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Russ Vought could jeopardize the next decade of climate science. But who is he?
It is my sincere belief that, as with many aspects of governance, thinking about climate policy bores former President Donald Trump. He is not without his hobbyhorses — wind turbines are ugly bird-killers; it’s freezing in New York, so where the hell is global warming? — but on the whole, I tend to agree with the assessment that he basically believes “nothing” on climate change. Trump simply isn’t all that interested. He prefers to let the others do the thinking for him.
This isn’t a knock on Trump, per se; part of leading a bureaucracy as big and as complicated as the United States government is surrounding yourself with people who can offload some of that thinking for you. But the crucial question then becomes: Who is doing that thinking?
The answer, to a large extent, is Russ Vought.
The name might not immediately ring a bell. Biographical details of the 48-year-old career bureaucrat can be hard to find (“a native of Trumbull, Connecticut,” “the youngest of seven children,” “a die-hard Yankees fan”), giving the impression that Vought came out of nowhere. In a sense, he did: For years, Vought dealt mainly with spreadsheets as he worked first as a budget staffer for Texas Republican Sen. Phil Gramm and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, then later for then-Rep. Mike Pence, and eventually the Heritage Foundation. It was Gramm, though, who gave Vought his outlook on the world: “If you do budget, you do everything.”
After a stint with the Trump transition team, Vought became deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2018, and took over entirely in 2019. At OMB, he famously held up military aid to Ukraine in what became the subject of Trump’s first impeachment. Described as “ideological in the extreme,” “adversarial” with his colleagues, and having an “aggressive personal style” — incongruous, perhaps, with his somewhat nerdy, bespectacled appearance — Vought would reportedly go too far in proposed budget cuts sometimes even for his boss.
After Biden’s win in 2020, Vought launched the Center for American Restoration, a pro-Trump think tank with the mission of renewing “a consensus of America as a nation under God,” and has otherwise kept busy with appearances on conservative-friendly talk shows on One America News Network and Fox News. Steve Bannon has approvingly dubbed him “MAGA’s bulldog,” though he rarely speaks to the mainstream press. (I received a failed delivery message in response to an email to the address listed on the website for the Center for American Restoration; other attempts to contact Vought went unanswered.)
Vought is all but assured to take up a powerful position in a potential incoming Trump cabinet. He “trained up during the first Trump administration, and he is looking to apply those skills that he learned in a second,” said Alex Witt, the senior advisor for oil and gas at Climate Power, a strategic communications group that shared its research on Vought with me.
Vought may not be the most obvious architect for the project of dismantling climate progress, however. In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for the next Republican president, Vought authored the chapter on the Office of the President of the United States — hardly the most climate-y section, given that there are also chapters on reforming the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior. A flurry of new articles about Vought describe him as a Christian nationalist crusader preoccupied with fending off big government and orchestrating an expansion of presidential powers.
But just as Trump advisor Stephen Miller shaped far-right immigration policies from behind the scenes, Vought would be a hidden hand in a future administration dismantling climate progress. In his chapter in Project 2025, for example, Vought proposes moving the National Defense Strategy from under the purview of the Defense Department to the White House and its National Security Council — normal “expansion of presidential powers” stuff. But Vought goes even further, directing the NSC then to “rigorously review” the staff with an eye for “climate change … and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed force.”
Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Center for Climate and Security, told me that such a proposal indicates “a misunderstanding of how connected climate hazards are to the core duties of what the military is focused on.” It could also put the U.S. armed forces on the back foot in conflicts around the world if it’s followed through. As just one example, if the military isn’t engaging with its Indo-Pacific partners “and helping those countries build resilience to climate change, then China is more than happy to step in and address that,” Sikorsky warned. At home, NSC analyses of the domestic impacts of climate change will likely come to a halt, scuttling future coordination between the military and local governments after disasters and hampering mitigation efforts around the country.
