writ large. Think about federal and state tax incentives to build car factories. Or how uniquely protectionist tax rules allowed huge (and profitable) American trucks to dominate the market. Or subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Or even Reagan-era limits on exports from Japan, which just led them to build cars here. Or the bailouts amid the Great Recession.
I could go on and on, but generally speaking, a competitive auto industry is so essential to a country’s economy that its government will go to great lengths to see it succeed. America’s no different, and neither are tax incentives that get people to buy EVs.
Jobs, jobs, jobs. The goal of many investments from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is to build an electric car and battery manufacturing infrastructure here in America, so we’re not wholly dependent on China for it. And guess what? Nearly all of the battery plants being built to support this effort are in Southern red states. Georgia, Kentucky, South, and North Carolina and Tennessee are just some of the states that stand to gain tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. They’re going there for proximity reasons, to support their nearby automakers like Toyota, BMW, Volvo, Nissan and more, but also because those aren’t exactly union-friendly places — an issue the United Auto Workers is not happy about. Seems like all of this would benefit a conservative politician from any of those places, no?
People are not being “forced” into anything. As I’ve written before, the move to a more battery-driven auto industry seems very likely, but it will not be as up-and-to-the-right as many predicted a year ago. It’ll be a rocky, messy, uneven shift that occurs in some countries and even U.S. states ahead of others; that may not be the best thing for our climate but it is reality. In the meantime, no one is being “forced” into this. California and other states may ban the sale of gas cars by the middle of the next decade, but a lot can happen between now and then and all signs point to the market shifting electric by then anyway. Nor have I seen any legislation that would force people to give up their existing cars, which likely would be impossible.
I’m from Texas. You go down there and try telling those people they have to “give up” their F-150s and Silverados. You’d have better luck telling them you’re there to take their guns away; at least they’re used to hearing that. But more and more, as charging grows and U.S.-built batteries drive costs down, hopefully, people will see the benefits of going electric all on their own.
Elon Musk. And here’s probably the ultimate counter-argument to the idea that EVs will wreck your life as much as drag bingo, DEI training at the office, and the other things the TV told you to be very mad about. The modern EV market was catapulted to success by a Texas-based billionaire entrepreneur — the richest man on Earth— who has declared war on the Woke Mind Virus. Say what you want about Musk, and you could say a lot, but Tesla is a genuine American success story. It’s grown from a startup to a global juggernaut with a market cap exceeding that of every other carmaker, all without selling a single gasoline car.
And remember, DeSantis can denounce EVs all he wants, but he still needed Musk and Twitter to announce his candidacy. That’s a pretty inconvenient fact for the anti-EV culture warriors out there.
The truth is, there are valid concerns to be discussed as the auto industry moves away from gasoline; many of them policy-related. Things like the environmental impact of mining, or the labor battle involving EVs that’s playing out in Detroit right now. But that’s not what we’re getting here, with the screeds over electric wokeness — and they just don’t hold up to even a moment of critical thinking.
Naturally, I don’t think the right-wing war on electric cars is going anywhere anytime soon. But ultimately, it may just not matter. The industry’s going to go where it’s going to go in order to compete globally, and all the memes in the world won’t be able to stand in the way of that.
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Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France that were freezing last week are now experiencing record high temperatures • Forecasters are monitoring a storm system that could become Australia’s first named tropical cyclone of this season • The Colorado Rockies could get several feet of snow today and tomorrow.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, according to AccuWeather. “For perspective, this would equate to nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter. The figure accounts for long-term economic impacts including job losses, medical costs, drops in tourism, and recovery expenses. “The combination of extremely warm water temperatures, a shift toward a La Niña pattern and favorable conditions for development created the perfect storm for what AccuWeather experts called ‘a supercharged hurricane season,’” said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This was an exceptionally powerful and destructive year for hurricanes in America, despite an unusual and historic lull during the climatological peak of the season.”
AccuWeather
This year’s hurricane season produced 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes. Five hurricanes made landfall, two of which were major storms. According to NOAA, an “average” season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season comes to an end on November 30.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the $7,500 EV tax credit, California will consider reviving its Clean Vehicle Rebate Program. The CVRP ran from 2010 to 2023 and helped fund nearly 600,000 EV purchases by offering rebates that started at $5,000 and increased to $7,500. But the program as it is now would exclude Tesla’s vehicles, because it is aimed at encouraging market competition, and Tesla already has a large share of the California market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has cozied up to Trump, called California’s potential exclusion of Tesla “insane,” though he has said he’s okay with Trump nixing the federal subsidies. Newsom would need to go through the State Legislature to revive the program.
President-elect Donald Trump said yesterday he would impose steep new tariffs on all goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico on day one of his presidency in a bid to stop “drugs” and “illegal aliens” from entering the United States. Specifically, Trump threatened Canada and Mexico each with a 25% tariff, and China with a 10% hike on existing levies. Such moves against three key U.S. trade partners would have major ramifications across many sectors, including the auto industry. Many car companies import vehicles and parts from plants in Mexico. The Canadian government responded with a statement reminding everyone that “Canada is essential to U.S. domestic energy supply, and last year 60% of U.S. crude oil imports originated in Canada.” Tariffs would be paid by U.S. companies buying the imported goods, and those costs would likely trickle down to consumers.
Amazon workers across the world plan to begin striking and protesting on Black Friday “to demand justice, fairness, and accountability” from the online retail giant. The protests are organized by the UNI Global Union’s Make Amazon Pay Campaign, which calls for better working conditions for employees and a commitment to “real environmental sustainability.” Workers in more than 20 countries including the U.S. are expected to join the protests, which will continue through Cyber Monday. Amazon’s carbon emissions last year totalled 68.8 million metric tons. That’s about 3% below 2022 levels, but more than 30% above 2019 levels.
