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With mosquito-like mini-battering rams, hot dog-shaped floaties, and not a lot of battery life.
Last week, I took a train and two buses to an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium on Staten Island, where I watched first responders pretend another Hurricane Sandy had just struck New York City.
For the sake of the drill, organizers kept many of the details of the fictional scenario the same as they’d been then: Emergency Management officials were told to respond as if a supercharged storm was causing devastating floods and stranding people in life-threatening situations. But the dry run also featured a major difference from the disaster that hit 12 years ago this month and left more than 43 New Yorkers dead.
This time, the city has drones.
It has drones with cameras that can read the logo on your jacket from 400 feet in the air and drones with sophisticated mapping software that can estimate how deep a flooded intersection is. It has drones that come on little leashes tethered to NYPD cruisers for continuous power and drones that are so small they can fly under beds and into closets and sound like dentist drills when they’re operating. It has drones that can transmit messages in 80 languages, drones with thermal sensors, and drones that can drop flotation devices into the ocean. It even has a drone that can break a window — the highlight of the morning for the members of the local press and the top brass of the New York Police Department, Fire Department, and NYCEM (New York City Emergency Management, pronounced “Nee-chim,” newly rebranded from the more generic Office of Emergency Management) who’d gathered to observe the exercise, which was touted as the largest-known municipal unmanned aerial system drill in history.
“Breach drones,” as I’ve since learned, look a little like crudely drawn mosquitos. Held aloft by four rotary wings, the $87,750 contraptions are affixed with rods on their fronts that resemble an insect’s proboscis but function essentially like a battering ram. Given the drone’s unsteady, bobbing flight and the way it repeatedly banged itself against the window to chip a hole in the pane big enough to fly through, I found the whole demonstration to be surprisingly entomological for what New York City’s first responders claim is the bleeding edge of its extreme weather response.
“We’re really just scraping the first layer” of what is possible, Louis Font, a citywide interagency coordinator, told me during the drill. As he put it, drones are “the Swiss army knife of the public safety world.”
There is a small problem, though: New Yorkers really, really hate drones. Actually, they hate all autonomous gadgets that give off a whiff of Big Brother. A security robot deployed in the Times Square subway station over the winter had to be guarded by two human officers around the clock to prevent it from being vandalized, and the cheeky New York City news blog Hell Gate proposed that bots like the NYPD’s crime-fighting “Digidog” are “the city’s most expensive punching bags” and teased, “we’re excited to watch as the situation unfolds.” Even the local wildlife seems willing to take matters into its own talons, with birds attacking drones deployed to Rockaway Beach over the summer.
The city acquired its first set of drones in 2018 and is now one of about 900 U.S. municipalities that have begun using unmanned aerial systems in its crime- and emergency-related responses. But with a police budget bigger than many nations’ entire military outlay and a techno-optimist mayor, New York quickly became one of the premier drone-wielding cities in the world.
It hasn’t been an entirely smooth journey, though. Plans to use drones to monitor private backyard Labor Day parties last year spurred privacy concerns rooted in a history of the NYPD abusing surveillance technologies and prompted pushback from local civil liberties groups. “We’ve got so many discredited examples of this mayor searching for high-tech gimmicks to solve real-world problems and leaving New Yorkers out to dry,” Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a.k.a. STOP, told me. “We end up spending a huge amount of money on largely unvetted vendors to buy products that simply just don’t fit the needs of our city.”
The question I wanted to answer on Staten Island was whether drones might be able tomeet the needs of a city after a storm like Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Sandy. The overwhelming impression I left with, though, was of agencies that are in the awkward stage of a growth spurt — eager to use technology that will one day be indispensable but, for the time being, presents the risk of overcomplicating situations that would otherwise benefit from a more old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground approach, with potentially both comic and tragic results.
Much of this is simply because of the physical limitations of drones. For one thing, they can’t fly in winds of more than about 20 to 30 miles per hour, making them pretty much useless during an actual storm (or in a Manhattan wind tunnel, for that matter). That narrows their use to two main categories: before a storm, as early warning systems, and after, in search-and-rescue operations.
It’s easy to understand the appeal of the former use. Scientists expect New York will get about 25% more annual rainfall by 2100 due to climate change, and the city has over 500 miles of coastline vulnerable to storm surge, with over half of its environmental justice communities living within its 100-year floodplains. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, 11 people drowned in flooded basement apartments, which are illegal under the city housing code and often used as housing by low-income immigrant families. Making matters worse, New York’s emergency alert system requires a voluntary opt-in and currently has just 1,281,938 subscribers — roughly 15% of a city of 8.3 million. Last year, the city comptroller further claimed that the notification list for people living in basement apartments reached less than 1% of its target population. (A spokesperson for NYCEM told me there has been a 35% increase in their basement subscriber numbers since the comptroller’s comments.)