The most significant blow on the climate front, however, would come from Vought’s proposal to reinstate Schedule F, a job classification that aims to convert at least 50,000 career civil servants to “at-will” political employees. (Trump used an executive order to implement Schedule F at the very end of his term; President Biden unimplemented it soon after taking office.) The employment classification ostensibly aims to make it easier to replace “rogue” or “woke” civil servants and would-be whistleblowers, a.k.a. “the deep state,” with party-line faithful. But in the words of Vought himself, Schedule F is also necessary because Biden’s “climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”
The effects of such a decision, experts told me, could range from very bad to disastrous self-sabotage. Schedule F is “designed to be a tool to purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with “partisan loyalists who would willingly follow any order without question, regardless of whether it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do for the people,” Joe Spielberger, the policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent and nonpartisan watchdog group, told me. In practice, that might mean firing longtime civil servants perceived as not loyal enough, or even just “creating and perpetuating a climate of fear and intimidation where people are not able or willing to speak out when they see abuse of power and other corruption happening.”
Such a scenario is concerning for employees at agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who work on climate modeling. But the expertise of the U.S. civil service is broad and deep; Schedule F could impact everyone from the economists, lawyers, and engineers who work on something like the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to the people who sit on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.
“Civil service positions are not classified as political appointees for a reason, which is so that staff, especially scientists, can do work that spans administrations because it is so fundamental to public health and welfare,” Chitra Kumar, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ managing director for climate and energy, told me in an email. The people made fireable under Schedule F, in other words, are the ones who actually know what is going on, whereas “elected officials come and go, often taking a year or more to understand the latest underlying science.”
Reimplementing and expanding Schedule F, however, is apparently one of Vought’s greatest ambitions. Earlier this year, the National Treasury Employees Union obtained documents via a Freedom of Information Act request that showed Vought’s intent to apply the status to much of OMB’s workforce in 2020. As justification for taking an implicit machete to his staff, Vought writes in Project 2025 that “it is the president’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority,” but that instead, the U.S. civil service is “all too often … carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
Ann Carlson, the former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and a professor of environmental law at UCLA, strongly refutes Vought’s claim. For one thing, she told me that the great irony of the Schedule F proposal is that it would make it more difficult for the Trump administration to carry out its goals in the long run.
“Part of the problem for a conservative administration is, if you want to roll back policies that are in place, you need people who know how to do that,” Carlson pointed out. She also bristled at the suggestion that civil servants are unable to check their biases at the door: Carlson’s team at NHTSA helped put together the Biden administration’s rules to strengthen fuel economy standards, but it also worked to roll back the Obama administration’s regulations and replaced them with the SAFE standards under Trump. “I don’t actually know, for most of them, which one they preferred,” Carlson said.
Carlson wasn’t the only former political appointee I spoke with who fiercely defended the integrity of her staff. Ron Sanders, a three-year Trump appointee, so vehemently opposed Schedule F when it was briefly implemented in 2020 that he resigned as chairman of the Federal Salary Council. Today, he represents a group of Republican former national security officials who are imploring Congress to find a middle ground between the current status quo and the extreme political loyalty demanded by Schedule F.
When I read Sanders the part of Vought’s Project 2025 chapter that calls for weeding out the “radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country,” he told me that such thinking is “myopic.” “This is potentially a Republican administration coming in and finding ‘Democrats’ in place,” Sanders said. “You could say the same thing about the Biden administration, but they knew better — they knew that senior career officials appointed in the Trump administration are still politically neutral. It just happened to be a matter of timing.”
It likewise struck me as curious that Vought would push so hard for a policy that would not only hamstring the Trump administration but might also allow future Democratic presidents to carry out purges of perceived conservative government operatives.
The Biden administration has made moves to prevent Schedule F from potentially returning under a different president. Still, Spielberger from the Project on Government Oversight told me that short of a legislative fix by Congress, such actions will only delay reimplementation of the policy by “a matter of months” should Trump be reelected. The damage to climate science from four years of Schedule F, however, could be drastic.
