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The hiking community is usually the biggest supporter of conservation efforts. But sometimes the animal you’re conserving is scary.
Before I learned his name, I knew Joe Scott only as the Bear Guy.
“Oh, and he is an archetypal Bear Guy,” Andrea Wolf-Buck, the communications director of Conservation Northwest, a Washington state conservation nonprofit, wrote me in a follow-up email after the initial oblique introduction. “Joe does not disappoint!”
I was speaking with Wolf-Buck in the first place because, unlike Conservation Northwest, I am not someone who has a Bear Guy on speed dial. To be honest, all I knew about bears at that point boiled down to three things: 1) that I really do not want to get eaten by one, 2) something something something play dead?, and 3) that they brought out extremely strong opinions in the ever-lively Washington Hikers and Climbers Facebook group, a 263,000-member-strong private community prone to long debates over the ethics of geotagging photos, the progeny of large animal tracks, and, evidently, the proposed restoration of grizzly bears in North Cascades National Park on the Canadian border.
A typical comment thread on a post about the latter in recent years has looked something like this:
Stupid idea. Let them roam where they roam. If they end up migrating down here, then so be it.
We do not want grizzly bears in the North Cascades. Keep them where they are. This is a terrible idea.
I think Mother Earth approves. I’m excited about this!
I am a hiker and climber and would prefer not to be killed by a bear.
This is amazing conservation news and a project long in the making to bring them back to their habitat!
I love the N Cascades the way they are.
NO.
I, like many members of the overwhelmingly liberal, animal-loving, granola-munching hiking community in Washington state, am predisposed to anything and everything that has a conservation angle. The fisher restoration? Bring ‘em back! Gray wolves? A majestic animal and a beautiful success story! But guiltily, I’d felt a niggling sense of, well, understanding when fellow outdoor enthusiasts expressed nervousness about the grizzly proposal.
“[T]he thought of grizzlies in the North Cascades sends shivers down many a Northwest hiker’s spine,” Craig Romano, a local guidebook author in favor of the restoration project, has written. “And I know that many of my fellow hikers have no desire to hike in grizzly country — even less so to encourage these bears to return to some of their favorite hiking grounds.”
A view of the North Cascades. “The wildest places are those that have grizzly bears,” said conservationist Joe Scott, “and we derive a great deal of value from that as people.”
Photo by craig kerwien on Unsplash
Though grizzlies (also called brown bears) once numbered in the thousands in the Pacific Northwest, their population was decimated by the Hudson Bay Company's fur operation in the mid 1800s. While hikers send pictures of cinnamon-colored (and deceptively named) black bears to the North Cascades park stewards in excitement every season, the last credible grizzly sighting in the area was in 1996. The grizzly bear — one of the most iconic symbols of the mountain west — is now believed to be functionally extirpated in the North Cascades.
Despite being a conservation horror story, this history has made modern Washington something of an arkoudaphobic hiker’s paradise. The state has all the rugged, breathtaking alpine beauty of places like Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, or British Columbia, but without the accompanying media reports of grizzly attacks. While Washington does have plenty of smaller black bears, they’re skittish and not considered to be much of a threat; precautions like bear spray and bear bells, all necessary in grizz’ country, are frequently dismissed by longtime locals as paranoid out-of-towner behavior. As Conservation Northwest’s Wolf-Buck sympathized with me on a call, “No Washingtonian who goes into the woods is really afraid of a black bear. We know what we’re supposed to do. Grizzly is a different story.”
The latest iteration of the on-again-off-again Washington state grizzly reintroduction process began in 2015 and found an unexpected bipartisan ally in President Donald Trump’s then-secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke. Opposition by the local ranching communities, taken up by Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), sent Zinke backpedaling, and his successor, David Bernhardt, shut down the plan for good. Then last November, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service revived the effort to reintroduce the bears using the Endangered Species Act provision 10(j), intended to “relieve landowner concerns” by giving potential newcomer bears an experimental status of “threatened,” allowing for more management options and relaxing regulations. The public comment period ended in December; now everyone is waiting for the environmental impact statement, which is the next bureaucratic hurdle to clear.
