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Why he did is anybody’s guess. But we’re all about to suffer the consequences.
Donald Trump hasn’t taken office yet, but the quarter of a billion dollars Elon Musk invested in Trump’s victory is already paying off in ways large and small. On Friday, Reuters reported that the Trump transition team is looking to scrap a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash-reporting requirement, “a move that could cripple the government’s ability to investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles with automated-driving systems.” Tesla finds this requirement irksome, and lo, it may soon disappear.
In the scope of Musk’s emerging sway over the Trump administration and the course of federal policy in the coming years, it’s a relatively minor story of potentially corrupt influence and the subversion of the public interest. But an even more disturbing picture of Musk’s full priority set is coming into focus.
Musk, the richest human being in history (his net worth now tops $400 billion), may soon exercise a control over government policy unprecedented for a private citizen, which as recently as a year or so ago might have seemed like a net positive for the fight against climate change. Until the relatively immediate present, Musk was rightly counted as a hero of that battle. Whether or not you accept his claim that “I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on Earth,” Musk has certainly done more than anyone to promote the adoption of electric vehicles. And no public figure could — if he wanted — have more ability to convince conservatives in general, and Donald Trump in particular, to accept the reality of climate change and commit to doing something about it than he does.
But that is not what Elon Musk wants. It is becoming clear that in pursuit of his own objectives — money, power, domination over others, personal aggrandizement, and the realization of his dream of making humanity a “multi-planet species” — Musk is content not just to set aside the fight against climate change, but to actively undermine it.
While Musk has not made any grand announcement declaring that he no longer cares about climate, there is considerable evidence to suggest he does not. In a rambling interview with Trump this August, Musk said that his views on the fossil fuel industry are “probably different from what most people would assume.” He explained that “I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry,” and although over time we should move toward sustainable energy, “we still have quite a bit of time … we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to stop farmers from farming or prevent people from having steaks.”
Which is almost exactly what any fossil fuel CEO would say.
It certainly marks a rhetorical shift for someone who once advocated a “popular uprising” against fossil fuel companies. One might object that whatever he says in interviews, he’s still the CEO of America’s largest EV manufacturer. And Tesla no doubt remains a company filled with people committed to combating climate change who see their work as a key part of that effort. The third iteration of the company’s “Master Plan,” released last year, describes what it believes is necessary to “fully electrify the economy and eliminate fossil fuel use.”
But that doesn’t seem to reflect the CEO’s own thinking. The Washington Postreported that earlier this year, Musk killed plans to create an affordable Tesla that could have greatly expanded the reach of EVs in the U.S., opting instead to make further investments in luxury cars and artificial intelligence. (To add insult to injury, Reuters first reported in April that the car had been canceled, but Musk said that the outlet was “lying.”) “The internal deliberations over the so-called Tesla Model 2,” said the Post, “reflect what sources close to Musk describe as a significant shift in the billionaire’s attitude toward climate change.”
That’s apparent in what may be the single most important decision Trump and congressional Republicans will have to make with regard to EVs: whether to kill the $7,500 EV subsidy revived and expanded by the Inflation Reduction Act. If Musk wanted to, he could almost certainly convince Trump that the subsidies ought to remain in place. But he doesn’t; this summer he said on an earnings call that while eliminating the subsidies might cost Tesla some sales, “long term, it probably actually helps” because it would be “devastating for our competitors.” Or as he said in a tweet, “Take away the subsidies. It will only help Tesla.”
In other words, Musk favors a policy change that will reduce overall adoption of EVs, because it will hurt his competition, perhaps driving some of his competitors out of the EV market entirely. Bad for the climate, but good for Elon Musk.
Then we have the rest of the Trump administration’s agenda to roll back climate progress. To date there is zero evidence that Musk has suggested that Trump dial back his “drill, baby, drill” agenda or appoint administration figures who are anything less than fossil fuel enthusiasts. Quite the opposite: When Trump posted on Truth Social that “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals,” Musk responded by tweeting, “This is awesome.”
That it isn’t in Trump’s power to single-handedly waive “all Environmental approvals” isn’t the point, so much as the fact that Musk thrills to the idea of the government no longer bothering to enforce environmental laws. While the “Department of Government Efficiency” Trump has tasked Musk with creating is neither a department, nor part of the government, nor devoted to efficiency, it nonetheless stands as a symbol of Musk’s close relationship with Trump and his ability to influence Trump’s decisions, particularly given how little Trump actually cares about policy areas other than immigration and foreign trade. It has become hard to envision Musk acting as anything other than an accelerant on Trump’s worst environmental instincts.
Musk’s shift to the right will continue to have serious national consequences in both government policy and public debate. He bought Twitter in 2022 with the stated intention of removing much of its content moderation in the name of “free speech,” with the predictable result that the renamed X quickly became a sewer of far-right extremism and misinformation of all kinds. As multiple analyses have shown, climate denialism and deceit have proliferated on X, making it one of the premier vectors of influence for those who would thwart efforts to address the climate crisis.
There is no reason to believe that this concerns Musk in any way. The man who once had the key insight that the way to fight climate change was to make EVs cool now thinks nothing is cooler than getting retweets and likes from the right-wing trolls who consider him their king.
At this point, one might even question whether Musk ever cared about climate change, or if concern about warming was just an engine that he realized could make him rich and feed his grandiose dreams of world domination. The answer to that question is: It doesn’t matter. Whatever he might once have thought, Musk has been transformed. He is no longer a force for good in the climate fight; instead, he’ll be one more obstacle to ensuring the future of the planet. If only he didn’t have the ability to do so much damage.
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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.