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Electric cars and e-bikes dominate the discourse about sustainable transportation, but there are quirkier ways to move people around.
The Shogo’s front end shouts fast, and its steering yoke could’ve come off a race car — no surprise, since Honda motorsport engineers designed and hand-assembled it. Sure, the little electric vehicle tops out at 5 miles per hour. But sometimes it’s not about raw speed. It's about who gets to feel the glee of driving.
Developed as part of Honda’s “ Project Courage,” Shogo is a battery-powered ride built to let 4-to-9-year-old children’s hospital patients find a little extra joy as they drive themselves around the hallways. The kid EV comes with a tall mount at the back to hold a child’s IV and a toy bucket up front so stuffed animals can come along for the ride.
The Honda Shogo.Honda
Shogo looks like a souped-up version of Power Wheels, or a downsized go-kart purpose-built to set speed records in the hospital wing. It is, like many of the most interesting electric-powered vehicles out there, just a little weird. Electric cars and electric bikes have come to dominate the discourse about sustainable transportation, but there are quirkier ways to move people around, and those rides are going electric, too. We are finding out whether there’s a place in our transportation revolution for the oddballs, and whether battery power can replace gasoline in ATVs, dune buggies, and other people-movers.
Golf isn’t just a good walk spoiled. It’s also a sustainability bugaboo, given the land and water wasted on its courses (especially in places where grass was not meant to grow). Golf carts, on the other hand, are a remarkably good green transportation solution.
Electric cars, despite their potential to cut carbon emissions compared to gasoline-burners, still have lots of car problems — they’re heavy and powerful, for one thing, which makes them dangerous to pedestrians. There are better, smarter ways to move a family of four around a pedestrian-heavy neighborhood or downtown. Like an electric golf cart, for example.
Numerous towns around America have become much friendlier to using golf carts as a less formal, safer way to transport people across short or medium distances. In some of these places, low-speed golf carts are allowed to use the same footpaths where walkers walk and scooters scoot, but where anything you’d call a “car” is banned. Since golf carts are less dangerous than proper cars, younger teens can be allowed to drive them to school.
In the space between the golf cart and the EV you’ll find the tiny car that goes by many names: neighborhood electric vehicle (NEV), micro-EV, low-speed vehicle (LSV). Basically, picture something that’s more rugged than a golf cart and can travel at faster speeds — up to 35 mph — but isn’t overbuilt or powerful enough for highway driving. That wouldn’t appeal to people who want their vehicle to do everything, from trips down the block to journeys across the country.
The Wink Motors Mark 1.Wink Motors
On the other hand, LSVs are street-legal in many places where golf carts are not, and can accomplish all the local driving a full-size car can at a fraction of the cost. That makes them an attractive form of cheap, emissions-free transportation in places where cars really are the only way to get around — and hitting the road on board an electric golf cart, longboard, unicycle, or other form of non-fortified vehicle feels like staring death in the face on every trip.
City streets are for the practical and prosaic — the army of sensible crossovers that populate American roads. The place to find eccentric rides is everywhere else. Today, these icons are going electric.
All-terrain vehicles (ATVs) have always been a perfect match for petroleum power, since their owners typically use them for working on the farm or terrorizing a dirt track — both activities that occur far from a high-speed charger. But here, too, battery power is on the verge of a breakthrough as range improves, because electrification offers the same benefits it does for a full-sized car: namely, lots of power, little maintenance, no noise, and low fuel costs.
Polaris, one of the biggest names in that market, recently rolled out the Ranger XP Kinetic. The company worked with Zero Motorcycles, the leading maker of zippy electric motorbikes, to help it build a four-wheeler with up to 80 miles of range to allow for plenty of mud-slinging on a single charge. Just like electric cars, the e-ATVs market has seen startups, like India-based Tachyon, try to sneak in and succeed before the legacy companies get serious about electrification. Even Tesla may get into the game, as it teased a possible future electric ATV during the reveal of the Cybertruck. (Its limited production runs of the Cyberquad for kids sold out immediately.)
The Polaris XP Kinetic.Polaris
For those who are more keen to drive a little (electric) dune buggy in the sand — and who’ve got a healthy bank account — there is the Meyers Manx 2.0, a $75,000 electrified take on classic dune buggy style. Volkswagen unveiled a concept car several years ago signaling its own intent to put a battery in a two-seat sand-slinger, but that project died on the vine, so we may have to wait for more affordable options to come.