The drones come in handy, then, because “not every New Yorker is on Twitter, not every New Yorker is on Instagram or Facebook, not every New Yorker reads The New York Times, the Post, or the Daily News, not all of them are tuned into our press conferences,” NYCEM Commissioner Zachary Iscol told me. “And so especially for vulnerable populations and immigrant communities, you’ve got to reach them where they are.”
This summer, NYCEM piloted a program using drones to broadcast bilingual flood warnings in low-lying neighborhoods ahead of storms — an idea Mayor Eric Adams had after seeing hurricane sirens on telephone poles during a visit to Puerto Rico, Iscol told me. The drones’ machine-generated Spanish translations, however, were slammed as “incomprehensible” by native speakers. (Font, the interagency coordinator, admitted the translations are still crude since “they’re robots” and told me the agencies are working to improve the messages.)
Carolina Salguero, the founder and executive director of PortSide NewYork, which works with the waterfront community in Red Hook, told me she fears drone-delivered storm warnings could potentially alienate their intended audiences. “Why would you believe the government if it’s dissed the community for this long?” she said, recalling how some Red Hook residents unwisely ignored warnings ahead of Sandy. (One can only imagine the added element of distrust that would come from a drone shouting those same warnings at you.). Cahn, of STOP, was also skeptical of the message’s delivery system: “The idea that you’re going to warn people with a fleet of drones is ludicrous. It’d take hundreds of thousands of drones operating throughout the day to reach the number of people that [NYCEM] can reach through a single text message,” he told me.
That problem of scale is also true after a storm. While I was impressed by the drones’ heat-seeking capabilities — operators could quickly find human actors and mannequins heated to lifelike temperatures during the Staten Island drill — the NYPD only had 85 drones in its arsenal as of this spring. Because connectivity issues are common after major weather disasters, drones cannot travel terribly far from human-toted hotspots, meaning the actual ground drones can cover to look for stranded, trapped, hurt, or drowning New Yorkers is relatively small. Drones also have a limited battery life of about half an hour and must repeatedly return to handlers to have their batteries swapped out as they conduct searches.
Sometimes it seems almost as if the city government is creating problems for drones to solve. A scenario where a window-breaching drone would be more beneficial than having a firefighter simply walk into a building feels like an edge case, and while a drone can inform someone in Mandarin that help is on the way, that “help” still ultimately takes the form of human paramedics, police, or firefighters. Font told me that drones helped supplement the rescue of “multiple drowning victims” in the Rockaways this summer by providing an extra vantage, but the systems were only deployed in the first place because of an unresolved lifeguard shortage. (Though there was excited chatter at the Staten Island drill about drones one day being able to tow distressed swimmers to shore, currently they can only bonk you with a hotdog-sized floatation device that inflates to three feet long to buy first responders some extra time — and that’s if you manage to grab ahold of it while flailing about in rough waters.)
Perhaps the biggest problem the drone exercise appeared poised to address was concerns about whether the city government could continue to function adequately under Adams’ leadership. Though the drill had reportedly been in the works for six months, mounting scandals and resignations in the administration made the large-scale demonstration of interagency cooperation conveniently timed. On Monday, less than a week after the drill, Phil Banks — the deputy mayor for public safety whose phone was seized last month as part of a federal bribery investigation — resigned. His departure leaves a gaping hole in the office that is tasked with coordinating the agencies involved in an extreme weather response, including directly overseeing NYCEM and the FDNY. (Banks reportedly was also at the forefront of promoting the city’s use of “high-tech devices, including drones.)
When I asked Iscol — who has publicly admitted to having had his own conversations about leaving the administration due to the ongoing turmoil — during the drill (i.e. before Banks resigned) whether he was confident that there could still be smooth operations between City Hall and its agencies in the event of a near-term disaster, he told me firmly that he was. “There are 300,000 people that work for the city of New York, and they’re showing up every day,” he told me. “It’s our job to show up and make sure they have the resources and support and the guidance and direction they need to be successful to deliver for New Yorkers.” He emphasized that “it’s business as usual for the agencies,” despite how things look in the headlines.
As for the drones, the commissioner seemed clear-eyed in assessing their usefulness. “As you do things that are new and for the first time, it’s an evolution — you’re always improving,” he told me. Drone advancements are “iterative, kind of like an iPhone,” and he’s aware they’re not all the way there yet. But “it’s not like we’re only using drones,” he stressed. “We’re still taking a multi-channel approach.”
Concerned onlookers will often approach Font, the interagency coordinator, to ask if he’s spying on them when they notice him flying a drone. He told me that he is always eager to show regular New Yorkers how the city is using the technology: “We’re a bunch of tech guys, so we really love getting into the nuts and bolts of it,” he said.