In the meantime, you can count on a Bear Guy to tell it to you straight. “I think the number of human deaths at the claws of grizzly bears [in Yellowstone National Park] totals 11 since 1872,” Scott said. “So there’s your perspective.”
Scott’s real title is international program director of Conservation Northwest; in addition to working on the grizzly program in the North Cascades, he partners with teams in British Colombia on similar grizzly revitalization projects. The programs in B.C. are often led by First Nations groups, who are spiritually, culturally, and even geographically linked to the grizzly; on the southern side of the border, the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe has voiced support for the restoration efforts but did not reply to a request for comment by press time.
Scott had actually overestimated the fatalities he quoted to me: Since Yellowstone was founded, just eight people have been killed by grizzlies inside the park boundary (a ninth unsubstantiated fatality may have occurred in 1907 after someone supposedly poked a bear cub with an umbrella). The home of Old Faithful gets 4.8 million visitors a year; North Cascades, by contrast, is one of the least-visited National Parks, with just 30,154 visitors in 2022. Yellowstone estimates the odds of being injured by a grizzly within its borders are around 1 in 2.7 million visits; in theory, if that ratio held in Washington, it could take almost 90 years before there was even an injury.
Grizzlies are “not like little Tasmanian devils spinning around the landscape, striking hapless humans at random, or some nonsense like that,” Tom Smith, a bear biologist specializing in human-bear conflict, and who is not involved in the North Cascades restoration effort, told me. “There is always some predisposing factor, and the vast majority of those [attacks] … if the persons had done something proactive or differently, they wouldn’t have happened.”
"You don't get to being an old bear by doing stupid things," Tom Scott, a bear biologist specializing in human-bear conflict, told Heatmap. "They don't just jump like a jack-in-the-box out of nowhere to go after people."
Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash
The problem is, there is a lot of bad information out there about grizzlies, which is why people like me — outdoorsy, environmentally minded, sympathetic to conservation efforts — can get caught up in the what-ifs. Many such fallacies are repeated and amplified in those Facebook posts: that the translocation candidates would be other place’s “problem bears” (they wouldn’t be); that we don’t need more meat-eating carnivores roaming the mountains (Cascade grizzlies are heavy plant-eaters); and that we should wait for the bears to come back on their own (cut off from the North Cascades by roads and cities in B.C., they won’t). Even concerns about climate change’s impact on future bears can be assuaged; research shows habitats favorable to grizzlies are only likely to expand as the region warms, in part because bears eat many of the plants that are the first to spring up after wildfires.
Then there is the fact that we’re still years and years away from grizzlies being more than a few needles in a vast 9,800-square-mile haystack. The proposal on the table is to move just 25 bears into the mountains over a 10-year period, with the dream goal of the population reaching perhaps 200 after a century. “I will probably never see a grizzly in the wild in my lifetime in Washington state,” Wolf-Buck told me.
Despite the anxiety on social media, most people are also supportive of the proposal. A May 2016 poll commissioned by Defenders of Wildlife, another conservation nonprofit supporting the bear project, and conducted by Tulchin Research, found 79% of hikers, campers, hunters, and fishers in the state supported the effort. Among all voters, approval was one percentage point better.
Support dips to a still-strong 66% in the eastern, agricultural, and red parts of the state, including Okanogan County, which lies directly to the proposed reintroduction area’s east. “In the community that I am a part of, and in the circles that I typically spend my time in, people are staunchly opposed to having another predator to deal with,” Pam Lewison, a rancher and the director of the Center for Agriculture at the conservative Washington Policy Center think tank, told me, adding that “ultimately, the thought that these are majestic creatures who are more afraid of you than you are them is just not true.”
