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An excerpt from David Lipsky’s The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial
Let’s say you’ve shipped out as a denier.
You’re in it for the action, the dollars, the travel, the fun. And you shade your eyes, glance up at a tall number: 97%, the percentage of active-duty climate researchers who accept man-made climate change.
This is what pollster Frank Luntz understood in 2002. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming,” Luntz wrote, in his famous battle memo. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.”
And this is what was also understood by Dr. S Fred Singer and Frederick Seitz, two of the graybeard prophets who launched the global-warming skepticism movement in the 1990s, that crucial tipping point in the battle between the warmers and the deniers. A word — a concept, a percentage — was your enemy. And every six years the IPCC, the international climate science body, would stamp along on its five thousand legs and drop down another big dose of consensus. Plant it in the headlines of every newspaper. Here was the spot on the tree to carve your “X.” As you spit in your palms and lifted the axe.
Dr. Singer, an atmospheric physicist who would become one of the world’s most prominent climate deniers, tried twice. The anti-consensus petitions have names: The Leipzig Declaration, the Heidelberg Appeal. They sound like spy movies: lovelorn and crestfallen thrillers starring a tongue-tied Jason Bourne, about the cities where he tried to make his feelings known.
The appeal came first, in 1992. Dr. Singer and an associate helped arrange a conference in Heidelberg, Germany. Scientists were invited to sign a petition.
At first, Dr. Singer called it a “statement.” Time passed, coasts cleared. And he was like a man alone at the breakfast bar, filling his plate. Dr. Singer called it “strongly worded.” Said the appeal “expressed skepticism on the urgency for global action to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions.” That it “urged statesmen to go slow on climate-change policies.”
As it happens, the Heidelberg Appeal never once mentions global warming. It’s very pro-science. It’s just not at all anti-climate science.
But it was a list of science names and got weaponized anyway. When denial Senator James Inhofe quoted the petition in Congress, this is how the message ran. “The Heidelberg Appeal, which says that no compelling evidence exists to justify controls of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. They agree it is a hoax.” Two possibilities: Either the senator had never read the appeal, or he hoped you hadn’t.
Dr. Singer took a firmer hand on the next go-round. New and improved — now with global warming.
This was 1995. Earlier that year, Dr. Singer had sent a fossil fuel company his prospectus. For a very reasonable $95,000, the scientist promised to help “stem the tide towards ever more onerous controls on energy use.”
His hook was ozone. The spray cans that had been phased out, Dr. Singer explained, “all on the basis of quite insubstantial science.”
So if funds were provided “without delay,” Dr. Singer could deliver: an event, a panel, and a round number — “a Statement of Support by a hundred or more climate scientists.” With the Singer specialty: “This Statement could then be quoted or reprinted in newspapers.”
I don’t know whether Dr. Singer ever secured his funding. But that November, a panel did convene: in Leipzig, Germany. And one year later, his Statement did appear: the Leipzig Declaration. With the promised one hundred signatures.
The names crinkled brows. (Harvard’s John Holdren, later science advisor to the Obama White House, wrote of them as a mirage or the dream you reconstruct over breakfast: the list “dissolves under scrutiny.”) Sleuths from Danish Broadcasting attempted to track down the 33 European signers. Four could not be located. Twelve denied signing or even knowing about any Leipzig Declaration. Three were offended to hear their names were associated with it. The Statement had also been signed by dentists, lab techs, engineers, and one off-course entomologist who landed briefly on the page.
But the Leipzig Declaration packed its bags and coast-to-coasted anyway — from the Wall Street Journal to the Orange County Register, migrating also to Canada, London, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand. “It is widely cited by conservative voices,” write journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “And is regarded in some circles as the gold standard of scientific expertise on the issue.”
Dr. Singer identifed a hardy, Band of Brothers spirit among his “one hundred climate scientists.” As he explained in the Wall Street Journal, “It takes a certain amount of courage to do this.”
What it didn’t necessarily take was a degree in science. Florida’s Saint Petersburg Times ran their Leipzig story on the front page. Because (a) Florida, sea level. And (b), one signer was a local, the weather guy over at Tampa Bay’s WTVT. Who lacked “a Ph.D. in any scientific field,” the paper noted. “Or, for that matter, a bachelor’s.”
Dr. Singer had met his quota by reaching out to these sportscasters of the air. Twenty-five weathermen signed in, a big klatch from the state of Ohio. This included Richard Groeber, owner and operator of Dick’s Weather Service: you dialed his phone number and he told you the weather.