He expects, though, that eventually the questions and suspicious looks will start to taper off. The NYPD and FDNY already use drones in their everyday operations throughout the city; companies like Amazon have also started exploring the use of drones to deliver packages. Drones will become increasingly commonplace as the years wear on. Boring, even! So of course they’ll be used during extreme weather events, too.
“This is the world we live in now,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the resignation of New York Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks.
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What he wants them to do is one thing. What they’ll actually do is far less certain.
Donald Trump believes that tariffs have almost magical power to bring prosperity; as he said last month, “To me, the world’s most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariffs. It’s my favorite word.” In case anyone doubted his sincerity, before Thanksgiving he announced his intention to impose 25% tariffs on everything coming from Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods.
This is just the beginning. If the trade war he launched in his first term was haphazard and accomplished very little except costing Americans money, in his second term he plans to go much further. And the effects of these on clean energy and climate change will be anything but straightforward.
The theory behind tariffs is that by raising the price of an imported good, they give a stronger footing in the market; eventually, the domestic producer may no longer need the tariff to be competitive. Imposing a tariff means we’ve decided that a particular industry is important enough that it needs this kind of support — or as some might call it, protection — even if it means higher prices for a while.
The problem with across-the-board tariffs of the kind Trump proposes is that they create higher prices even for goods that are not being produced domestically and probably never will be. If tariffs raise the price of a six-pack of tube socks at Target from $9.99 to $14.99, it won’t mean we’ll start making tube socks in America again. It just means you’ll pay more. The same is often true for domestic industries that use foreign parts in their manufacturing: If no one is producing those parts domestically, their costs will unavoidably rise.
The U.S. imported over $3 trillion worth of goods in 2023, and $426 billion from China alone, so Trump’s proposed tariffs would represent hundreds of billions of dollars of increased costs. That’s before we account for the inevitable retaliatory tariffs, which is what we saw in Trump’s first term: He imposed tariffs on China, which responded by choking off its imports of American agricultural goods. In the end, the revenue collected from Trump’s tariffs went almost entirely to bailing out farmers whose export income disappeared.
The past almost-four years under Joe Biden have seen a series of back-and-forth moves in which new tariffs were announced, other tariffs were increased, exemptions were removed and reinstated. For instance, this May Biden increased the tariff on Chinese electric vehicles to over 100% while adding tariffs on certain EV batteries. But some of the provisions didn’t take effect right away, and only certain products were affected, so the net economic impact was minimal. And there’s been nothing like an across-the-board tariff.
It’s reasonable to criticize Biden’s tariff policies related to climate. But his administration was trying to navigate a dilemma, serving two goals at once: reducing emissions and promoting the development of domestic clean energy technology. Those goals are not always in alignment, at least in the short run, which we can see in the conflict within the solar industry. Companies that sell and install solar equipment benefit from cheap Chinese imports and therefore oppose tariffs, while domestic manufacturers want the tariffs to continue so they can be more competitive. The administration has attempted to accommodate both interests with a combination of subsidies to manufacturers and tariffs on certain kinds of imports — with exemptions peppered here and there. It’s been a difficult balancing act.
Then there are electric vehicles. The world’s largest EV manufacturer is Chinese company BYD, but if you haven’t seen any of their cars on the road, it’s because existing tariffs make it virtually impossible to import Chinese EVs to the United States. That will continue to be the case under Trump, and it would have been the case if Kamala Harris had been elected.
On one hand, it’s important for America to have the strongest possible green industries to insulate us from future supply shocks and create as many jobs-of-the-future as possible. On the other hand, that isn’t necessarily the fastest route to emissions reductions. In a world where we’ve eliminated all tariffs on EVs, the U.S. market would be flooded with inexpensive, high-quality Chinese EVs. That would dramatically accelerate adoption, which would be good for the climate.
But that would also deal a crushing blow to the American car industry, which is why neither party will allow it. What may happen, though, is that Chinese car companies may build factories in Mexico, or even here in the U.S., just as many European and Japanese companies have, so that their cars wouldn’t be subject to tariffs. That will take time.
Of course, whatever happens will depend on Trump following through with his tariff promise. We’ve seen before how he declares victory even when he only does part of what he promised, which could happen here. Once he begins implementing his tariffs, his administration will be immediately besieged by a thousand industries demanding exemptions, carve-outs, and delays in the tariffs that affect them. Many will have powerful advocates — members of Congress, big donors, and large groups of constituents — behind them. It’s easy to imagine how “across-the-board” tariffs could, in practice, turn into Swiss cheese.
There’s no way to know yet which parts of the energy transition will be in the cheese, and which parts will be in the holes. The manufacturers can say that helping them will stick it to China; the installers may not get as friendly an audience with Trump and his team. And the EV tariffs certainly aren’t going anywhere.
There’s a great deal of uncertainty, but one thing is clear: This is a fight that will continue for the entirety of Trump’s term, and beyond.
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.