“What we’re going to end up with is an executive branch that’s just uninformed,” Daniel Farber, the director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, stressed to me. Farber’s fear is not just that “a bunch of uninformed ideologues” would be running the show, but also that once government experts are kicked out, it will be difficult to replace them or entice them to return.
“Even after we go back to a Democratic president, you can’t wave a wand and get all those people back,” Farber said. In the first nine months of the Trump administration, for example, the EPA lost more than 700 employees — and that was due to poor morale and high turnover even without the threat of Schedule F.
Schedule F doesn’t just chase out climate-related experts from the government. It also accelerates the revolving door that allows anti-climate zealots actors in. Both the Heritage Foundation and Vought’s think tank, the Center for American Restoration, have taken money from Big Oil groups and executives. Trump has already made his own transactional assurances to the industry if it funds his return to the White House. Schedule F, meanwhile, would open up hundreds if not thousands of positions for unqualified political operatives — essentially creating a “spoils system” where the lines between government and private industry would blur more than they already do.
“Russ Vought is not the problem,” Witt, of Climate Power, told me. “The problem is Donald Trump: Donald and the GOP are bought out by Big Oil, and Vought and other bad actors are a cog in that machine.”
It’s a metaphor that works well for the federal government, too: What happens when you have 50,000 cogs, but the person you’ve deferred to run the machine has fired all the mechanics?
“You take out all that expertise, all the people who understand how the system works?” Carlson, the former NHTSA director, said. “Good luck to you.”
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The company says its first Optimus robots will start rolling off the line in “2026.”
Tesla is a car company everywhere except Wall Street. It delivered some 1.7 million cars in 2024, which were built in factories in Texas, California, Germany, and China. These car sales (and leases and sales of regulatory credits) generated some $77 billion in revenue. Its gross margin on these cars is about 18.5%, or around $14 billion.
When Tesla reported its first quarter earnings, it announced a more than 70% decline in profits, continued falling sales, and ahit to its business from the trade war with China. But its stock climbed the next day, and is now trading at around $350 a share, from $238 before the report, giving it an overall value of over $1 trillion. By some metrics, Tesla makes up more than half of the overall value of the automotive industry.
That’s because it’s not valued like a car company. The company’s investors are putting a huge stake on future innovations that largely spring from the head of Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive. These include promised self-driving cars and a self-driving taxi service, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot, which Musk has said could turn into a $10 trillion business. (For reference, Walmart’s annual revenue is just under $650 billion; Walmart is also worth less than Tesla today.) So far, all we know about the Optimus is that it can dance.
One reason analysts and shareholders cheered its most recent results is because Musk committed to spending less time in Washington trying to reshape the federal government and more time with the company that makes up the lion’s share of his immense personal wealth. But just getting more of Musk’s time is the easy test. A more consequential challenge for the thesis that Tesla can be more than just a company that sells cars to people who drive them is its upcoming robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, scheduled for next month.
While Google’s Waymo already has a fully autonomous taxi system available in a few areas of a few cities, Musk has repeatedly promised that Tesla could reach full autonomy globally far more cheaply than Waymo — or, as he puts it, “Waymo needs ‘way mo’ money to succeed 😂.”
But the initial rollout of the robotaxi may be modest. Adam Jonas, a bullish Tesla analyst with Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients on Friday after a conversation with Tesla’s head of investor relations that the Austin debut will “have 10-20 cars” and “plenty of tele-ops to ensure safety levels.”
Another future Tesla business, its Optimus robot, might be able to open up its factory to tours for investors sometime in the last three months of the year, Jonas reported, with commercialization coming by the middle of 2026 at a cost of around $20,000 per unit. The company aims to produce “several thousand” robots by the end of this year, he said. (Though you should be skeptical of any and all dates and deadlines given by Tesla — Musk has been promising an imminent fleet of autonomous Teslas for over five years.) Right now, Jonas wrote, about 12 are being produced at a time, more or less by hand.