Electrified boats, snowmobiles, and fat-tire motorcycles are bringing battery power to the lake, the mountaintop, and the dirt track. The electric airplane is difficult, but not impossible. Wait long enough and the electric revolution will come to vehicles built for just about any purpose or terrain, and all our adventures will get a little less carbon-intensive.
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All of the awesome earth-moving and none of the planet- or lung-harming emissions.
Construction is a dirty business, literally and figuratively. Mud and gunk and tar come with the territory for those who erect buildings and pave roads for a living. And the industrial machines that provide the muscle for the task run on hulking diesel engines that spew carbon and soot as they work.
Heavy equipment feels like an unlikely place to use all-electric power in order to ditch fossil fuels. The sheer size and intense workload of a loader or excavator means it has enormous energy needs. Yet the era of electric construction equipment has begun, with companies such as Volvo, Komatsu, and Bobcat all now marketing electric dirt movers and diggers. One big reason why: Full-size machines create the opportunity to make construction projects quieter and cleaner — a potentially huge benefit for those that happen in dense areas around lots of people.
Volvo, for example, appeared at last week’s Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in Anaheim, California, primarily to tout its efforts to reduce emissions in the trucking industry via hydrogen-powered semis, electric trucks, and technological refinements to reduce pollution such as nitrous oxide from traditional diesel. But the Swedish brand also trotted out its clean power dirt movers.
The L120 electric loader that is now taking reservations has a lifting capacity of 6 metric tons on pure electric power, making it useful for job sites such as recycling centers and ports. To see such a beast in person — and displayed on pristine convention-center carpet as if it were this year’s Ford Mustang, no less — is an odd and humbling experience that elicits a little-boy level of glee at beholding a big machine. Its bucket, large enough to carry a basketball team, seems to exist on a scale that is too big for battery power, yet Volvo claims the L120 can match the performance of its diesel brethren.
Volvo also brought an electric excavator, the machine used for shoveling out huge bucketfuls of earth. The EC230 Electric is based on the diesel-powered machine of the same name, but with a stack of batteries adding up to 450 kilowatt-hours of capacity and 650 volts of power give the excavator seven to eight hours of runtime on clean electric power.
“Going to the 600-volt battery packs with similar power density that we’re using in [semi] trucks allowed us to take that into the larger construction equipment,” Keith Brandis, VP of policy and regulatory affairs for Volvo North America, told me. “A big breakthrough for us was making sure that the duty cycle — the vibration, the harshness, the temperature extremes — was proven. We have coolant that runs throughout that battery pack, so we precondition the temperatures for very cold starts as well as during very hot temperatures.”
Indeed, the two big boys on display in Anaheim expand Volvo’s lineup of electric construction machines up to seven. The new full-size offerings also take battery power up to a scale needed for serious projects, where it could cut the noise and pollution that emanate from a site. Volvo says its e-machines are already at work on the restoration project in New York City’s Battery Park, at the southern end of Manhattan, where the local government made quiet and clean construction equipment a priority.
Volvo is not alone in this space. Komatsu builds a slate of electric excavators in a variety of sizes leading up to the 20-ton PC210LCE, which the Japanese brand introduced in 2023.
At the smaller end, Bobcat now builds battery-powered mini-loaders and compact excavators. Caterpillar made an EV dump truck a couple of years ago, and more heavy-duty electric machines for industries like mining are on the way.
Although electric loaders and excavators have begun to match the capability of their combustion-powered cousins and have reached a battery runtime that spans a full workday, Volvo and other heavy equipment manufacturers face a few hurdles in convincing more construction companies to go electric. Just like with passenger cars, there is the matter of price. Battery-powered equipment costs more up front, so companies must be convinced that the savings they’ll reap via reduced fuel and maintenance costs will make the electric equipment less expensive in the long run.
And just like with passenger cars, incentives play an outsized role in affordability. Brandis noted that municipalities often have fixed budgets for equipment replacement, which is inconvenient when clean, electric equipment costs substantially more. “We typically rely on purchase incentives or infrastructure incentives, grants, or vouchers that are available,” he said, such as California’s HVIP voucher for zero-emission heavy equipment.