The Petersburg newshound dialed. Was Dick Groeber, he asked, really a scientist?
“I sort of consider myself so,” Groeber replied. “I had two or three years of training in the scientific area, and 30 or 40 years of self-study.”
The reporter brought his concerns to the keeper of the signatures, Dr. Singer. The scientist’s answer is a testament to the virtue of persistence, of keeping an eye fixed always on the prize. What was truly important, Dr. Singer said, was “the fact that we can demonstrate that 100 or so scientists would put their names down.”
And I wonder if it bothered Dr. Singer. If it’s the story of his outranked life. That for the Oregon Petition — the signature list that did go over the top — the push came from the bigger, better honored, more consequential Fred.
This article was excerpted from David Lipsky’s new book "The Parrot and the Igloo."Courtesy W.W. Norton
I don’t know who took care of the introductions. I do know S. Fred Singer sent Arthur Robinson — a biochemist, five-time Republican nominee for Oregon’s 4th congressional district, and the founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a privately funded lab — material to beef up the research paper that accompanied the Oregon Petition. And I know that the Marshall Institute —— founded by the other Fred, Dr. Seitz, the physicist and tobacco industry consultant Business Week once called the “granddaddy of global-warming skeptics” — dispatched two specialists, climate Sherpas, to lug and guide Arthur along the trickier science crevasses.
One of them was later exposed on the front page of The New York Times. Dr. Willie Soon had been the beneficiary of $1.2 million in fossil fuel largesse. The last of his dinosaur generation to find their way into the tar pits.
“In correspondence with his corporate funders,” the Times reported in 2015, Dr. Soon “described many of his scientific papers as ‘deliverables’ that he completed in exchange for their money.”
And then a beautiful single-sentence short story: capturing the whole project and spirit of denial. “Though often described on conservative news programs as a ‘Harvard astrophysicist,’ Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard.”
Arthur cowrote his paper with the two Dr. Seitz specialists, and a fellow member of the Oregon Institute faculty: his 21-year-old son, Zachary.
This father-son teamwork produced something strange. First, their paper said climate change would not occur. Then, somewhat unexpectedly, it reversed field and explained that the change was already in progress and accomplishing marvels.
Their concluding sentences drop the effort of science entirely. The language pans across streams and meadows — takes in a drowsy summer morning, with the sound of bees. “We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals,” the Robinsons write, a little dreamily, “as a result of the CO2 increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we are now blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift of the Industrial Revolution.”
Arthur’s paper had never been published or peer-reviewed. It was entirely homeschool.
And here’s where you can appreciate the great, freewheeling advantage of having fun. Arthur Robinson and Frederick Seitz collaborated on a tremendous prank.
Arthur had his report professionally printed. Now this home-cooked meal, this sloppy Joe, resembled an entrée at the end of a Food Network episode. The National Academy of Sciences produces one of the world’s most distinguished journals. Garnishing with font and layout, Robinson labored until his blessing looked, in the words of the journal Nature, “exactly like a paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
Everybody has the one résumé line they lean on. It’s whispered before you sweep over to shake hands; it will lead the obituaries when you step away forever. Frederick Seitz was the former National Academy president — publishers of the Proceedings journal whose format Arthur had copied.
Dr. Seitz wrote the letter that accompanied the Oregon Petition.
The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy. ... This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. ...We urge you to sign and return the petition card.
Dr. Seitz signed with his résumé line: Past President, The National Academy of Sciences.
A cover letter from an Academy president. A paper formatted to look exactly as if it had been published in the Academy magazine. (Plus the plural we urge, the institutional in our opinion — the speaking voice of an organization.) Arthur and Seitz had pulled off the greatest soundalike in denial history.
The package was then sent all across America — as one researcher wrote, to “virtually every scientist in every field.” And how could recipients fail to believe, tearing open their envelopes, that the Academy was reaching out to them, at an hour of scientific need?
In 1996, Nature had written about the “dwindling band of skeptics.” You picture palm fronds and breakers, the shoreline from Lord of the Flies: a rocky atoll among rising seas.
This line vexed deniers. It so bugged S. Fred Singer he ascribed it, for ease of attack, to Al Gore. (The scientist loved to attack the vice president.). So the other aim of the petition: to grow the movement, at least in the eyes of key readerships in the Washington metro area.
