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Plants are marching north. Native gardening will never be the same.
Thirteen miles isn’t very far: roughly the length of Manhattan or the distance you run in a half marathon. On a freeway, it takes less than 15 minutes to drive.
Multiply 13 by 10, though, and it becomes 130 miles — more than the width of the state of Connecticut. Move the U.S. border 130 miles north, and Whistler Blackcomb becomes an American ski resort; move it south, and Tijuana is the new Los Angeles. If you started walking, it would take you 35 straight hours to cover the distance; if you called an Uber, you’d be looking at a $450 ride.
The temperature regions that determine the local viability of different plants, called plant hardiness zones, are believed to be slipping north at a rate of about 13.3 miles per decade — not a number that sounds especially alarming, but one that will, over a century, add up to dramatically reshape the regional flora of the United States. In addition to being yet another depressing climate statistic, though, that number is also generating a lot of headaches in the surprisingly combustible world of native gardening.
It’s been 16 years (or approximately 21 northward miles) since Douglas Tallamy’s warning in his book Bringing Nature Home that “unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.” Though we may still be far from achieving his long-term goal of a “homegrown national park,” in which Americans convert half their yard space to native gardens, Tallamy’s teachings remain hugely influential in gardening and conservation circles (42 states have their own specialized native plant societies promoting these goals).
Tallamy insists that “all plants are not created equal, particularly in their ability to support wildlife.” If we’re to sustain the remaining biodiversity in the U.S., it is essential to feed insects — and in turn, the birds that eat those insects — the foods they’ve evolved to eat. If a plant isn’t native to these ecosystems, then it isn’t worth planting or sustaining. Often, says Tallamy, doing so is actively detrimental to biodiversity goals.
But what even is a native plant in this obviously shifting world? Already, New York City is considered subtropical, capable even of supporting certain hardy palms; by 2040, Seattle could be in the same hardiness zone that central Florida, New Orleans, and parts of Texas are in today. Researchers have seen plants native to the South slowly pushing their ranges north.
Native plants are frequently the species under the most stress from the new weather patterns in their historic ranges. The state tree of Washington, the Western hemlock, for example, is especially susceptible to drought and is struggling to survive in a drier Pacific Northwest. “We’ve found a lot of mortality of trees that should be in the prime in their life,” explained Raymond Larson, an associate director and curator at the University of Washington Botanic Gardens and a contributor to Great Plant Picks, a viability resource for Pacific Northwest gardeners.
As a result, many horticulturalists with an eye on the next century are actively exploring — and recommending — plants that are explicitly not native. Axios Seattlerecently published a list of trees that Pete Smith, a program director at the Arbor Day Foundation, believes will be able to tolerate the next 50 to 100 years in the region, and it notably included the Japanese pagoda tree; the pawpaw, a native of the East Coast; and the ginkgo, which is “incredibly tough, very long-lived, and great at tolerating urban stresses” — but an exotic from China that is particularly reviled by Tallamy.
“What honestly most gardeners — many gardeners, anyway — have kind of lost track of is what the word ‘native’ means,” Smith explained to me when I followed up to ask about the globe-spanning range of his recommendations. “It is presumptuous, even, to talk about native plants as if 1492 was some magic date that talks about what is and was native to this continent.”
“Native” doesn’t have a hard and fast definition. In Bringing Nature Home, Tallamy writes that a true native is a plant that interacts “with the community that historically helped shape it,” but he also warns against using too small a timescale when making these determinations: “[A] history measured in centuries is the tiniest drop in the proverbial bucket of evolutionary time.” Native plant purists, Smith added, will argue that “the only quality tree is a tree that was grown from a seed from right underneath the tree that bore that seed. Isn’t that a wonderful ideal? [But] it’s not practical.”
Some native plant proponents have allowed for species that are retreating north (or up) on their own volition since these changes happen slowly and food-chain communities can relocate with them. A number of Southern species in the United States got there in the first place by being pushed down during the last ice age, and have been reclaiming prehistoric ranges as the cold has receded over the last 10,000 years. But ancient forests don’t appear to have migrated as complete ecosystems during these upheavals; it was a race of every-species-for-itself. “There’s a lot more interchangeability among members of an ecosystem than people had thought,” David Jablonski, a paleontologist, told the Smithsonian.
There is also the problem that the climactic zones are moving faster than trees can follow. “The average forest migrates at a rate of roughly 1,640 feet each year,” Wired has written — that is, about three miles in a decade. In order “to outrun climate change,” trees would need to book it north at a rate of “approximately 9,800 to 16,000 feet” a year, or about 10 times as fast. Plenty of foresters aren’t waiting around for that to happen and are seriously exploring the controversial idea of human-assisted migration.
Larson, at the UW Botanic Gardens, meanwhile, said their horticulturalists are looking off-continent for inspiration for the hard years ahead. “We’re experimenting more with plants in Mediterranean climates,” he said, and “also the southern hemisphere: Australia, Chile, New Zealand." Places that have "somewhat similar climates," to the Pacific Northwest, “but tend to get a little bit hotter." And while some of these experiments haven’t panned out as hoped in the past, “we’re going to try them again, because 5 or 10 degrees can make all the difference.”