But grizzlies are “odds assessors,” according to Smith, the bear biologist, and there are simple ways for hikers to tilt the math in their favor. In addition to precautions recreationists should already be taking in black bear country — storing food in bear canisters and never in a tent — the “one thing I don’t see blazoned across every pamphlet that should be there is, you have no business going into bear country without a deterrent,” Smith told me. “I mean, you have no business.” For most people, that just means getting in the habit of carrying bear spray. And hike with friends: “The simplest thing that a person can do, that shows consistent positive results, is hike with two or more people,” Smith added. “I don’t have a single incident in North America where two people calmly stood their ground and the bear touched them.” (Oh, and all that stuff about playing dead? Don’t do that.)
According to Scott, the North Cascades are “probably some of the best grizzly bear habitat on planet Earth.”
Photo by Hunter Reilly on Unsplash
Will there be a learning curve? Of course. But “just like the bears, we’re a highly adaptable species,” Scott told me, pointing out that “people will get used to it: They get used to carrying bear spray, they get used to storing their food in bins, they get used to making noise on a trail, and they get used to leashing their dogs. None of this is all that big of a deal.”
Then the Bear Guy said something that surprised me: that maybe we should be a little bit nervous outdoors. Maybe Washingtonians’ laxity is what is unnatural, the wildlife population long ago brought to a bloody heel by us. But is that actually what we want our state’s remaining wild lands to be — human playgrounds? “Some people want it, but I think most people don’t,” Scott said. “All the marketing for the outdoor crap and all this stuff — it’s all about adventure. Well, you want adventure? Here you go. Guaranteeing your safety is not adventure.”
There is still much work ahead: more studies; more research; more proposals; more letters to Congress; more outreach to the state’s ranchers, who are concerned about their livelihoods and the stresses on animals they care about; and, especially, more education of those who want to enjoy the beauty of Washington state but are a little bit uneasy about sharing that space with newcomers.
Which, to an extent, maybe we ought to be. As a wise Bear Guy once told me, “we might not necessarily be the boss out there, and that’s a good thing.”
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The company says its first Optimus robots will start rolling off the line in “2026.”
Tesla is a car company everywhere except Wall Street. It delivered some 1.7 million cars in 2024, which were built in factories in Texas, California, Germany, and China. These car sales (and leases and sales of regulatory credits) generated some $77 billion in revenue. Its gross margin on these cars is about 18.5%, or around $14 billion.
When Tesla reported its first quarter earnings, it announced a more than 70% decline in profits, continued falling sales, and ahit to its business from the trade war with China. But its stock climbed the next day, and is now trading at around $350 a share, from $238 before the report, giving it an overall value of over $1 trillion. By some metrics, Tesla makes up more than half of the overall value of the automotive industry.
That’s because it’s not valued like a car company. The company’s investors are putting a huge stake on future innovations that largely spring from the head of Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive. These include promised self-driving cars and a self-driving taxi service, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot, which Musk has said could turn into a $10 trillion business. (For reference, Walmart’s annual revenue is just under $650 billion; Walmart is also worth less than Tesla today.) So far, all we know about the Optimus is that it can dance.
One reason analysts and shareholders cheered its most recent results is because Musk committed to spending less time in Washington trying to reshape the federal government and more time with the company that makes up the lion’s share of his immense personal wealth. But just getting more of Musk’s time is the easy test. A more consequential challenge for the thesis that Tesla can be more than just a company that sells cars to people who drive them is its upcoming robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, scheduled for next month.
While Google’s Waymo already has a fully autonomous taxi system available in a few areas of a few cities, Musk has repeatedly promised that Tesla could reach full autonomy globally far more cheaply than Waymo — or, as he puts it, “Waymo needs ‘way mo’ money to succeed 😂.”
But the initial rollout of the robotaxi may be modest. Adam Jonas, a bullish Tesla analyst with Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients on Friday after a conversation with Tesla’s head of investor relations that the Austin debut will “have 10-20 cars” and “plenty of tele-ops to ensure safety levels.”
Another future Tesla business, its Optimus robot, might be able to open up its factory to tours for investors sometime in the last three months of the year, Jonas reported, with commercialization coming by the middle of 2026 at a cost of around $20,000 per unit. The company aims to produce “several thousand” robots by the end of this year, he said. (Though you should be skeptical of any and all dates and deadlines given by Tesla — Musk has been promising an imminent fleet of autonomous Teslas for over five years.) Right now, Jonas wrote, about 12 are being produced at a time, more or less by hand.