It really was their weakness: Demographics. Max Planck once made an ice-eyed observation about scientific change. It doesn’t result from fresh evidence, or the Kevlar argument. Positions get too dug in for that. It steals on gradually, in calendars and gravesides. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” the physicist wrote. “But rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
The plain truth was the deniers weren’t getting any younger. Actual science was drawing the young PhDs. (When S. Fred Singer addressed a roomful of such climatologists in the spring of the Oregon Petition, the reception was not hostile. It was charity. His audience “politely pointed to datasets and to scientific research,” wrote science journalist Myanna Lahsen, “none of which Dr. Singer appeared to be familiar with.”) It’s why the great denial work was brought off by Frederick Seitz, 86, and S. Fred Singer, 78; and by Arthur Robinson, aged 56, whose footsteps two-time Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling had long ago banished from institutional hallways.
“What will happen is clear,” Arthur told supporters, in a sort of pre-invasion essay, as his envelopes mustered at the post office. “The warmers will be deprived of the central pillar that underlies their entire campaign.”
This was that tall, shade-throwing word: consensus. “Remove their facade of scientific consensus, and they will likely lose — if it is removed in time.”
And it worked. In the House and Senate, lawmakers said the petition proved climate change was “bogus” — a non-issue for “the vast majority” of scientists. (They needed something like it to be true. So they went ahead and believed it into truth.) It worked because it’s a big library, and we’re all busy people. And, as the bibliothecary Jorge Luis Borges once observed, “The person does not exist who, outside their own specialty, is not credulous.”
“Happy Earth Day, Al Gore!” Fred Singer wrote in his Washington Times column. “Your much-touted ‘scientific consensus’ on global warming has just been exposed as phony.” They’d finally found a way to bring down the tree.
In 2001, Scientific American went through Arthur Robinson’s signature books. Present on Arthur’s list were names submitted in a spirit of substitute-teacher abuse. (Arthur told the Associated Press that he had “no way of filtering out a fake.”) There was Shirl E. Cook and Richard Cool and Dr. House, and the presumably dependable Knight and the presumably less steady Dr. Red Wine, also the accommodating Betty Will, the in-terrible-distress W. C. Lust. Also someone who gave their name only as Looney. Plus a dash of celebrity like Michael J. Fox and John Grisham and the dramatis personae of the medical series M*A*S*H. Even some businesses, like R. C. Kannan & Associates, and Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc., had found a way to lift the pen and get involved. Dick Groeber — Dick’s Weather Service — had once again elected to lend the effort the weight of his endorsement. All these names appeared on Arthur’s petition as it was cited in Congress.
Arthur claimed only one false name was ever found to soil his list. (Some jokester had snuck on Dr. Geri Halliwell — Ginger Spice, of the empowerment band Spice Girls.) But post-media, all these names were quietly withdrawn. W. C. Lust and Betty Will and Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc., and Dick’s Weather Service, scrubbed from history.
The names Scientific American examined were real. Barrier to entry was not high. If you claimed a bachelor’s in math, science, or engineering, to Arthur’s way of thinking you were a climate scientist. (Even so, Dick Groeber had no real business being on this list.) Your kid’s math teacher could sign. So could her shop teacher, and the veterinarian.
These names were Styrofoam peanuts, packaging, and brushed aside. Scientific American took “a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science.”
Of the 26 names they could identify through the databases, “11 said they still agreed with the petition.” The magazine went on, “One was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages.” The magazine estimated that Arthur had managed about 200 climate researchers — “a small fraction of the climatological community.” Remove number from box, shake off the packaging: What Arthur Robinson and Frederick Seitz had delivered was a sweaty means of confirming the consensus.
And still there were international headlines (“NO SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON GLOBAL WARMING”). And still Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer could make their use of the data.
Dr. Seitz told reporters the petition represented “the silent majority of the scientific community.” (Which meant at least 51 laconic percent.) And Dr. Singer called it “the largest group of scientists ever,” as if the petition combined a Caltech homecoming weekend with an especially congested Burning Man.
Arthur kept up the petition drive. Yet among supporters, he couldn’t quite bring himself to call the signers colleagues. The tongue values what it values.
“We’ve got now about 17,000 scien—” Arthur caught himself. “People with degrees in science.” As of 2008, he’d nearly doubled his figure.
S. Fred Singer experienced the same performance trouble. In 2012 he was still quoting it. Because it was the only thing — Arthur had given the movement the strongest evidence it ever had. But even the famously reliable Singer tongue went rogue. “There’s hundreds of us — thousands,” he said on PBS. “Look, 31,000 scientists and engineers signed a statement.” Then the scientist went a bit green. “Look, they’re not specialists in climate.”
