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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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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.