And that’s just the mechanics. The software for humanoid autonomy also isn’t there yet: “Tesla admits both intelligence and cost ‘need to come a long way’ to unlock the true potential of humanoid robots,” Jonas wrote. “The neural nets for Optimus are far larger than for cars given greater degrees-of-freedom and far more open-ended tasks.”
Tesla also has more prosaic worries for these next generation businesses. Company officials told Jonas that they’re in an “incredibly competitive” hiring market, especially compared to Chinese companies, which “own the supply chain” for advanced technologies.
While Tesla and Musk are eager to tell the public that the company is orienting itself toward an AI-driven robotic future, some of its other corporate actions may reflect the more present-day concerns of brand management. Tesla sales have declined sharply overseas, and its showrooms have become sites for protest, driven by anger over Musk’s role in the Trump administration.
The company said Friday that it would welcome a new member of its board: Jack Hartung, president and chief strategy officer of Chipotle, a brand with its own history of crisis, stock market volatility, and precarious executive leadership. While it’s unlikely Tesla will get involved in the food business anytime soon, it may benefitfrom learning from Chipotle’s struggles over the last few years of giving people what they expect.
At least one target of Chris Wright’s grant review may run into some sticky statutory issues.
The Department of Energy announced on Thursday that it’s reviewing some 179 awards made by the Biden administration worth $15 billion to ensure they were “consistent with Federal law and this Administration’s policies and priorities.”
But what happens when federal law and Trump’s priorities are at odds?
In the case of at least one awardee, the major U.S. steel producer Cleveland Cliffs, the DOE’s review process may become a mechanism to take funding that is statutorily designated for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and channel it into long-lived fossil fuel assets.
Lourenco Goncalves, the CEO of Cleveland Cliffs, a major U.S. steel producer, said on an earnings call last week that the company was in the process of renegotiating its $500 million award under the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The DOE program funded 33 projects to decarbonize heavy industry, including cement, steel, aluminum, and glass production, with first-of-its-kind or early-scale commercial technologies.
Cleveland Cliffs was originally going to use the money to replace its coal-fired blast furnace at a steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, with a new unit that ran on a mix of hydrogen and natural gas as well as new electric furnaces. Now, the company is working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” Goncalves told investors. The project would no longer assume the use of hydrogen and “would instead rely on readily available and more economical fossil fuels.”
The CEO later clarified that the company planned to “reline” its blast furnace at Middletown, extending its life, “now that the project is changing scope.”
But the Inflation Reduction Act, which created the Industrial Demonstrations Program, says the funds must be used for “the purchase and installation, or implementation, of advanced industrial technology,” which it defines as tech “designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction progress to net-zero.”
“I don’t know at this point what Cleveland Cliffs can confidently say they’re going to do to substantially reduce greenhouse gasses and also deliver gains in public health and jobs to local communities, which is a prerequisite for IDP grant money,” Yong Kwon, a senior advisor for the Sierra Club’s Industrial Transformation Campaign, told me.
The memo announcing the Department of Energy’s review says that it has already reached some “concerning” findings, though it does not describe what was concerning or provide any further detail about the awards under review.
Compared to his peers at other agencies, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been noticeably quiet about the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to slash funding across the Department of Energy. But in March, Axiosobtained documents that said more than 60% of grants awarded under the Industrial Demonstrations Program were being targeted. The following month, CNN reported that Cleveland Cliffs’ Middletown project was on the list slated for termination, noting that it would have secured 2,500 jobs and created more than 100 new, permanent jobs in JD Vance’s hometown.
At the time, Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich told CNN that “no final decisions have been made” about the funding and that “multiple plans are still being considered.” Now it appears the Department may be negotiating with Cleveland Cliffs to develop a cheaper and more politically palatable project.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have also introduced a bill that would rescind any money from the Industrial Demonstrations Program that isn’t obligated, meaning that if the Department of Energy can find a way to legally terminate its contracts with companies, Congress may claw back the money.