But in 1998, when the ground was fresh, Dr. Singer told Congress that signers were “specialists in fields related to global warming.” He told readers, while the issue was being contested, they were “experts in the pertinent scientific fields.”
Arthur’s website gives his patriotic side of the figure. “31,487 American scientists,” he writes. “Including 9,029 Ph.D.s.” You needed a data point, a comparison.
So, for the doctoral number: America is home to half a million science and engineering PhDs. Arthur netted 1.8%. His yield was small. And for the bachelor’s number: We’ve awarded 10 million first degrees in science and engineering. Here Arthur’s petition was an absolute crash: 0.3%.
Arthur again sounded the Academy horn in a press release. “More than 40 signatories are members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.” But Arthur had withheld the comparison. The Academy’s got 2,200 members. His yield was eerily consistent: 1.8%. The generally accepted number for climate scientists and warming is 97% to 3%. Arthur’s fate was to spend 25 years as superintendent of a consensus he loathed.
This article was excerpted and condensed from David Lipsky’s book The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, available now from W. W. Norton & Company ©2023.
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Businesses were already bracing for a crash. Then came another 50% tariff on Chinese goods.
When I wrote Heatmap’s guide to driving less last year, I didn’t anticipate that a good motivation for doing so would be that every car in America was about to get a lot more expensive.
Then again, no one saw the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s tariffs coming. “We would characterize this slate of tariffs as ‘worse than the worst case scenario,’” one group of veteran securities analysts wrote in a note to investors last week, a sentiment echoed across Wall Street and reflected in four days of stock market turmoil so far.
But if the economic downturn has renewed your interest in purchasing a bike or e-bike, you’ll want to act fast — and it may already be too late. Because Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs stack on top of his other tariffs and duties, the U.S. bicycle trade association PeopleForBikes calculated that beginning on April 9, the day the newest tariffs come into effect, the duty on e-bikes from China would be 79%, up from nothing at all under President Biden. The tariff on most non-electric bikes from China, meanwhile, would spike to 90%, up from 11% on January 1 of this year. Then on Tuesday, the White House announced that it would add another 50% tariff on China on top of that whole tariff stack, starting Wednesday, in retaliation for Beijing’s counter-tariffs.
Prior to the latest announcement, Jay Townley, a founding partner of the cycling industry consulting firm Human Powered Solutions, had told me that if the Trump administration actually followed through on a retaliatory 50% tariff on top of those duties, then “we’re out of business because nobody can afford to bring in a bicycle product at 100% or more in tariffs.”
It’s difficult to overstate how existential the tariffs are for the bicycle industry. Imports account for 97% of the bikes purchased in the United States, of which 87% come from China, making it “one of the most import-dependent and China-dependent industries in the U.S.,” according to a 2021 analysis by the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates for trade-protectionist policies.
Many U.S. cycling brands have grumbled for years about America’s relatively generous de minimis exemption, a policy of waiving duties on items valued at less than $800. The loophole — which is what enables shoppers to buy dirt-cheap clothes from brands like Temu, Shein, and Alibaba — has also allowed for uncertified helmets and non-compliant e-bikes and e-bike batteries to flood the U.S. market. These batteries, which are often falsely marketed as meeting international safety standards, have been responsible for deadly e-bike fires in places like New York City. “A going retail for a good lithium-ion replacement battery for an e-bike is $800 to $1,000,” Townley said. “You look online, and you’ll see batteries at $350, $400, that come direct to you from China under the de minimis exemption.”
Cyclingnews reported recently that Robert Margevicius, the executive vice president of the American bicycle giant Specialized, had filed a complaint with the Trump administration over losing “billions in collectable tariffs” through the loophole. A spokesperson for Specialized defended Margevicius’ comment by calling it an “industry-wide position that is aligned with PeopleForBikes.” (Specialized did not respond to a request for clarification from Heatmap, though a spokesperson told Cyclingnews that de minimis imports permit “unsafe products and intellectual property violation.” PeopleForBikes’ general and policy counsel Matt Moore told me in an email that “we have supported reforming the way the U.S. treats low-value de minimis imports for several years.”)
