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It’s the Obama playbook, but different.
It was — against all odds — an energy debate.
Just look at the statistics. The word “fracking” was mentioned 10 times. “Oil” came up seven times. Even “climate change,” which Donald Trump was not very eager to talk about, was mentioned four times. And while that may not seem like a lot for such a vast and globe-spanning problem, climate change came up only three times in all of 2016’s debates combined.
Even more than when talking about trade or inflation, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump used energy to make their economic vision concrete and meaningful to Americans. For Harris, that meant recognizing the scale of the country’s fossil fuel resources today while gesturing toward a cleaner and lower-carbon future that will produce (in theory, at least) lots of high-wage manufacturing jobs for America’s middle class. For Trump, the energy industry — and, really, the fossil fuel industry — is central to his fleshy, authoritarian vision of American strength. Seemingly any attempt to replace hydrocarbons with something cleaner or less polluting arises from nothing less than an elite conspiracy to weaken the country and sell out its people.
For such a stark contrast — and for such an outlandish contrast, to be clear — it was a surprisingly substantive debate. Which isn’t to say we learned much, especially about Trump. The Republican nominee was the same man we’ve seen for the past nine years, the same politician who has defined the extreme GOP position on global warming. Over the past near-decade, Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and has seemed to revel in emissions-increasing policies. That isn’t changing. Asked directly what he would do about climate change on Tuesday night, he did not address the question at all. Instead, he talked about how car factories are getting built in Mexico, and he claimed in a difficult-to-follow rant that Joe Biden is getting paid off by China.
About Harris, we learned far more. Harris struck a careful, moderate tone during the debate between the need for climate action and the ongoing importance of fossil fuel extraction. She spoke about the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate policy, but also discussed how it increased federal leasing for oil and gas. She spoke about climate change in terms of its higher everyday costs for Americans, and not — as Biden did — as an existential threat to the country.
“What we know is that [climate change] is very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or [it] is being jacked up.”
She bragged about the Biden administration’s oil and gas record in the same breath as she discussed its enormous investments in clean energy. American oil and gas production is at an all-time high — it is higher, in fact, than Saudi Arabia’s — but I can’t remember hearing a Biden administration official bragging about that.
“I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” she said.
In a way, Harris has essentially returned to Obama’s 2012 “all of the above” energy policy. That approach remains unpopular with climate activists, who think it did too much for the oil and gas industry; personally, I think it’s an open question whether Obama actually believed in the “all of the above” approach or was subtly trying to help renewables all along. But more importantly, the underlying policy context is totally different now than it was 12 years ago: With the Inflation Reduction Act in place, the government can more easily bless all forms of energy development because it is, in fact, helping clean energy take root.
What’s most important, though — and what I hope climate advocates do not overlook — is that Harris’s tack here reflects the broad state of American public opinion. While most Americans want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they do not seem to want an energy revolution: More than two-thirds of Americans believe the country should use a mix of renewables and fossil fuels, according to the Pew Research Center, and less than a third believe the country should rely “entirely” on renewables. In the same poll, most Americans said they oppose federal rules that would aim to make electric vehicles half of all new cars sold by 2032.
This is not to say that Americans are big oil lovers. Most Americans think the country should prioritize various forms of zero-carbon energy development over fossil fuels. And while Republican support for renewables has dropped over the past few years — and has fallen furtherover the past few months, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently — a generation gap has emerged wherein younger Republicans are much more likely to champion solar and wind than older party members.
Even among seemingly environmental-aligned demographics, greater support exists for fossil fuels than one might expect. Most Democrats say they would not “favor” expanding fracking or offshore drilling — but about a quarterof Democratswould favor more fossil fuel drilling. So would roughly 45% of independents and, of course, a large majority of Republicans, according to Pew.
Of course, these facts of public opinion sit uneasily with what we know about climate change, which is that greenhouse gas emissions — and fossil fuel development with it — should plan to scale down soon. The International Energy Association has said that the most likely pathway for keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius requires the development of “no new long lead-time upstream oil or gas projects.” This observation provides less guidance for American policy makers than it might initially seem, because it is really focused on the opening of new, massive oil fields like Guyana’s. (The IEA also says, in almost the same breath, that “continued investment is required in some existing oil and gas projects,” which could possibly justify ongoing extraction from Texas’s well-established oil and gas fields.)
But even then, the non-negotiable fact would remain: The world must move away from fossil fuels. And the American people are not generally ready to do that today. The country wants something closer to an “all of the above” strategy than it wants a Green New Deal.
That strategy brings climate policy out of the ideological realm and into the pragmatic. Americans, polling suggests, like renewables in part because they will let the United States reduce its dependence on foreign oil, a popular idea in and of itself and talking point of both parties going back decades.
When Heatmap polled more than 5,000 Americans last month, more than half said that a “strong benefit” of a given clean energy project would be its ability to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil and natural gas. Among respondents, those putative energy independence benefits were the No. 2 most popular reason to support clean energy; the only more popular rationale for backing a project was that it would cut utility bills.