Then there is the construction version of range anxiety, simply ensuring there is enough electricity at any job site to recharge a division of electric loaders. At locations where sufficient electrical infrastructure is already in place, Volvo is helping electric buyers install switchgears, meters, and EV chargers built to talk to the big machines. “It eliminates one other problem point for the customer because we’ve already proven that the operability is there with the equipment,” Brandis told me.
The problem with construction, however, is that sometimes it takes place in remote locations far from easy connections. At ACT, Ray Gallant of Volvo construction equipment said this is the point at which the power has to come to the customer. Volvo recently acquired the battery production business of Proterra, which, among other things, would help the corporation develop battery electric storage solutions that it could deploy remotely — at a far-flung job site, say.
“When we’re in remote sites, we have to take the electrons to the electric machines,” he said.
The lawmakers from opposite parties discussed the Inflation Reduction Act and working together to pass legislation at Heatmap’s Energy Entrepreneurship 2025 event.
Will Republicans’ reconciliation bill successfully gut the Inflation Reduction Act?
A Democratic and Republican senator speaking last week at Heatmap’s Energy Entrepreneurship 2025 event predicted that it will not.
A proposal effectively killing the IRA “wouldn’t make it through the House,” Senator John Curtis of Utah, a Republican, said flatly at the event.
“If you believe that democracy does follow representation, those House members from those states are going to fight like hell to maintain those credits,” Senator John Hickenlooper, a Democrat of Colorado, agreed. He argued that 70% of the credits and benefits in Biden’s flagship climate law go to red states.
“I think you’re going to find enough Republicans push back on the value of these credits that there will be a thoughtful discussion and very careful review of each one. And as you know from the number of people that have spoken up on this, I think we’re in a good place, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be pushed and poked and prodded,” Curtis added, referencing the Republican signatories of letters sent to party leaders urging the preservation of the credits. Curtis and Hickenlooper both were optimistic about the chances of the credits surviving the budget reconciliation underway.
Consensus, not compromise, was the name of the game at Heatmap’s D.C. Climate Week event, which saw Heatmap executive editor Robinson Meyer sit down with the senators to discuss their approach to climate policy and bipartisan collaboration.
Robinson Meyer, Senator John Curtis, and Senator John Hickenlooper.Taylor Mickal Photography,
Curtis and Hickenlooper have worked together on the Co-Location Energy Act, which ensures that wind and solar projects can be developed on land already leased for other types of energy projects, and the Fix Our Forests Act, which emphasizes wildfire mitigation and forest health.
Thursday’s discussion also touched on working with the Trump administration on climate and energy policy. Curtis revealed that he spoke to all of Donald Trump’s nominees, including Chris Wright, about his work in the House on the Conservative Climate Caucus. “They all knew about it, and they all supported it,” he noted, adding that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin was a member of the Caucus when he served in the House.
“I think it's very important for me, for Coloradans, for me to have Chris Wright's cell phone number and be able to talk to him,” Hickenlooper stated, emphasizing that he’s willing to work with the Trump administration to achieve Colorado’s climate goals.
The Co-Location Energy Act was “common sense,” according to Curtis. The act was introduced back in December by himself and Congressman Mike Levin, a Democrat from California. “Two thirds of [Utah] is owned by the federal government, and if you say that’s off the table for development, that’s a huge problem,” he said.
Fix Our Forests, which passed the House in January after being introduced by Congressmen Scott Peters, a Democrat from California and Bruce Westerman, a Republican of Arizona, “is a case study in how we can get things done,” Curtis noted. The key to speaking to conservatives about climate change, he said, is avoiding divisive language, comparing the wrong approach to a coercive time-share presentation. “The salesman says to you, ‘do you love your kids?’ and you feel like you're backed into a corner,” he explained. “I think the way we approach this oftentimes puts Republicans on the defensive.”
Hickenlooper agreed, “You never persuade someone to change their mind about something that really matters by telling them why they’re wrong and why you’re right.”
On Rewiring America layoffs, a FEMA firing, and Vineyard Wind
Current conditions: It’s heating up in the West, where temperatures could hit triple digits in parts of California’s Central Valley today• Despite a soggy start to Friday in the Northeast, conditions will clear up in time for a warm and sunny Mother’s Day• It’s hot and clear in Kerala, India, where forecasters expect a wetter-than-average monsoon season to begin at the end of the month.