And that’s just the mechanics. The software for humanoid autonomy also isn’t there yet: “Tesla admits both intelligence and cost ‘need to come a long way’ to unlock the true potential of humanoid robots,” Jonas wrote. “The neural nets for Optimus are far larger than for cars given greater degrees-of-freedom and far more open-ended tasks.”
Tesla also has more prosaic worries for these next generation businesses. Company officials told Jonas that they’re in an “incredibly competitive” hiring market, especially compared to Chinese companies, which “own the supply chain” for advanced technologies.
While Tesla and Musk are eager to tell the public that the company is orienting itself toward an AI-driven robotic future, some of its other corporate actions may reflect the more present-day concerns of brand management. Tesla sales have declined sharply overseas, and its showrooms have become sites for protest, driven by anger over Musk’s role in the Trump administration.
The company said Friday that it would welcome a new member of its board: Jack Hartung, president and chief strategy officer of Chipotle, a brand with its own history of crisis, stock market volatility, and precarious executive leadership. While it’s unlikely Tesla will get involved in the food business anytime soon, it may benefitfrom learning from Chipotle’s struggles over the last few years of giving people what they expect.
At least one target of Chris Wright’s grant review may run into some sticky statutory issues.
The Department of Energy announced on Thursday that it’s reviewing some 179 awards made by the Biden administration worth $15 billion to ensure they were “consistent with Federal law and this Administration’s policies and priorities.”
But what happens when federal law and Trump’s priorities are at odds?
In the case of at least one awardee, the major U.S. steel producer Cleveland Cliffs, the DOE’s review process may become a mechanism to take funding that is statutorily designated for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and channel it into long-lived fossil fuel assets.
Lourenco Goncalves, the CEO of Cleveland Cliffs, a major U.S. steel producer, said on an earnings call last week that the company was in the process of renegotiating its $500 million award under the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The DOE program funded 33 projects to decarbonize heavy industry, including cement, steel, aluminum, and glass production, with first-of-its-kind or early-scale commercial technologies.
Cleveland Cliffs was originally going to use the money to replace its coal-fired blast furnace at a steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, with a new unit that ran on a mix of hydrogen and natural gas as well as new electric furnaces. Now, the company is working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” Goncalves told investors. The project would no longer assume the use of hydrogen and “would instead rely on readily available and more economical fossil fuels.”
The CEO later clarified that the company planned to “reline” its blast furnace at Middletown, extending its life, “now that the project is changing scope.”
But the Inflation Reduction Act, which created the Industrial Demonstrations Program, says the funds must be used for “the purchase and installation, or implementation, of advanced industrial technology,” which it defines as tech “designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction progress to net-zero.”
“I don’t know at this point what Cleveland Cliffs can confidently say they’re going to do to substantially reduce greenhouse gasses and also deliver gains in public health and jobs to local communities, which is a prerequisite for IDP grant money,” Yong Kwon, a senior advisor for the Sierra Club’s Industrial Transformation Campaign, told me.
The memo announcing the Department of Energy’s review says that it has already reached some “concerning” findings, though it does not describe what was concerning or provide any further detail about the awards under review.
Compared to his peers at other agencies, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been noticeably quiet about the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to slash funding across the Department of Energy. But in March, Axiosobtained documents that said more than 60% of grants awarded under the Industrial Demonstrations Program were being targeted. The following month, CNN reported that Cleveland Cliffs’ Middletown project was on the list slated for termination, noting that it would have secured 2,500 jobs and created more than 100 new, permanent jobs in JD Vance’s hometown.
At the time, Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich told CNN that “no final decisions have been made” about the funding and that “multiple plans are still being considered.” Now it appears the Department may be negotiating with Cleveland Cliffs to develop a cheaper and more politically palatable project.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have also introduced a bill that would rescind any money from the Industrial Demonstrations Program that isn’t obligated, meaning that if the Department of Energy can find a way to legally terminate its contracts with companies, Congress may claw back the money.
