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If you care about decarbonization, Trump’s EV comedy routine is actually quite concerning.
“What do you think of electric cars?” It’s a question Donald Trump asks the audience at his rallies these days, and the inevitable response is a chorus of boos. The mini-rant about EVs that follows is now as much a feature of Trump speeches as complaints about immigration or the injustice of his criminal indictments. As he said recently in Dayton, Ohio, “They want to do this all-electric nonsense where the cars don’t go far, they cost too much, and they’re all made in China.”
When Trump chooses to elevate an issue, he inevitably infuses it with questions of identity, the divisions between us and them. He doesn’t just tell you what to believe, he tells you that this is what our kind of people believe, and believing the opposite would make you one of our enemies, contemptible and repugnant.
Of course, EVs were already a means of expressing identity long before Trump started talking about them. None of us, no matter what our political orientation or feelings about capitalism, are immune from the impulse to make a statement to the world about our selfhood and the groups we belong to through our consumer choices, whether it’s the clothes we wear or the phone we carry or the car we drive.
But if we’re ever going to reach the point where the overwhelming majority of vehicles on the road are electric — an indispensable part of reducing carbon emissions — we’ll have to divorce the fuel source that drives a car from those identity questions.
Trump will certainly do what he can to prevent that from happening, even if his position on EVs is less than coherent. “The electric cars, automatically, are going to be made in China,” he says, yet he offers this as a reason to oppose policies that would encourage domestic production of EVs. Part of his interest is surely just about adding EVs to the list of things he can criticize President Biden for. Early in his presidency, Biden set out a goal that by 2030, half of new cars sold in the U.S. would be zero-emission, and though new tailpipe regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency push that goal back by two years, the rules give it teeth in the form of fines if car companies don’t meet the target.
It helps Trump that the target is optimistic, to say the least; only 7.6% of new car sales in 2023 were EVs. And Republicans delight in mocking the slow progress on building a nationwide network of charging stations, presenting it as a case study in both government inefficiency and the folly of taking action on climate change. The clear message to conservative voters is that buying an EV would violate their sense of self in a profound way, putting them on the side of Joe Biden and all those woke enviro-hippies.
From their earliest modern iterations, EVs and hybrids were indeed a statement of identity for liberals: Driving one said that you cared about pollution and climate change, and were willing to sacrifice a certain amount of convenience to lower your personal negative impact on the environment. In the right circles, a Prius could be a kind of status symbol despite its relatively modest price. The reaction from the right was contempt at anyone driving one, for the same reasons.
Though Tesla began to alter that image by marketing their EVs as stylish and technologically advanced, the political division on EVs has remained. According to a recent Gallup poll, 72% of liberals say they either have an EV or might buy one in the future, while an identical 72% of conservatives say they won’t ever buy one.
If you were a car company looking only to boost sales, that might not be too much of a problem, since in a market where around 15 million cars are sold every year, there’s plenty of room for identity segmentation. Auto companies can promote particular models to young people or suburban moms or even lesbians, and still make healthy profits. Everyone can find the car to express their identity; for instance, every year, the three best-selling vehicles in America are pickup trucks (the Ford F-series, the Ram, and the Chevy Silverado), and it isn’t because so many people need them for hauling and towing. It’s because the pickup is associated with a brand of rugged masculinity that millions of men want to present to the world, whether it’s really who they are or not.
But the goal isn’t getting some or even a lot of people to buy EVs, it’s to get nearly every car buyer to choose one. The paradox is that driving an EV may only cease to be a matter of identity when it becomes the default, and that can only happen when people of every partisan and political orientation start buying them.
We can see the glimmers of that transition in accelerating demand for hybrids. Hybrid sales grew an extraordinary 53% from 2022 to 2023, as more models — including low-priced ones — became available. You can even get a Ford Maverick Hybrid pickup, which is proving extremely popular, for under $25,000 (a MotorTrend article from last year was titled “We Bought a 2023 Ford Maverick Hybrid and It’s a Real F***ing Truck, Damn It!”). That greater variety of choices, combined with the increasing availability of EVs, may be depoliticizing hybrids, at least to a degree. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer said on a recent episode of Shift Key, “the presence of battery electric vehicles really defangs conventional hybrids because it is no longer the ‘lib car.’”
There are two critical impediments to a similar change happening for EVs: price and battery range. At the moment, going fully electric still means paying more up front compared to buying a comparable internal combustion vehicle, even if subsidies significantly lower that premium. But if getting an EV involved no extra initial cost, and charging stations were as common as gas stations, buying an EV wouldn’t say “I am willing to sacrifice to address climate change.” And it may be that the less your EV says about you — or at least, the less the fact that it’s an EV says about you — the better.