Trump indeed axed China’s de minimis exemption as part of his April 2 tariffs — a small win for the U.S. bicycle brands. But any protection afforded by duties on cheap imported bikes and e-bikes will be erased by the damage from high tariffs imposed on China and other Asian countries. Fewer than 500,000 bicycles in a 10 million-unit market are even assembled in the United States, and essentially none is entirely manufactured here. “We do not know how to make a bike,” Townley told me flatly. Though a number of major U.S. brands employ engineers to design their bikes, when it comes to home-shoring manufacturing, “all of that knowledge resides in Taiwan, China, Vietnam. It isn’t here.”
In recent years, Chinese factories had become “very proficient at shipping goods from third-party countries” in order to avoid European anti-dumping duties, as well as leftover tariffs from Trump’s first term, Rick Vosper, an industry veteran and columnist at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, told me. “Many Chinese companies built bicycle assembly plants in Vietnam specifically so the sourcing sticker would not say ‘made in China,’” he added. Of course, those bikes and component parts are now also subject to Trump’s tariffs, which are as high as 57% for Vietnam, 60% for Cambodia, and 43% for Taiwan for most bikes. (A potential added tariff on countries that import oil from Venezuela could bump them even higher.)
The tariffs could not come at a worse time for the industry. 2019 marked one of the slowest years for the U.S. specialty retail bike business in two decades, so when COVID hit — and suddenly everyone wanted a bicycle as a way of exercising and getting around — there was “no inventory to be had, but a huge influx of customers,” Vosper told me. In response, “major players put in huge increases in their orders.”
But by 2023, the COVID-induced demand had evaporated, leaving suppliers with hundreds of millions of dollars in inventory that they couldn’t move. Even by discounting wholesale prices below their own cost to make the product and offering buy-one-get-one deals, dealers couldn’t get the bikes off their hands. “All the people who wanted to buy a bike during COVID have bought a bike and are not ready to buy another one anytime soon,” Vosper said.
Going into 2025, many retailers were still dealing with the COVID-induced bicycle glut; Mike Blok, the founder of Brooklyn Carbon Bike Company in New York City, told me he could think of three or four tristate-area shops off the top of his head that have closed in recent months because they were sitting on inventory.
Blok, however, was cautiously optimistic about his own position. While he stressed that he isn’t a fan of the tariffs, he also largely sells pre-owned bikes. On the low end of the market, the tariffs will likely raise prices no more than about $15 or $20, which might not make much of a difference to consumer behavior. But for something like a higher-end carbon fiber bike, which can run $2,700 or higher and is almost entirely produced in Taiwan, the tariffs could mean an increase of hundreds of dollars for customers. “I think what that will mean for me is that more folks will be open to the pre-owned option,” Blok said, although he also anticipates his input costs for repairs and tuning will go up.
But there’s a bigger, and perhaps even more obvious, problem for bike retailers beyond their products becoming more expensive. “What I sell is not a staple good; people don’t need a bike,” Blok reminded me. “So as folks’ discretionary income diminishes because other things become more expensive, they’ll have less to spend on discretionary items.”
Townley, the industry consultant, confirmed that many major cycling brands had already seen the writing on the wall before Trump announced his tariffs and begun to pivot to re-sale. Bicycling Magazine, a hobbyist publication, is even promoting “buying used” as one of its “tips to help you save” under Trump’s tariffs. Savvy retailers might be able to pivot and rely on their service, customer loyalty, and re-sale businesses to stay afloat during the hard days ahead; Moore of PeopleForBikes also noted that “repair services may increase” as people look to fix what they already have.
And if you don’t have a bike or e-bike but were thinking about getting one as a way to lighten your car dependency, decarbonize your life, or just because they’re cool, “there are still good values to be found,” Moore went on. “Now is a great time to avoid a likely increase in prices.” Townley anticipated that depending on inventory, we’re likely 30 to 40 days away from seeing prices go up.
In the meantime, cycling organizations are scrambling to keep their members abreast of the coming changes. “PeopleForBikes is encouraging our members to contact their elected representatives about the very real impacts these tariffs will have on their companies and our industry,” Moore told me. The National Bicycle Dealers Association, a nonprofit supporting specialty bicycle retailers, has teamed up with the D.C.-based League of American Bicyclists, a ridership organization, to explore lobbying lawmakers for the first time in decades in the hopes that some might oppose the tariffs or explore carve-outs for the industry.
But Townley, whose firm Human Powered Solutions is assisting in NBDA’s effort, shared a grim conversation he had at a recent trade show in Las Vegas, where a new board member at a cycling organization had asked him “what can we do” about Trump’s tariffs.
“I said, ‘You’re out of time,” Townley recalled. “There isn’t much that can be done. All we can do is react.”
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.