The Industrial Demonstrations Program was the Biden administration’s “missing middle” grant program, designed to support projects that were past the early experimental stage, in which case they were no longer candidates for funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, but were also not ready for mass deployment, like those supported by the Loan Programs Office. In the case of Cleveland Cliffs, the funding was also aimed at making the U.S. a leader in the future of steelmaking, retaining thousands of jobs, saving the company money, and enabling it to command a higher price for its products.
“If you’re going to maintain blast furnaces, it means you have one foot in a technology that is now quickly becoming outdated that the rest of the global steel industry is transitioning away from,” Kwon told me.
David Super, an expert in administrative law at Georgetown University, told me in an email that if the Department of Energy provides and Cleveland Cliffs accepts funding that does not comply with statute, “the Department officials involved could be in violation of the Antideficiency Act and Cleveland Cliffs could be required to return the money, a modified contract notwithstanding.” The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from obligating funds for projects that are not authorized by law.
Super added that the law also specifies that the money be awarded “on a competitive basis.” As Cleveland Cliffs won the competition with its hydrogen project, allowing it to use the money for a different project at the company’s plant “would thus violate the requirement of competitive awards and would allow the unsuccessful bidders to challenge this funding award.”
Neither Cleveland Cliffs nor the Department of Energy responded to a request for comment.
Leaks to the press have signaled that the Department of Energy may be taking a similar approach with the hydrogen hubs, potentially terminating contracts to develop renewable energy-based projects — all of which are in blue states — while allowing natural gas-based projects in red states to continue.
It is still not clear how the agency will handle its $3.5 billion direct air capture hubs, which news outlets have reported may also be under threat. On Friday, however, the oil and gas company Occidental, which was awarded a contract to develop a DAC hub in Texas, announced that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company is considering investing up to $500 million in the project as part of a new joint-venture agreement. The press release notes that the agreement was signed during President Trump’s visit to the United Arab Emirates.
Last week, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said during a confirmation hearing for Kyle Haustveit, the nominee to head the Office of Fossil Energy, that two carbon capture projects in her state were “in limbo” due to the agency’s spending review. The same day, in another hearing, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida accused Wright of having frozen $67 billion worth of funds and asked him to commit to releasing it.
Wright denied this. “We’re not withholding any funds and we’ve paid every invoice we’ve had for work done and funds that are due,” he replied. But he went on to clarify that the agency is “engaging with” recipients “to make sure American taxpayer monies are being spent in thoughtful, reasonable ways.”
According to efficiency department data, the DOE has “terminated” 39 contracts worth $60 million and five grants worth $3.4 million. The contracts include news subscriptions, various technical support services, and a $22 million contract with consulting firm McKinsey for “rapid response deliverables” for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the department that runs the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The grants include three Advanced Research Projects Agency awards to explore using geologic stores of hydrogen, and another to reduce methane emissions from natural gas flares.
On budget negotiations, Climeworks, and DOE grants
Current conditions: It’s peak storm season in the U.S., with severe weather in the forecast for at least the next six days in the Midwest and East• San Antonio, Texas, is expected to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit today• Monsoon rains have begun in Sri Lanka.
The House Budget Committee meeting to prepare the reconciliation bill for a floor vote as early as next week appears to be a go for Friday, despite calls from some Republicans to delay the session. At least three GOP House members, including two members of the Freedom Caucus, have threatened to vote no on the budget because a final score for the Energy and Commerce portion of the bill, which includes cuts to Medicaid, won’t be ready from the Congressional Budget Office until next week. That is causing a “math problem” for Republicans, Politico writes, because the Budget Committee “is split 21-16 in favor of Republicans, and Democrats are expecting full attendance,” meaning Republicans can “only lose two votes if they want to move forward with the megabill Friday.” Republican Brandon Gill of Texas is currently out on paternity leave, further reducing the margin for disagreement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is also contending with discontent in the ranks over cuts to clean energy tax credits. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still pretty bad,” New York Republican Andrew Garbarino, a co-chair of the House Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, told Politico on Thursday. But concerns about the cuts, which would heavily impact Republican state economies and jobs, do not appear to be a “red line” for many others, including Georgia’s Buddy Carter, whose district benefits from Inflation Reduction Act credits for a Hyundai car and battery plant that is among the targets for elimination. You can learn more about the cuts Republicans are proposing to the IRA in our coverage here.
The Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks is preparing for significant cuts to its workforce, citing the larger economic landscape and the Trump administration’s lack of consistent support. The company currently has 498 employees, but is undergoing a consultation process, indicating it is looking to cut more than 10% of its workforce at once, SwissInfo.ch reports. “Our financial resources are limited,” Climeworks’ co-founder and managing director Jan Wurzbacher said in comments on Swiss TV.
Though Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is a known proponent of carbon capture, and there had been excitement in the industry that Trump’s attempts to expedite federal permitting would benefit carbon storage sites, the administration has also hollowed out the Department of Energy’s carbon removal team, my colleague Katie Brigham has reported. The ongoing funding cuts and uncertainty have made it difficult to get information from the government that could affect Climework’s Project Cypress in Louisiana, although Wurzbacher stressed that “we are not currently aware that our project would be stopped.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced in a Thursday memo that the department will be reviewing at least $15 billion worth of grants awarded to “power grid and manufacturing supply chain projects” under the Biden administration, Reuters reports. “With this process, the Department will ensure we are doing our due diligence, utilizing taxpayer dollars to generate the largest possible benefit to the American people and safeguarding our national security,” Wright said in his statement.
The memo goes on to note that the DOE plans to prioritize “large-scale commercial projects that require more detailed information from the awardees for the initial phase of this review, but this process may extend to other DOE program offices as the reviews progress.” Projects that don’t meet the DOE’s standards could be denied, as could projects of grantees who fail to “respond to information requests within the provided time frame, does not respond to follow-up questions in a timely manner.” As of last week, Wright told lawmakers, “we’ve canceled zero” existing projects so far, E&E News writes; the agency will reportedly be reviewing at least 179 different awards during its audit.
The number of National Weather Service offices ending 24-hour operations and severe weather alerts is increasing. On Thursday, The San Francisco Chronicle confirmed that California’s Sacramento and Hanford offices, which provide information to more than 7 million people in the Central Valley, have been forced to reduce service due to “critically reduced staffing.”
Eliminating 24-hour service is especially concerning for the Central Valley and surrounding foothills, where around-the-clock weather updates can be critical. “These are offices that have both dealt with major wildfire episodes most of the past 10 years, and we are now entering fire season,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told the Chronicle. “That’s a big, big problem.” Swain additionally shared on LinkedIn a map he’d put together of regions in the U.S. that no longer have full-service weather coverage, including “a substantial chunk of Tornado Alley during peak tornado season and the entirety of Alaska’s vast North Slope region.” The NWS is additionally seeking to fill 155 vacancies in coastal states that could face risks as the Atlantic hurricane season begins at the end of the month, The Washington Post reports. An estimated 500 of 4,200 NWS employees have been fired or taken early retirements since the start of Trump’s term.
Heatmap’s “most fascinating” EV of 2025 just got pushed back to 2026. The Ram 1500 Ramcharger — which has a 140-mile electric range as well as a V6 engine attached to a generator to power the car when the battery runs out — is now set to launch in the first quarter of next year due to “extending the quality validation period,” Crain’s Detroit Business reported this week. Parent company Stellantis also pushed back the launch of its fully electric Ram 1500 REV until summer 2027, with a planned model year of 2028. “Our plan ensures we are offering customers a range of trucks with flexible powertrain options that best meet their needs,” Stellantis spokeswoman Jodi Tinson told Crain’s in an email. Though you now have even longer to wait, you can read more about the car Jesse Jenkins calls “brilliant” here.
GMC
The 2026 GMC Hummer EV just got even more ridiculous. “Thanks to the new Carbon Fiber Edition,” the 9,000-pound car “can zoom to 60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds,” InsideEVs reports.