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Fear of the unknown is only natural. It’s no surprise many drivers who are unfamiliar with electric vehicles worry that if they make the leap to this new technology, their lives will be plagued by problems they’ve heard about on the news like range anxiety or long recharge times. Predictably, those with a political ax to grind against electrification stoke those fears, hoping to paint EV as a deficient or inferior product, or a sacrifice big government wants you to make for the greater good. They are wrong.
I won’t lie to you and say EVs are flawless. There are things gasoline gas does that electric cannot, such as making a Cannonball Run across the country with a bare minimum of stops. What you might not realize if you’ve yet to drive or own an EV, however, is all of the ways that they are clearly, obviously better. Yes, the climate case for electric vehicles powered by renewable energy is the big, bold-faced reason to move away from internal combustion. Even if you set aside green reasons to buy an EV, the electric life is an upgrade.
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Fearmongering about EVs often focuses on long-distance driving, since this is the one place where gasoline holds a clear advantage — yes, it is slightly more cumbersome to rely on EV fast-chargers than it is to pull off the interstate for five minutes or less whenever you need gas. As charging gets faster, though, and battery ranges get longer, the inconvenience gap is shrinking. At a certain point, the distance you can travel down the highway on one charge will be greater than or equal to the amount of time you’d want to go between bathroom breaks, anyway.
Now ask yourself: What are your driving habits actually like? If you’re like most Americans, you take the occasional long road trip, but 90 percent of your driving happens within a few dozen miles of home: getting groceries, commuting, dropping off the kids at dance practice. (There’s a reason most auto accidents happen within 15 miles of home. It’s where we drive.)
You don’t need gasoline to live like this. EV owners can plug into the garage after work and wake up each morning with more than enough range for the daily grind. No more stopping at the gas station on the way home from work and standing out in the blazing heat or freezing cold to pump fossil fuels into your car.
Saying goodbye to the gas station also, mercifully, means saying goodbye to paying for gas. As I write this in Los Angeles, the average price in California has exceeded $6 per gallon, while the national average is up to $3.79. For a variety of reasons, it’s difficult to do an apples-to-apples cost comparison between gas and electric. They don’t commonly use the same units; electricity can have a much different price per kilowatt-hour depending on the time of day and whether you charge at home or at a public fast-charger. However, although you can find studies that bend over backward to twist the numbers to favor gasoline, driving electric typically costs less per mile. The gap gets bigger if you live in a state with high gas prices or do nearly all your charging at home, where it’s cheap.
Those savings, along with government incentives, made the higher up-front cost of an EV easier to swallow. So does the potential for less routine maintenance. I can’t tell you how nice it is to forget about oil changes.
Then there’s performance.
Today’s super-deluxe EVs post bonkers zero-to-sixty times. High-end versions of the Tesla Model S, Lucid Air, Porsche Taycan, and even the Rivian R1T pickup truck hit the mark in three seconds or less. The reason is mechanical: An electric motor can deliver all its torque from a stop, while a gas engine is particular about just where it can reach peak horsepower and torque.
This truth matters even if you’re not planning to spend six figures on an electric car, because it means even the more modestly priced EVs are just fun to drive, with lots of zip off the starting line. Forget the car guy stats: What will make you happy is the feeling as your EV silently pins you back against the seat or effortlessly accelerates to highway speed as you merge — the moment of Zen that has been promised by a thousand cliched car commercials. And you don’t have to spend a hundred thousand dollars to get it.
EV ownership also delivers other little quality-of-life improvements. For example, full climate control: A big battery means you can blast the car’s AC or heat for a long time without running a gasoline engine. It means you’re not polluting the neighborhood’s air as you sit there idling for minutes on end, waiting for the kid you’re picking up to get in the car already. It means you can preheat or pre-cool the car from inside the house, or leave the vehicle on Dog Mode so it air-conditions your pooch while you run into Starbucks.
A combustion vehicle will always be a rolling, carbon-emitting power plant. An EV has the potential to be much more — part of a smarter, more integrated future. Homeowners with solar panels could use that clean energy to fill up their car batteries. And when more vehicles join the Ford F-150 Lightning in offering two-way charging, more EV owners will be able to use their cars as a power supply that could, for example, keep the house lights on in case of a blackout.
