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On Musk’s next move, earnings calls, and Earth Day EOs
On NOAA’s disappearing websites, Penn Station plans, and PJM reforms
The car brand with a crunchy reputation has started to earn it, at last.
On greenhouse gas data, the GOP’s budget plan, and tariffs
Current conditions: Unseasonably heavy rains killed at least 100 people in India and Nepal • Parts of Southern California could see triple-digit temperatures today as a heat wave peaks • This year’s La Nina is officially over.
The Trump administration is overseeing a chaotic set of changes at the U.S. Department of Energy that could gut its in-house bank and transform one of the government’s key scientific and technology development agencies, Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reports. In the coming days, the department could see thousands of its employees — nearly one-fifth of its staff — resign in one of the largest headcount reductions in memory. At the same time, it could cancel billions of dollars in next-generation energy R&D projects in Ohio and other states.
Some of these changes have been planned for weeks. But in recent days, department officials have appeared to grow anxious behind the scenes about the scale of the transformation. Some Trump officials have reached out to individuals, offering them financial incentives in order to discourage them from taking the buyout, according to administration documents and accounts from multiple department employees who were not authorized to speak publicly. “If the full set of changes goes through, the Department of Energy may be so depleted that it will be unable to carry out the Trump administration’s goals, such as bolstering the power grid or building new power plants,” Meyer explained.
Kathleen Sgamma, a fossil fuel lobbyist and President Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, took herself out of the running for the role Thursday ahead of her confirmation hearing. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Mike Lee of Utah announced the news as the hearing was set to begin. Sgamma did not give a reason for her decision, but it follows the Tuesday release of a 2021 letter in which she criticized Trump’s actions connected to the January 6 Capitol riot. Sgamma was previously the head of the oil and gas industry trade group Western Energy Alliance and has called for the BLM, which oversees 245 million acres of public lands, to open more areas to energy exploration and development.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to dramatically scale back the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, according toProPublica. The program has been in place since 2010, and requires around 8,000 facilities to monitor and report their planet-warming pollution, accounting for the vast majority of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. This data helps inform policy and “constitutes a significant portion of the information the government submits to the international body that tallies global greenhouse gas pollution,” ProPublica explained. “Losing the data will make it harder to know how much climate-warming gas an economic sector or factory is emitting and to track those emissions over time.” EPA officials want to eliminate reporting requirements for all but one of the 41 categories currently submitting data, according toThe New York Times.
House Republicans passed a budget blueprint Thursday that lays the groundwork for the party to begin drafting legislation to enact President Trump’s agenda. Now the fight over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits begins in earnest. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains, the blueprint is a set of instructions for writing the eventual budget bill, laying out topline numbers for tax cuts and spending reductions — it doesn’t contain any actual policies. Trump’s biggest priorities are to extend the tax cuts he enacted in 2017, pass new tax cuts on tips and overtime pay, and to boost spending on immigration control and defense.
The resolution Republicans passed allows for all of the above. In total, it enables Congress to craft a bill that would increase the national debt over the next decade by more than $5 trillion. “The good news for the IRA tax credits is that the framework only requires lawmakers to craft legislation that would produce $4 billion in savings,” says Pontecorvo. “The bad news is that Senate Republicans have given their word to budget hawks in the House that they will aim to produce a minimum $1.5 trillion in savings. House Republicans are eager to find at least $2 trillion in deficit reductions.”
On Thursday, Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and John Curtis of Utah sent a letter to their party’s leadership asking them to preserve IRA tax credits that spur manufacturing, reduce energy costs for consumers, and give certainty to businesses that have already made investments in the U.S. based on the credits. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Jerry Moran of Kansas also signed the letter. It was the first major show of support for the tax credits in the Senate, following a similar letter signed by 21 Republicans in the House.
Tesla has halted new orders for its Model S and Model X in China, apparently in response to the trade war instigated by President Trump’s new tariffs, reportedElectrek’s Fred Lambert. These models are produced in the U.S. and imported into China, meaning they now face steep new fees. Trump this week slapped 145% tariffs on imported Chinese goods, and China responded on Friday by hiking its fees on imported U.S. goods to 125%. The decision by Tesla “kills a relatively small market of about 2,000 vehicles for Tesla in China,” Lambert said, “but those are profitable vehicles, which is not the case for most vehicles Tesla sells in the country these days.”
The American Society of Magazine Editors announced this week that Heatmap’s Decarbonize Your Life section won the National Magazine Award for Service Journalism. 🎉
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