An increase in the number of EV models (which is already happening) will help too: If there are small and large EV pickups, EV sedans, EV sports cars, and critically, cheap EVs — which at the moment are only being manufactured in China — then there will be enough room to make a variety of identity statements with an EV that have nothing to do with its fuel source.
If he wins in November, Trump will probably try to reverse Biden’s tailpipe emission standards and roll back some of the EV subsidies that are now in place. But he may encounter more resistance than he thinks. Despite a recent slowdown in the growth rate of EV sales, the auto companies are still committed to transitioning to zero-emission fleets (even if they’d like to take their time getting there). And some red parts of the country are now deeply invested in EVs, especially in the “Battery Belt” in the Southeast, where EV technology companies are hiring thousands of workers and auto companies are opening EV plants.
One signal that mass adoption of EVs is imminent will be when car companies barely mention the fact that they’re electric in marketing them. When all the ads feature masculine men doing manly things with their manly electric trucks, hip and beautiful young people heading to the beach in their fun electric convertibles, and safety-conscious moms carpooling to soccer practice in their comfy electric SUVs, none of whom seem concerned about the climate, then we’ll know we’re on our way.
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On the World Bank’s bad record keeping, Trump’s town hall, and sustainable aviation fuel
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France are flooded after heavy rains • Sydney’s Bondi Beach is closed because lumps of toxic tar are washing ashore • A winter storm warning is in effect for parts of Montana.
Nearly 40% of the climate finance funds that have been distributed by the World Bank over the last seven years are unaccounted for due to poor record keeping, according to a new report from Oxfam International. That’s up to $41 billion that is untraceable. “There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible,” the report said. “It also remains unclear whether these funds were even spent on climate-related initiatives intended to help low- and middle-income countries protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis and invest in clean energy.”
The World Bank is the largest multilateral provider of climate finance, and has a goal of directing 45% of its total financing toward climate projects by 2025. The report noted that climate finance will be a key issue at the upcoming COP29, where countries will put forward a new global climate finance goal. “The lack of traceable spending could undermine trust in global climate finance efforts at this critical juncture,” Oxfam said.
During a town hall event hosted by Univision last night, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was asked by a veteran construction worker – who had seen first-hand “the devastating impacts of climate change” – if he still believed global warming was a “hoax.” In his response, Trump claimed to be an environmentalist, saying he’d won “many awards over the years” for the way he’d constructed his buildings, “the way I used the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand.” But, he said, “we can’t destroy our country” for the sake of saving the climate. He said the U.S. is competing against China, which “doesn’t spend anything on climate change.” According to the International Energy Agency, last year China alone accounted for one-third of the world’s clean energy investments.
Needless to say, Trump didn’t really answer the question about whether he thought climate change was real, but he did cast doubt on sea level rise and claimed “the real global warming we have to worry about is nuclear.”
I’ll just take this opportunity to remind you that Heatmap’s Jeva Lange put together an exhaustive fact-check on Trump’s climate and weather claims going back to 2001.
The Supreme Court yesterday allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now. The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. Whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
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The Department of Energy yesterday announced its first two loans for sustainable aviation fuel. The roughly $3 billion in funding will go to two companies:
“As the aviation sector aims to meet its decarbonization goals, SAF will become increasingly vital,” the DOE said in a statement. “SAF is the only viable near-term option to decarbonize the airline industry.”
A Canadian court’s ruling on a climate lawsuit today could influence similar cases in Canada and other countries. Seven young people are suing the Ontario government over its emissions targets, which they say are inadequate and violate their human rights. If the case heads to Canada’s Supreme Court, and the plaintiffs win, that would “dramatically open the door to new litigation,” constitutional law expert Emmett Macfarlane toldReuters. “That would be explosive. It would have immediate ramifications for all governments.”
The University of California, San Diego, is the first major public university to require all its undergraduate students to complete a climate change course.
They may not survive a full challenge, though.
The Supreme Court allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants on Wednesday, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now.
The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. A group of power utilities, trade groups, and Republican-governed states are suing to block the greenhouse gas rule, arguing that it oversteps the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.
The EPA’s new rules, which were finalized in April, would be the government’s first successful effort to regulate climate pollution from the power sector. The electricity industry is the second most-polluting sector in the American economy.
The Obama administration previously tried to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from the power sector. The Supreme Court blocked those rules from taking effect in 2016, before striking them down completely in 2022.
This time, the agency has written the rules within a framework laid out by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority in that ruling. In that now landmark case, the court ruled that the EPA could restrict greenhouse gas pollution from power plants only by requiring new technology, such as carbon capture equipment, to be installed at the plant itself. The agency couldn’t require utilities to stop burning fossil fuels and build more renewables.
In the near term, whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. During his first term, Donald Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental and climate protections.
Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
“The high court made the right call,” Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Given its rulings in recent years undercutting environmental protections, the refusal of the majority on the Supreme Court to block this vital rule is a victory for common sense.”