Electric isn’t for everyone. Not at this moment, anyhow. For people who can’t charge at home or at work, the challenge of getting electricity at public fast-chargers can be too annoying or expensive. If you drive lots of miles off the beaten path, far from the interstate highway system, you might wait, justifiably, until the map fills in with more chargers.
For the urbanite or suburbanite, it’s time to get real. We all want our cars to do everything, and yes, for the occasional journey of four-plus hours, it’d be slightly easier to keep burning gas. Life isn’t summer vacation, though. Life is driving to work and to date night. Life is sitting in traffic and then feeling that sweet exhale of accelerating when it finally opens up. Electric isn’t just better for the planet — for everyday driving, electric is better for you, too.
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On the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, armored EVs, and China’s coal addiction
Current conditions: An approaching rain storm prompted evacuation warnings for parts of Los Angeles recently affected by wildfires • A Category 5 tropical cyclone is heading for Western Australia • School has been suspended in Brazil’s state of Rio Grande do Sul due to an extreme heat wave. Less than a year ago, the region was under water.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says he plans to revoke $20 billion in grants awarded for Biden-era climate projects. In a video posted on X, Zeldin said the EPA would end its contract with the bank that oversees the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion Inflation Reduction Act program for climate mitigation and adaptation initiatives. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported last year, the idea behind the fund was to “create a national clean financing network for clean energy and climate solutions.” The money has already been awarded to eight nonprofits, including the Coalition for Green Capital, Rewiring America, Habitat for Humanity, and Community Preservation Corporation. Zeldin seems intent on clawing the money back, accusing the Biden administration of rushing its distribution without oversight. “The financial agreement with the bank needs to be instantly terminated and the bank must immediately return all of the gold bars that the EPA toss off the Titanic,” he said. The move will likely draw legal challenges.
X/epaleezeldin
President Trump has nominated Kathleen Sgamma, an oil and gas lobbyist, to lead the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM oversees 245 million acres of public lands, or about one in every 10 acres across the country. It also manages 700 million acres of mineral estate. Sgamma leads a Colorado-based fossil fuel trade group called the Western Energy Alliance. As The Associated Press reported, she “has been a leading voice for the fossil fuel industry, calling for fewer drilling restrictions on public lands that produce about 10% of U.S. oil and gas.” Environmentalists slammed the nomination. “It’s hard to imagine how Trump could give a bigger middle finger to America’s public lands,” said Taylor McKinnon, Southwest director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Everyone who treasures the outdoors should oppose her nomination.”
Public documents show that the State Department was planning to buy $400 million worth of armored Tesla vehicles, most likely Cybertrucks, Drop Sitereported yesterday. The 2025 procurement forecast has since been updated to remove any mention of Tesla, and now references only “armored electric vehicles.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become a key advisor to President Trump, scrutinizing government spending as leader of the “Department of Government Efficiency.” His role has “raised recurring questions about how he might police himself when one of his companies competes for official contracts,” Bloombergsaid. Musk posted on X that he was “pretty sure” his company wasn’t getting $400 million from the government. “No one mentioned it to me, at least.”
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The German government put out a report yesterday that says climate change poses a looming existential threat to the European Union. By 2040, the climate crisis will “increasingly impact political, economic, and social dynamics within the EU,” the report said. More frequent extreme weather events will burden public health and trigger mass migration both into and within Europe, and also threaten crop production and tourism in countries heavily reliant on both sectors. “A lack of tourism and crop failures can lead to economic instability and have the potential to cause conflict within the EU,” the report said. “It is in Germany and the EU’s interest to slow climate change and accelerate decarbonisation, not only from an economic and ecological perspective but also from a security policy perspective.”
National Interdisciplinary Climate Risk Assessment
Construction on coal-fired power plants in China soared last year to the highest level since 2015, according to analysis from the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air and the Global Energy Monitor. China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, but it has been applauded for its renewable energy expansion. Indeed, last year it added 356 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity. But China also started building lots of new coal power plants with electric-generating capacity totaling about 95 gigawatts. These plants will begin to come online in the next few years. “Instead of replacing coal, clean energy is being layered on top of an entrenched reliance on fossil fuels,” the report said. “The parallel expansion of coal and renewables risks undermining China’s clean energy transition.”