Electrification nonprofit Rewiring America announced Thursday that it is laying off 36 employees — about 28% of its workforce — due to the Trump administration’s clawback of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund awards, my colleague Katie Brigham reported. CEO Ari Matusiak wrote in a public letter to his employees that “the volatility we face is not something that we created; it is being directed at us.”
Matusiak added on LinkedIn that since February, Rewiring America has been “unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” some $2 billion of which were awarded through the GGRF last year to the organization and four other partners to help decarbonize American homes. The Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the GGRF’s $27 billion in total funding, wreaking havoc “on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants,” Katie goes on. Read her full report of the layoffs here.
The acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Cameron Hamilton, was fired on Thursday, one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee, E&E News reports. Testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday, Hamilton had told lawmakers that “I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate” FEMA — a response to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s remarks that “the president has indicated he wants to eliminate FEMA as it exists today.”
Though Noem swiftly appointed Hamilton’s successor — David Richardson, a senior official at DHS with experience in the Marine Corps commanding artillery units — Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington slammed the move, telling Noem, “We have seen an upheaval at FEMA that is going to put lives in jeopardy. We are losing indispensable staff just weeks away from fire and hurricane season.” Hurricane season begins in fewer than 23 days, with the possibility of the first named storm of the year forming before then, and forecasters are also anticipating an above-average fire season. “There is a reason the law requires the administrator of FEMA to have state emergency management experience,” Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, told E&E News.
The Supreme Court declined this week to hear a pair of challenges brought against Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind farm under construction south of Martha’s Vineyard. The petitions were brought by the fishing industry lobbying group Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which argued the approval of Vineyard Wind violated protections against ocean users and endangered species, as well as the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which represents Rhode Island fishermen and a seafood company. “We will continue to pursue our goal of shutting down the Vineyard Wind project by filing an administrative petition with the Secretary of the Interior,” TPPF Senior Attorney Ted Hadzi-Antich said in a statement, per The New Bedford Light. To date, Vineyard Wind has — haltingly — installed 32 of the planned 62 turbines, with an anticipated eventual capacity of 806 megawatts.
The Japanese-flagged LNG tanker Energy Glory.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Energy groups and CEOs are seeking exemptions to the Trump administration’s rule requiring 1% of U.S. liquified natural gas exports to be shipped on American-made, operated, and flagged vessels within four years, with incremental increases up to 15% by 2047. There are 792 LNG carriers worldwide, most of which belong to South Korea and Japan; just five, dating to the 1970s, were made in U.S. shipyards and are not currently in use, Reuters reports.
As a result, energy executives and groups, including the influential American Petroleum Institute, argue that the Trump administration’s rule puts U.S. energy companies at a disadvantage. Exporters “have little control over their ability to comply with [U.S. Trade Representative’s] new requirements but ultimately face the consequences of not doing so,” API CEO Mike Sommers wrote in a letter reviewed by Reuters. Building five LNG tankers in the U.S. by the end of the decade to meet the 1% threshold is not doable, Sommers added, because it takes five years to make such a carrier at one of the two U.S. shipyards capable of such production.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that its database of extreme weather events “will be retired” as part of ongoing cost-saving cuts and reorganization at the agency. Though the database doesn’t explicitly focus on climate event attribution, it contains data going back to the 1980s, charting the upward trend of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S., including severe hail, flooding, wildfires, and hurricanes. “This administration thinks that if they stop doing the work to identify climate change that climate change will go away,” Democratic Representative and former meteorologist Eric Sorensen of Illinois told The Washington Post.
Though the Trump administration has made deep and sweeping cuts across the federal government, it has especially singled out climate-related programs and databases. Some grant seekers have been encouraged to reapply with climate-related language removed from their proposals, a rhetorical shift that has also made its way into business branding, as my colleague Katie Brigham and I have covered for Heatmap. In addition to obscuring the picture of how climate change is potentially increasing damage and deaths in the United States, sunsetting the database is also causing headaches for insurance groups and financial risk modeling firms like First Street, whose head of climate implications and co-founder Jeremy Porter told CNN, “without it, replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models.”
The new pope, Robert Prevost — now known as Leo XIV — is expected to follow in Pope Francis’ footsteps when it comes to calling for urgent action on climate change. Speaking last year, Prevost “reiterated the Holy See’s commitment to protecting the environment, enumerating examples, like the Vatican installing solar panels and shifting to electric vehicles,” Vatican News reports.