Not all the news from the Supreme Court on Wednesday was good for climate advocates, though.
In the same decision that let the new rules stand, the high court’s conservative justices signaled that they might block the rules next year.
“In my view, the applicants have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of their challenges” to the rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a short statement attached to the stay, which was cosigned by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
But because the rules don’t require utilities to start complying until next June, there was no reason to grant an emergency stay, the two justices added.
Justice Clarence Thomas would have gone further and stepped in to block the rules immediately. Justice Samuel Alito, another reliable conservative vote, did not participate in the deliberations.
That suggests that four justices could be ready to block the rules as soon as next year. They would need only one more vote — from Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Amy Coney Barrett — to stay the protections from taking effect.
The statement didn’t provide any hints to what Roberts or Barrett are thinking.
Has Plug Power pulled the plug on its upstate New York facility?
In 2021, top elected officials in New York state promised that Plug Power, a nascent company in the growing hydrogen industry, would build a large hydrogen fuel production facility in the Buffalo-Rochester area. It was supposed to make the state an industry leader.
Today, the project is looking more like a warning sign about the perils of being a first-mover in the unproven hydrogen business.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Plug Power, an American hydrogen and fuel cell producer founded in 1997, believed it would capitalize on rising demand for the liquid fuel when it broke ground at its hydrogen production facility at Genesee County’s Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park in 2021, a project known colloquially as STAMP. Heavy polluting industries like steel and transportation were chomping at the bit to strike supply deals for hydrogen, a liquid fuel that produces no carbon when burned. And this New York plant would on paper be particularly attractive from a climate perspective: It would be powered by hydroelectric dams at Niagara Falls, offering a potential carbon reduction of an estimated 14,000 tons of CO2 per year. It would also be the largest project of its kind in the Northeast.
Three years later and the project appears to be on ice, according to a phone call recording between New York county officials and a real estate developer that was obtained by Heatmap News.
Construction stopped in January, per the call, as did work Plug Power promised to do on an electrical substation that will also power a neighboring semiconductor manufacturing plant. Now energy-hungry data center developers are bidding to pick up the substation work instead in exchange for a spot at STAMP and access to some of the remaining hydroelectricity, and county officials are looking at buying Plug Power’s electrical equipment.
It is unclear whether the hydrogen production plant will ever be completed.
“They’ve put things on hold and now we’re coming to pick up the pieces,” Chris Suozzi, an executive vice president at the Genessee County Economic Development Authority, told one bidder – PRP Real Estate Management – on a call last month. PRP taped the call and shared it with us after it was first reported by local news nonprofit InvestigativePost. Suozzi also said on the call: “They’re not ready to go. They’re on pause. We don’t know what’s going to happen with them at this point.”
The New York Plug Power plant’s problems should be familiar to anyone in the climate tech startup space but for the unfamiliar, the company’s rapid growth seems to have run headlong into struggles with cash. A year ago Plug Power said in an investor filing there was a “substantial” concern the company may not have “sufficient funds to fund [its] operations through the next 12 months.” So problematic are Plug’s financial woes that they’ve become a political target; after the Energy Department offered a $1.6 billion conditional loan commitment to Plug for building hydrogen production plants, Republicans in Congress called for an inspector general investigation into the move.
But the New York production facility won’t benefit from the potential loan either. We’ve learned from two sources familiar with the matter that the project is not included in its potential loan application currently pending before DOE.
Then there has been the rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act. Even though the project relies on carbon-free hydropower, it may not qualify for the IRA’s hydrogen production tax credit because of proposed requirements for fuel to rely on new renewable energy sources (known as “additionality”). This has been a major sticking point in implementation of the credit, and Plug Power is quoted in InvestigativePost last week linking the work stoppage at the production facility on waiting for the final regulation implementing the credit. This is even as the company uses the yet-to-be finalized credit in its financial analyses for other hydrogen facilities in operation today, like this one in Georgia.
Environmental justice issues have also been a drag on development. The native Tonawanda Seneca Nation is opposed to the entire industrial park because of the resulting impacts on wildlife, noise and the visual landscape. In April, the Fish and Wildlife Service revoked a necessary permit for a wastewater treatment pipeline that would be used by companies at the park.
Earthjustice attorney Alex Page – who is working with the Nation to fight the project – told me the tribe was told last year by the Energy Department that Plug Power had withdrawn the New York site from its loan application. The Nation will continue to fight the project and DOE’s loan financing to Plug Power on the chance that money could be reprogrammed to the industrial park. Page said: “The Nation remains very, very much opposed.”
We sent Plug Power multiple requests for comment as well as Suozzi. A representative for Plug Power declined to answer questions about the project. I got a text from a number listed for Suozzi asking to chat later, but I didn’t hear back before publication.