“The companies and local governments that are now being strung along by the Trump administration did not make a vague handshake agreement with the Biden administration. Instead, they signed a contract with the federal government to receive a certain amount of money in exchange for doing a certain activity. The administration might have changed since then. But the government is still bound by its debts and obligations.”
–Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer on contract law and the Trump spending fight
And that’s on top of the constitutional questions.
One of the biggest stories of the new Trump administration is the president’s attempt to block congressionally mandated spending. So far, most of the discussion over this freeze has focused on whether it violates federal law and the Constitution. But another front is likely to open soon in that legal battle — and it has received much less attention.
On his first day in office, Trump froze all federal spending tied to the Inflation Reduction Act and the $1 trillion infrastructure law passed during Joe Biden’s presidency. Although Trump has since relented on other spending freezes — such as a short-lived block on virtually all federal payments — he has continued to withhold these energy, climate, and infrastructure funds, even after a federal judge ordered their release on Monday.
Continuing this freeze for longer than 45 days would take an act of Congress, and it’s unclear whether the Trump administration intends to get one. It seems to be gearing up to fight a Supreme Court battle over whether the president has an inherent “impoundment” authority to block federal funding unilaterally (more on that later).
That constitutional fight will obviously be extremely important. But as hundreds of CEOs and local government officials are now surely realizing, this battle is not the only legal front on which the Trump administration’s spending freeze will be fought.
That is because — as long as the freeze continues — the Trump administration is going to start violating hundreds or even thousands of contracts and legally binding spending agreements. The Trump spending fight is not only about policy and the Constitution, in other words, but also about contract law.
The companies and local governments that are now being strung along by the Trump administration did not make a vague handshake agreement with the Biden administration. Instead, they signed a contract with the federal government to receive a certain amount of money in exchange for doing a certain activity. The administration might have changed since then. But the government is still bound by its debts and obligations.
Those companies have now spent money — in some cases more than tens of millions of dollars — to fulfill their side of the contract. They have bought equipment, purchased land, and hired workers. Those companies’ contracts with the federal government are as legally binding as any other contract between two parties — and the courts are as empowered to defend those contracts as they are any others.
There is a significant amount of money tied up in these agreements. By the end of 2024, the Biden administration had “obligated” more than $96 billion of grants from the Inflation Reduction Act, while the Department of Energy’s loans office had “finalized” more than $60 billion in lending. Both terms generally mean that a contract has been signed.
As Heatmap has written before, just because the government has signed a contract for a certain amount of money doesn’t mean that the money has gone out the door. Many federal contracts are designed, basically, as ongoing invoicing relationships: A private party agrees to do something for the government, the private party does it, and then the private party brings back its receipts and asks the government for reimbursements.
The government has been refusing to make those private parties whole, even though those private parties have kept up their side of their agreements. (Note that at no point, ever, has the Trump administration claimed on the record that the private entities it’s now refusing to pay are in breach of contract. It is simply saying that it would rather not pay them just yet for political reasons.)
This has several important consequences for what is about to happen next.
The first is that the Trump administration is about to face dozens and perhaps hundreds of lawsuits over breach of contract. The president cannot simply announce that the contracts are void, like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy in The Office. If the president or his officials want to cut off funding to IRA and infrastructure law grant and loan recipients, then they will need to give specific reasons under the contract for terminating and then defend those claims in court — provided that the recipient sues. Under a law called the Tucker Act, companies can sue the federal government for breaching a contract in the Court of Federal Claims, a special court in Washington, D.C. These lawsuits will not be about MAGA policies, but rather about the facts of each contract and whether the parties are in compliance with them.
At the same time, the Trump administration will likely be waging a fight over “impoundment.” Some officials in the Trump administration — including Russ Vought, the Project 2025 architect who now leads the White House budget office — profess that the president has an inherent authority that allows him to unilaterally block federal funding. This is despite the fact that the Constitution does not mention such a capacious authority, and the Supreme Court has historically rejected other presidential ploys, such as President Bill Clinton’s use of the line-item veto, to accept some parts of the federal budget and ignore others.
This will create, at least at first, a two-track legal fight over the Trump administration’s spending freeze. At the high level, President Trump will be fighting over the political and constitutional question of whether he can unilaterally block funding that has been appropriated by Congress. But at the lower level, federal agencies may be sparring with hundreds of companies about whether they can wriggle their way out of the contracts they have already signed. These dozens of potential smaller fights will command an enormous amount of time and personnel attention — not only from the companies, nonprofits, and local governments trying to secure what they are owed, but also from the Trump administration, which has finite resources.