The Industrial Demonstrations Program was the Biden administration’s “missing middle” grant program, designed to support projects that were past the early experimental stage, in which case they were no longer candidates for funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, but were also not ready for mass deployment, like those supported by the Loan Programs Office. In the case of Cleveland Cliffs, the funding was also aimed at making the U.S. a leader in the future of steelmaking, retaining thousands of jobs, saving the company money, and enabling it to command a higher price for its products.
“If you’re going to maintain blast furnaces, it means you have one foot in a technology that is now quickly becoming outdated that the rest of the global steel industry is transitioning away from,” Kwon told me.
David Super, an expert in administrative law at Georgetown University, told me in an email that if the Department of Energy provides and Cleveland Cliffs accepts funding that does not comply with statute, “the Department officials involved could be in violation of the Antideficiency Act and Cleveland Cliffs could be required to return the money, a modified contract notwithstanding.” The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from obligating funds for projects that are not authorized by law.
Super added that the law also specifies that the money be awarded “on a competitive basis.” As Cleveland Cliffs won the competition with its hydrogen project, allowing it to use the money for a different project at the company’s plant “would thus violate the requirement of competitive awards and would allow the unsuccessful bidders to challenge this funding award.”
Neither Cleveland Cliffs nor the Department of Energy responded to a request for comment.
Leaks to the press have signaled that the Department of Energy may be taking a similar approach with the hydrogen hubs, potentially terminating contracts to develop renewable energy-based projects — all of which are in blue states — while allowing natural gas-based projects in red states to continue.
It is still not clear how the agency will handle its $3.5 billion direct air capture hubs, which news outlets have reported may also be under threat. On Friday, however, the oil and gas company Occidental, which was awarded a contract to develop a DAC hub in Texas, announced that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company is considering investing up to $500 million in the project as part of a new joint-venture agreement. The press release notes that the agreement was signed during President Trump’s visit to the United Arab Emirates.
Last week, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said during a confirmation hearing for Kyle Haustveit, the nominee to head the Office of Fossil Energy, that two carbon capture projects in her state were “in limbo” due to the agency’s spending review. The same day, in another hearing, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida accused Wright of having frozen $67 billion worth of funds and asked him to commit to releasing it.
Wright denied this. “We’re not withholding any funds and we’ve paid every invoice we’ve had for work done and funds that are due,” he replied. But he went on to clarify that the agency is “engaging with” recipients “to make sure American taxpayer monies are being spent in thoughtful, reasonable ways.”
According to efficiency department data, the DOE has “terminated” 39 contracts worth $60 million and five grants worth $3.4 million. The contracts include news subscriptions, various technical support services, and a $22 million contract with consulting firm McKinsey for “rapid response deliverables” for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the department that runs the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The grants include three Advanced Research Projects Agency awards to explore using geologic stores of hydrogen, and another to reduce methane emissions from natural gas flares.
On budget negotiations, Climeworks, and DOE grants
Current conditions: It’s peak storm season in the U.S., with severe weather in the forecast for at least the next six days in the Midwest and East• San Antonio, Texas, is expected to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit today• Monsoon rains have begun in Sri Lanka.
The House Budget Committee meeting to prepare the reconciliation bill for a floor vote as early as next week appears to be a go for Friday, despite calls from some Republicans to delay the session. At least three GOP House members, including two members of the Freedom Caucus, have threatened to vote no on the budget because a final score for the Energy and Commerce portion of the bill, which includes cuts to Medicaid, won’t be ready from the Congressional Budget Office until next week. That is causing a “math problem” for Republicans, Politico writes, because the Budget Committee “is split 21-16 in favor of Republicans, and Democrats are expecting full attendance,” meaning Republicans can “only lose two votes if they want to move forward with the megabill Friday.” Republican Brandon Gill of Texas is currently out on paternity leave, further reducing the margin for disagreement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is also contending with discontent in the ranks over cuts to clean energy tax credits. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still pretty bad,” New York Republican Andrew Garbarino, a co-chair of the House Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, told Politico on Thursday. But concerns about the cuts, which would heavily impact Republican state economies and jobs, do not appear to be a “red line” for many others, including Georgia’s Buddy Carter, whose district benefits from Inflation Reduction Act credits for a Hyundai car and battery plant that is among the targets for elimination. You can learn more about the cuts Republicans are proposing to the IRA in our coverage here.
The Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks is preparing for significant cuts to its workforce, citing the larger economic landscape and the Trump administration’s lack of consistent support. The company currently has 498 employees, but is undergoing a consultation process, indicating it is looking to cut more than 10% of its workforce at once, SwissInfo.ch reports. “Our financial resources are limited,” Climeworks’ co-founder and managing director Jan Wurzbacher said in comments on Swiss TV.
Though Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is a known proponent of carbon capture, and there had been excitement in the industry that Trump’s attempts to expedite federal permitting would benefit carbon storage sites, the administration has also hollowed out the Department of Energy’s carbon removal team, my colleague Katie Brigham has reported. The ongoing funding cuts and uncertainty have made it difficult to get information from the government that could affect Climework’s Project Cypress in Louisiana, although Wurzbacher stressed that “we are not currently aware that our project would be stopped.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced in a Thursday memo that the department will be reviewing at least $15 billion worth of grants awarded to “power grid and manufacturing supply chain projects” under the Biden administration, Reuters reports. “With this process, the Department will ensure we are doing our due diligence, utilizing taxpayer dollars to generate the largest possible benefit to the American people and safeguarding our national security,” Wright said in his statement.
The memo goes on to note that the DOE plans to prioritize “large-scale commercial projects that require more detailed information from the awardees for the initial phase of this review, but this process may extend to other DOE program offices as the reviews progress.” Projects that don’t meet the DOE’s standards could be denied, as could projects of grantees who fail to “respond to information requests within the provided time frame, does not respond to follow-up questions in a timely manner.” As of last week, Wright told lawmakers, “we’ve canceled zero” existing projects so far, E&E News writes; the agency will reportedly be reviewing at least 179 different awards during its audit.
The number of National Weather Service offices ending 24-hour operations and severe weather alerts is increasing. On Thursday, The San Francisco Chronicle confirmed that California’s Sacramento and Hanford offices, which provide information to more than 7 million people in the Central Valley, have been forced to reduce service due to “critically reduced staffing.”
Eliminating 24-hour service is especially concerning for the Central Valley and surrounding foothills, where around-the-clock weather updates can be critical. “These are offices that have both dealt with major wildfire episodes most of the past 10 years, and we are now entering fire season,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told the Chronicle. “That’s a big, big problem.” Swain additionally shared on LinkedIn a map he’d put together of regions in the U.S. that no longer have full-service weather coverage, including “a substantial chunk of Tornado Alley during peak tornado season and the entirety of Alaska’s vast North Slope region.” The NWS is additionally seeking to fill 155 vacancies in coastal states that could face risks as the Atlantic hurricane season begins at the end of the month, The Washington Post reports. An estimated 500 of 4,200 NWS employees have been fired or taken early retirements since the start of Trump’s term.
Heatmap’s “most fascinating” EV of 2025 just got pushed back to 2026. The Ram 1500 Ramcharger — which has a 140-mile electric range as well as a V6 engine attached to a generator to power the car when the battery runs out — is now set to launch in the first quarter of next year due to “extending the quality validation period,” Crain’s Detroit Business reported this week. Parent company Stellantis also pushed back the launch of its fully electric Ram 1500 REV until summer 2027, with a planned model year of 2028. “Our plan ensures we are offering customers a range of trucks with flexible powertrain options that best meet their needs,” Stellantis spokeswoman Jodi Tinson told Crain’s in an email. Though you now have even longer to wait, you can read more about the car Jesse Jenkins calls “brilliant” here.
GMC
The 2026 GMC Hummer EV just got even more ridiculous. “Thanks to the new Carbon Fiber Edition,” the 9,000-pound car “can zoom to 60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds,” InsideEVs reports.