Harris directly echoed that appeal on Tuesday. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said. “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.”
I can’t remember Biden making an appeal like this. When he talks about clean energy or the IRA, he tends to focus on its potential to grow the economy. Harris did some of that on Tuesday, bragging about the 800,000 new manufacturing jobs created during her vice presidency. But her focus on the national interest — and on the Biden administration’s appreciation of the ongoing fossil boom — was new.
Such an approach is unlikely to help her appeal to climate activists and advocates, who want the government to affirmatively begin to shutter fossil capacity. The Sunrise Movement, a climate activist group, criticized Harris on Tuesday for spending “more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future.”
What I’d advise those advocates to keep in mind is that their views are legitimately not very popular, and Harris is trying to win a very close election in a race that her team believes has potentially existential stakes for American democracy. She also remembers the 2020 primary, when she tacked left on virtually every issue — she promised to ban fracking, for instance — and still lost. (If that’s because many of the groups wound up backing Bernie Sanders in that primary, that only reinforces the view that she can’t win over those voters in the first place.)
Harris isn’t defying the left on every issue — she has resisted neoliberal dogma and pandered to the public’s views on price gouging, for instance, putting her more in line with the Democratic Party’s Elizabeth Warren wing. But unlike Biden, she refuses to pay an electoral price for backing left-wing policies. Indeed, she seems to believe that she cannot pay such a price and still win. If Harris is now bragging about her administration’s support for fossil fuels, if she is casting the Inflation Reduction Act as a law that helped fracking, that means climate activists have much more work to do to persuade the public on what they believe. The Democratic Party’s candidate will not do that persuasion for them. And in any case, activists are not going to convince the public to believe something in the next 54 days that they’ve failed to do in the past five years.
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Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France that were freezing last week are now experiencing record high temperatures • Forecasters are monitoring a storm system that could become Australia’s first named tropical cyclone of this season • The Colorado Rockies could get several feet of snow today and tomorrow.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, according to AccuWeather. “For perspective, this would equate to nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter. The figure accounts for long-term economic impacts including job losses, medical costs, drops in tourism, and recovery expenses. “The combination of extremely warm water temperatures, a shift toward a La Niña pattern and favorable conditions for development created the perfect storm for what AccuWeather experts called ‘a supercharged hurricane season,’” said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This was an exceptionally powerful and destructive year for hurricanes in America, despite an unusual and historic lull during the climatological peak of the season.”
AccuWeather
This year’s hurricane season produced 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes. Five hurricanes made landfall, two of which were major storms. According to NOAA, an “average” season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season comes to an end on November 30.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the $7,500 EV tax credit, California will consider reviving its Clean Vehicle Rebate Program. The CVRP ran from 2010 to 2023 and helped fund nearly 600,000 EV purchases by offering rebates that started at $5,000 and increased to $7,500. But the program as it is now would exclude Tesla’s vehicles, because it is aimed at encouraging market competition, and Tesla already has a large share of the California market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has cozied up to Trump, called California’s potential exclusion of Tesla “insane,” though he has said he’s okay with Trump nixing the federal subsidies. Newsom would need to go through the State Legislature to revive the program.
President-elect Donald Trump said yesterday he would impose steep new tariffs on all goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico on day one of his presidency in a bid to stop “drugs” and “illegal aliens” from entering the United States. Specifically, Trump threatened Canada and Mexico each with a 25% tariff, and China with a 10% hike on existing levies. Such moves against three key U.S. trade partners would have major ramifications across many sectors, including the auto industry. Many car companies import vehicles and parts from plants in Mexico. The Canadian government responded with a statement reminding everyone that “Canada is essential to U.S. domestic energy supply, and last year 60% of U.S. crude oil imports originated in Canada.” Tariffs would be paid by U.S. companies buying the imported goods, and those costs would likely trickle down to consumers.
Amazon workers across the world plan to begin striking and protesting on Black Friday “to demand justice, fairness, and accountability” from the online retail giant. The protests are organized by the UNI Global Union’s Make Amazon Pay Campaign, which calls for better working conditions for employees and a commitment to “real environmental sustainability.” Workers in more than 20 countries including the U.S. are expected to join the protests, which will continue through Cyber Monday. Amazon’s carbon emissions last year totalled 68.8 million metric tons. That’s about 3% below 2022 levels, but more than 30% above 2019 levels.
Researchers from MIT have developed an AI tool called the “Earth Intelligence Engine” that can simulate realistic satellite images to show people what an area would look like if flooded by extreme weather. “Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate,” wrote Jennifer Chu at MIT News. The team found that AI alone tended to “hallucinate,” generating images of flooding in areas that aren’t actually susceptible to a deluge. But when combined with a science-backed flood model, the tool became more accurate. “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk,” said MIT’s Björn Lütjens, who led the research. “Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.” The tool is still in development and is available online. Here is an image it generated of flooding in Texas:
Maxar Open Data Program via Gupta et al., CVPR Workshop Proceedings. Lütjens et al., IEEE TGRS
A new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris lets visitors listen to the sounds of endangered and extinct animals – along with the voice of the artist behind the piece, the one and only Björk.