These skirmishes will have economic consequences — and while these might be small in the context of America’s $29 trillion economy, they will gradually deepen. By refusing to honor its contracts, the Trump administration is forcing private companies to bear public costs. Those companies will delay hiring employees and investing in new equipment as they await repayment; some will furlough workers and go bankrupt. The burden will become more and more significant every day that the Trump administration continues its spending freeze.
These costs will not be randomly distributed through the economy, but rather concentrated primarily in sectors located in rural areas and affecting working-class Americans. Professional environmentalists in Seattle will continue to have a job regardless of what happens to some rural school district’s microgrid project. But the construction workers and electricians set to build that grid will lose income.
For this reason, the energy and infrastructure freeze does not strike me as a very wise move, politically — particularly as U.S. economic sentiment is worsening. One reason it is politically prudent for lawmakers, and not the president, to make spending decisions is that representatives understand their districts much better than federal officials in Washington, D.C.
This suggests the final takeaway: The Trump administration is beginning to play a very dangerous game with the United States. The American economy’s strength and prosperity arises from its territorial resource wealth, its educated and productive workforce, its secure defensive position, and — crucially — a set of financial intangibles that are ultimately backed up by federal contracts. The federal government is the largest counterparty in the global economy because it can be relied upon to pay its debts. If it begins to back out of contracts hither and thither, especially if primarily for partisan political reasons, then it will ultimately damage every American.
This is not a new or novel thought. Writing in 1790, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton said that the “punctual performance of contracts” was the key to maintaining the United States’ good credit. “States, like individuals, who observe their engagements, are respected and trusted: while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct,” he said. “Every breach of the public engagements, whether from choice or necessity, is in different degrees hurtful to public credit.”
It isn’t unusual for new administrations to pause some spending at the beginning of their terms, and perhaps the Trump administration will soon prove the worriers wrong and lift the spending freeze. But I fear it will not. It is very possible that in the next several months, the administration will begin to breach dozens of its public engagements. This will hurt the energy, automaking, and construction sectors in the near term. It will cause grief for the president — and, I worry, all of us — soon after.
Core inflation is up, meaning that interest rates are unlikely to go down anytime soon.
The Fed on Wednesday issued a report showing substantial increases in the price of eggs, used cars, and auto insurance — data that could spell bad news for the renewables economy.
Though some of those factors had already been widely reported on, the overall rise in prices exceeded analysts’ expectations. With overall inflation still elevated — reaching an annual rate of 3%, while “core” inflation, stripping out food and energy, rose to 3.3%, after an unexpectedly sharp 0.4% jump in January alone — any prospect of substantial interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve has dwindled even further.
Renewable energy development is especially sensitive to higher interest rates. That’s because renewables projects, like wind turbines and solar panels, have to incur the overwhelming majority of their lifetime costs before they start operating and generating revenue. Developers then often fund much of the project through borrowed money that’s secured against an agreement to buy the resulting power. When the cost of borrowing money goes up, projects become less viable, with lower prospective returns sometimes causing investors not to go forward .
High interest rates have plagued the renewables economy for years. “As interest rates rise, all of a sudden, solar assets that are effectively bonds become less valuable,” Quinn Pasloske, a managing director at Greenbacker, a renewable investor and operating company, told me on Tuesday, describing how the stream of payments from a solar project becomes less valuable as rates rise because investors can get more from risk-free government bonds.
The new inflation data is “consistent with our call of an extended Fed pause, with only one rate cut in 2025, happening in June,” Morgan Stanley economists wrote in a note to clients. Bond traders are also projecting just a single cut for the rest of the year — but not until December.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking committee Tuesday, “We think our policy rate is in a good place, and we don’t see any reason to be in a hurry to reduce it further.”
The yield for the 10-year Treasury bond, often used as a benchmark for the cost of credit, is up 0.09% today, to 4.63%. While this is below where yields peaked in mid-January, it’s a level still well above where yields have been for almost all of the last year. When Treasury yields rise, the cost of credit throughout the economy goes up.
Clean energy stocks were down this morning — but so is the overall market. Because while high interest rates are especially bad for renewables, they’re not exactly great for anyone else.