The conventional wisdom, that introducing or nurturing exotics results in a decline in biodiversity, is also being challenged — often heatedly so. It can seem at times that for every study that expounds on the evils wrought by alien plants, another concludes the exact opposite. The ongoing debate has produced fiery polemics, such as one signed by 19 ecologists and published in Nature in 2011, which announced “it is time … to ditch this preoccupation with the native-alien dichotomy and embrace more dynamic and pragmatic approaches … better suited to our fast-changing planet.” The scientists also swatted down the frequent synonymizing of “nativeness” with “good,” pointing out that “the insect currently suspected to be killing more trees than any other in North America is the native mountain pine beetle.”
(These sorts of back-and-forths are presumably what led former Arnold Arboretum horticulturist Peter Del Tredici, one of the Nature letter’s signatories, to observe, “the use of exotic versus native species … seems to bring out the worst in people, not unlike the debates over gun control and abortion.” Whoever said gardening was boring?)
Arthur Shapiro, a distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California at Davis, is also among those who have challenged the uncompromising emphasis on the superiority of native plants. “There are many nonnative plants grown in gardens that are immensely useful to butterflies and other pollinators,” Shapiro told me. “And there are many native plants that are completely useless. They might as well be made with rubber or wood.” If you were to uproot every exotic plant in urban California, for instance, you’d “essentially do away with the butterfly fauna.”
That’s partially due to a principle known as ecological fitting, which is “what happens when species with totally disparate histories, that evolved in different parts of the world, come into contact — perhaps as a result of commerce, perhaps as a result of gardening — and they fit together,” said Shapiro. “It’s a marriage made in heaven.” Additionally, oft-vilified “novel ecosystems”, sometimes disparagingly dismissed as “trash ecosystems," arise when exotic species are naturalized due to human influence and/or certain native species recede. Increasingly, though, scientists like Shapiro are viewing these emerging anthropocenic systems as environmental success stories. An unmanaged invasive pine plantation in Puerto Rico, for example, was found to have far more biodiversity than a nearby native-only forest of the same age, Nature recounts; the observation, made in 1979, ran so counter to the established beliefs about the sanctity of native plants that “it took almost a decade" for the resulting paper to pass peer review.
The native/non-native dichotomy is undoubtedly clumsy, so much so that one idea has been to dispense with the unhelpful language altogether. “Neonative,” a term proposed by University of Vienna conservation biologist Franz Essl, for example, could be adapted to describe species that have moved beyond their native ranges and established new foothold populations “due to human-induced changes of the biophysical environment, but not as a result of direct movement by human agency.”
Another idea is to take a step back, put our preconceived notions in check, and learn from what we’re seeing. “As climate changes, communities are going to change, mixtures are going to change,” Shapiro said. “Trying to stop it — except for managing things of economic or medical importance, pests, or disease vectors — is equivalent to trying to plow the sea. It’s futile. So we should actually be paying close attention to what’s happening, because we can learn a lot from it, about how communities self-assemble.”
This isn’t your permission to go plant a bunch of English ivy and scotch broom, though. Two things can potentially both be true: certain native plants have essential ecological functions and some non-native plants can play an important role in shaping future ecosystems. In fact, they’re going to have to, if the climate keeps warming and the hardiness zones continue their upward march.
“We would always tell someone: choose native first,” Smith, of the Arbor Day Foundation, concurred. But at the same time, “Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
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Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture
Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”
AccuWeather
Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year. Overall, renewables added a record 858 terawatt hours, nearly 50% more than the previous record set in 2022. Hydro was the largest source of low-carbon power, followed by nuclear. But wind and solar combined overtook hydro last year, while nuclear’s share of the energy mix reached a 45-year low. More solar capacity was installed in 2024 than in any other single year.
Ember
The report notes that demand for electricity rose thanks to heat waves and air conditioning use. This resulted in a slight, 1.4% annual increase in fossil-fuel power generation and pushed power-sector emissions to a new all-time high of 14.5 billion metric tons. “Clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures,” the report said.
President Trump’s new tariffs will have a “limited” effect on the amount of solar components the U.S. imports from Asia because the U.S. already imposes tariffs on these products, according to a report from research firm BMI. That said, the U.S. still relies heavily on imported solar cells, and the new fees are likely to raise costs for domestic manufacturers and developers, which will ultimately be passed on to buyers and could slow solar growth. “Since the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand for solar, wind, and grid components, we do expect that costs will increase for developers due to the tariffs which will now be imposed upon these components,” BMI wrote.
In other tariff news, the British government is adjusting its 2030 target of ending the sale of new internal combustion engine cars to ease some of the pain from President Trump’s new 25% auto tariffs. Under the U.K.’s new EV mandate, carmakers will be able to sell new hybrids through 2035 (whereas the previous version of the rules banned them by 2030), and gas and diesel vans can also be sold through 2035. The changes also carve out exemptions for luxury supercar brands like McLaren and Aston Martin, which will be allowed to keep selling new ICE vehicles beyond 2030 because, the government says, they produce so few. The goal is to “help ease the transition and give industry more time to prepare.” British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insisted the changes have been “carefully calibrated” and their impact on carbon emissions is “negligible.” As The New York Timesnoted, the U.S. is the largest single-country export market for British cars.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Occidental Petroleum’s application to capture and sequester carbon dioxide at its direct air capture facility in Texas, and issued permits that will allow the company to drill and inject the gas more than one mile underground. The Stratos DAC plant is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, Stratos is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. Its success (or failure) could shape the future of DAC investment at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out the Department of Energy’s nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team and casting doubt over the future of the DOE’s $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, it will use the same technology as Occidental’s South Texas DAC hub.
The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub are launching a $27 million effort to fund research into selectively breeding cattle that emit less methane.