How Hurricane Helene is still putting the Southeast at risk.
Less than two months after Hurricane Helene cut a historically devastating course up into the southeastern U.S. from Florida’s Big Bend, drenching a wide swath of states with 20 trillion gallons of rainfall in just five days, experts are warning of another potential threat. The National Interagency Fire Center’s forecast of fire-risk conditions for the coming months has the footprint of Helene highlighted in red, with the heightened concern stretching into the new year.
While the flip from intense precipitation to wildfire warnings might seem strange, experts say it speaks to the weather whiplash we’re now seeing regularly. “What we expect from climate change is this layering of weather extremes creating really dangerous situations,” Robert Scheller, a professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, explained to me.
Scheuller said North Carolina had been experiencing drought conditions early in the year, followed by intense rain leading up to Helene’s landfall. Then it went dry again — according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, much of the state was back to some level of drought condition as of mid-November. The NIFC forecast report says the same is true for much of the region, including Florida, despite its having been hit by Hurricane Milton soon after Helene.
That dryness is a particular concern due to the amount of debris left in Helene’s wake — another major risk factor for fire. The storm’s winds, which reached more than 100 miles per hour in some areas, wreaked havoc on millions of acres of forested land. In North Carolina alone, the state’s Forest Service estimates over 820,000 acres of timberland were damaged.
“When you have a catastrophic storm like [Helene], all of the stuff that was standing upright — your trees — they might be snapped off or blown over,” fire ecologist David Godwin told me. “All of a sudden, that material is now on the forest floor, and so you have a really tremendous rearrangement of the fuels and the vegetation within ecosystems that can change the dynamics of how fire behaves in those sites.”
Godwin is the director of the Southern Fire Exchange for the University of Florida, a program that connects wildland firefighters, prescribed burners, and natural resources managers across the Southeast with fire science and tools. He says the Southeast sees frequent, unplanned fires, but that active ecosystem management helps keep the fires that do spark from becoming conflagrations. But an increase like this in fallen or dead vegetation — what Godwin refers to as fire “fuel” — can take this risk to the next level, particularly as it dries out.
Godwin offered an example from another storm, 2018’s Hurricane Michael, which rapidly intensified before making landfall in Northern Florida and continuing inland, similar to Hurricane Helene. In its aftermath, there was a 10-fold increase in the amount of fuel on the ground, with 72 million tons of timber damaged in Florida. Three years later, the Bertha Swamp Road Fire filled the storm’s Florida footprint with flames, which consumed more than 30,000 acres filled with dried out forest fuel. One Florida official called the wildfire the “ghost” of Michael, nodding to the overlap of the impacted areas and speaking to the environmental threat the storm posed even years later.
Not only does this fuel increase the risk of fire, it changes the character of the fires that do ignite, Godwin said. Given ample ground fuel, flame lengths can grow longer, allowing them to burn higher into the canopy. That’s why people setting prescribed fires will take steps like raking leaf piles, which helps keep the fire intensity low.
These fires can also produce more smoke, Godwin said, which can mix with the mountainous fog in the region to deadly effect. According to the NIFC, mountainous areas incurred the most damage from Helene, not only due to downed vegetation, but also because of “washed out roads and trails” and “slope destabilization” from the winds and rain. If there is a fire in these areas, all these factors will also make it more challenging for firefighters to address it, the report adds.
In addition to the natural debris fire experts worry about, Helene caused extensive damage to the built environment, wrecking homes, businesses, and other infrastructure. Try imagining four-and-a-half football fields stacked 10 feet tall with debris — that’s what officials have removed so far just in Asheville, North Carolina. In Florida’s Treasure Island, there were piles 50 feet high of assorted scrap materials. Officials have warned that some common household items, such as the lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and electric vehicles, can be particularly flammable after exposure to floodwaters. They are also advising against burning debris as a means of managing it due to all the compounding risks.
Larry Pierson, deputy chief of the Swannanoa Fire Department in North Carolina, told Blueridge Public Radio that his department’s work has “grown exponentially since the storm.” While cooler, wetter winter weather could offer some relief, Scheuller said the area will likely see heightened fire behavior for years after the storm, particularly if the swings between particularly wet and particularly dry periods continue.
Part of the challenge moving forward, then, is to find ways to mitigate risk on this now-hazardous terrain. For homeowners, that might mean exercising caution when dealing with debris and considering wildfire risk as part of rebuilding plans, particularly in more wooded areas. On a larger forest management scale, this means prioritizing safe debris collection and finding ways to continue the practice of prescribed burns, which are utilized more in the Southeast than in any other U.S. region. Without focused mitigation efforts, Godwin told me the area’s overall fire outlook would be much different.
“We would have a really big wildfire issue,” he said, “perhaps even bigger than what we might see in parts of the West.”