Researchers from MIT have developed an AI tool called the “Earth Intelligence Engine” that can simulate realistic satellite images to show people what an area would look like if flooded by extreme weather. “Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate,” wrote Jennifer Chu at MIT News. The team found that AI alone tended to “hallucinate,” generating images of flooding in areas that aren’t actually susceptible to a deluge. But when combined with a science-backed flood model, the tool became more accurate. “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk,” said MIT’s Björn Lütjens, who led the research. “Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.” The tool is still in development and is available online. Here is an image it generated of flooding in Texas:
Maxar Open Data Program via Gupta et al., CVPR Workshop Proceedings. Lütjens et al., IEEE TGRS
A new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris lets visitors listen to the sounds of endangered and extinct animals – along with the voice of the artist behind the piece, the one and only Björk.
How Hurricane Helene is still putting the Southeast at risk.
Less than two months after Hurricane Helene cut a historically devastating course up into the southeastern U.S. from Florida’s Big Bend, drenching a wide swath of states with 20 trillion gallons of rainfall in just five days, experts are warning of another potential threat. The National Interagency Fire Center’s forecast of fire-risk conditions for the coming months has the footprint of Helene highlighted in red, with the heightened concern stretching into the new year.
While the flip from intense precipitation to wildfire warnings might seem strange, experts say it speaks to the weather whiplash we’re now seeing regularly. “What we expect from climate change is this layering of weather extremes creating really dangerous situations,” Robert Scheller, a professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, explained to me.
Scheuller said North Carolina had been experiencing drought conditions early in the year, followed by intense rain leading up to Helene’s landfall. Then it went dry again — according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, much of the state was back to some level of drought condition as of mid-November. The NIFC forecast report says the same is true for much of the region, including Florida, despite its having been hit by Hurricane Milton soon after Helene.
That dryness is a particular concern due to the amount of debris left in Helene’s wake — another major risk factor for fire. The storm’s winds, which reached more than 100 miles per hour in some areas, wreaked havoc on millions of acres of forested land. In North Carolina alone, the state’s Forest Service estimates over 820,000 acres of timberland were damaged.
“When you have a catastrophic storm like [Helene], all of the stuff that was standing upright — your trees — they might be snapped off or blown over,” fire ecologist David Godwin told me. “All of a sudden, that material is now on the forest floor, and so you have a really tremendous rearrangement of the fuels and the vegetation within ecosystems that can change the dynamics of how fire behaves in those sites.”
Godwin is the director of the Southern Fire Exchange for the University of Florida, a program that connects wildland firefighters, prescribed burners, and natural resources managers across the Southeast with fire science and tools. He says the Southeast sees frequent, unplanned fires, but that active ecosystem management helps keep the fires that do spark from becoming conflagrations. But an increase like this in fallen or dead vegetation — what Godwin refers to as fire “fuel” — can take this risk to the next level, particularly as it dries out.
Godwin offered an example from another storm, 2018’s Hurricane Michael, which rapidly intensified before making landfall in Northern Florida and continuing inland, similar to Hurricane Helene. In its aftermath, there was a 10-fold increase in the amount of fuel on the ground, with 72 million tons of timber damaged in Florida. Three years later, the Bertha Swamp Road Fire filled the storm’s Florida footprint with flames, which consumed more than 30,000 acres filled with dried out forest fuel. One Florida official called the wildfire the “ghost” of Michael, nodding to the overlap of the impacted areas and speaking to the environmental threat the storm posed even years later.
Not only does this fuel increase the risk of fire, it changes the character of the fires that do ignite, Godwin said. Given ample ground fuel, flame lengths can grow longer, allowing them to burn higher into the canopy. That’s why people setting prescribed fires will take steps like raking leaf piles, which helps keep the fire intensity low.
These fires can also produce more smoke, Godwin said, which can mix with the mountainous fog in the region to deadly effect. According to the NIFC, mountainous areas incurred the most damage from Helene, not only due to downed vegetation, but also because of “washed out roads and trails” and “slope destabilization” from the winds and rain. If there is a fire in these areas, all these factors will also make it more challenging for firefighters to address it, the report adds.
In addition to the natural debris fire experts worry about, Helene caused extensive damage to the built environment, wrecking homes, businesses, and other infrastructure. Try imagining four-and-a-half football fields stacked 10 feet tall with debris — that’s what officials have removed so far just in Asheville, North Carolina. In Florida’s Treasure Island, there were piles 50 feet high of assorted scrap materials. Officials have warned that some common household items, such as the lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and electric vehicles, can be particularly flammable after exposure to floodwaters. They are also advising against burning debris as a means of managing it due to all the compounding risks.
Larry Pierson, deputy chief of the Swannanoa Fire Department in North Carolina, told Blueridge Public Radio that his department’s work has “grown exponentially since the storm.” While cooler, wetter winter weather could offer some relief, Scheuller said the area will likely see heightened fire behavior for years after the storm, particularly if the swings between particularly wet and particularly dry periods continue.
Part of the challenge moving forward, then, is to find ways to mitigate risk on this now-hazardous terrain. For homeowners, that might mean exercising caution when dealing with debris and considering wildfire risk as part of rebuilding plans, particularly in more wooded areas. On a larger forest management scale, this means prioritizing safe debris collection and finding ways to continue the practice of prescribed burns, which are utilized more in the Southeast than in any other U.S. region. Without focused mitigation efforts, Godwin told me the area’s overall fire outlook would be much different.
“We would have a really big wildfire issue,” he said, “perhaps even bigger than what we might see in parts of the West.”