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      California’s Push for Electric Trucks Sputters Under Trump

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      The state will no longer require some truckers to shift away from diesel semis but hopes that subsidies can keep dreams of pollution-free big rigs alive.President Trump’s policies could threaten many big green energy projects in the coming years, but his election has already dealt a big blow to an ambitious California effort to replace thousands of diesel-fueled trucks with battery-powered semis.The California plan, which has been closely watched by other states and countries, was meant to take a big leap forward last year, with a requirement that some of the more than 30,000 trucks that move cargo in and out of ports start using semis that don’t emit carbon dioxide.But after Mr. Trump was elected, California regulators withdrew their plan, which required a federal waiver that the new administration, which is closely aligned with the oil industry, would most likely have rejected. That leaves the state unable to force trucking businesses to clean up their fleets. It was a big setback for the state, which has long been allowed to have tailpipe emission rules that are stricter than federal standards because of California’s infamous smog.Some transportation experts said that even before Mr. Trump’s election, California’s effort had problems. The batteries that power electric trucks are too expensive. They take too long to charge. And there aren’t enough places to plug the trucks in.“It was excessively ambitious,” said Daniel Sperling, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in sustainable transportation, referring to the program that made truckers buy green rigs.California officials insist that their effort is not doomed and say they will keep it alive with other rules and by providing truckers incentives to go electric.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      A tale of two suckers: Donald Trump’s plastic straws and Keir Starmer | Stewart Lee

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      It’s difficult to know whether to set any store by Donald Trump’s bleak and yet also often banal pronouncements, which read as if handfuls of offensive concepts have been tossed into the air by a monkey, read out in whatever order they landed and then made policy. Until it’s clear they can’t work. At which point, the monkey must toss again.But this month, Trump, whose morning ablutions increasingly appear to consist of dousing himself in sachets of the kind of cheap hot chocolate powder I steal from three-star hotels, like a flightless bird stuck in the machine that glazes Magnum lollies, declared he wanted to build his hotels on the mass graves of Gaza. Hasn’t Trump seen The Shining? It won’t end well. Pity those whose children have the misfortune to die next to a monetisable stretch of shoreline. And hope humanity’s next wave of mass killings happens somewhere uneven and way inland that hopefully wouldn’t even make a decent golf course.Is Ukraine the frontier upon which the future of European democracy hinges, or is it just a massive stretch of undeveloped fairway, its leisure/conference utility value currently compromised only by the desire of some losers to continue living in the country they consider home? Where we see the falling domino chain that starts with Poland and ends in your back garden, does Trump see only a succession of 18-hole courses full of men in caps and enormous flapping flares brokering manly deals at the tee? Drive your golf carts over the bones of the dead!But maybe Trump’s horrible mouth-cack is just continuing evidence of his former acolyte Steve Bannon’s advice to “flood the zone with shit”? Does Trump really hate all sea creatures so much that he has to reinstate the plastic straws Joe Biden successfully, and commendably, outlawed? Perhaps he was once told to keep his hands to himself by a mermaid. “These things don’t work,” Trump said of paper straws. “I’ve had them many times, and on occasion, they break, they explode.” Must millions of seabirds, turtles, manatees and dolphins die because Trump imagines that paper straws explode? Or so he can suck up his Diet Coke fast enough to amuse Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth and JD Vance by burping a smelly chorus of YMCA in Biden’s face next time there’s a gathering of ex-presidents.Because Trump, a fully grown man with unlimited funds, loves Diet Coke, and it’s tempting to wonder how many of his seemingly incomprehensible policy decisions can be traced back to his desire to be continually saturated by the soft drink. Maybe there is a subterranean lake of the stuff somewhere deep beneath the Greenland tundra that the climate crisis, which doesn’t exist, will soon make accessible to Trump’s deep Diet Coke drills? Delighted Inuit strip off their sealskins and dance in the showering liquid as they realise they have just struck a rich seam of their new master’s black gold. Like some kind of infantilised diaper king, Trump has genuinely had a special Diet Coke-summoning button installed in the Oval Office. Hopefully, he won’t get it mixed up with that other button. It will be a shame if all life on Earth is fatally irradiated just because Trump wanted a 500ml bucket of fizz to swill down his Big Mac and fries.But are we meant to take Trump’s erratic announcements seriously? While the last concerned voices of the dying liberal press pen outraged articles to their dying liberal readers about Gaza hotels, the invasion of Canada and Trump making it compulsory to drink everything through a Trump Plastic Freedom Straw Company Deluxe Plastic Freedom Straw ™ ®, even cauliflower cheese soup, his homunculus Musk has been quietly dismantling the infrastructure of American government as you knew it. There are cup-and-ball tricksters on Parisian street corners with more subtle moves.Half a dozen of Musk’s own hand-harvested incels-in-waiting, the kind of people who under normal circumstances would have got rich by inventing a way in which hardcore digital pornography could have been mainlined directly into the bloodstream in liquid form, have, under the spurious authority of Musk’s imaginary “department of government efficiency”, gone in and stolen all the data about everyone and everything in the US ever. Never mind. I am sure they will use it responsibly. What can possibly go wrong?Some people gathered at the scenes of Musk’s cost-cutting exercises and waved placards. Others sat and gawked at news footage of Kanye West’s naked wife’s arse or enjoyed disappointing trailers for the new Captain America movie, while the world as they knew it crumbled beneath their king-sized sofas. Keir Starmer backed away, as one might from a neighbour’s unpredictable weapon dog, avoiding direct comment, dodging a commitment to the AI declaration like a coward and hoping for the best, while Trumpy growls and foams. Which simply won’t do.Look. I’m as disappointed as the next metropolitan liberal elitist champagne socialist by Starmer’s government. While I accept, for example, the migration crisis must be addressed, I didn’t expect Starmer, who once left his “village and went to the city of Leeds” and “discovered a whole new world of indie bands – like Orange Juice and the Wedding Present”, to do it with Nigel Farage-style performative cruelty. Address the migration crisis, by all means, but don’t be a c*** about it. Did Orange Juice suffer the indignity of their eponymous third album not even entering the top 50 in 1984 just so, 41 years later, Starmer could send Yvette Cooper out to downgrade the desperate, like Paul Golding in heels.Currently, as Putin puffs up under Trump’s protection and unregulated AI threatens to rewrite history in real time, Starmer is on his knees sucking the paper straw of Trump’s presidency. I fear it may be about to explode in his mouth.

      Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July

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      in US Politics

      Trump names oil and gas advocate to lead agency that manages federal lands

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      Donald Trump has nominated a longtime oil and gas industry representative to oversee an agency that manages a quarter-billion acres of public land concentrated in western states.Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Colorado-based oil industry trade group Western Energy Alliance, was named Bureau of Land Management director, a position with wide influence over lands used for energy production, grazing, recreation and other purposes. An MIT graduate, Sgamma has been a leading voice for the fossil fuel industry, calling for fewer drilling restrictions on public lands that produce about 10% of US oil and gas.If confirmed by the Senate, she would be a key architect of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda alongside the interior secretary Doug Burgum, who leads the newly formed National Energy Council that Trump says will establish US “energy dominance” around the world. Trump has vowed to boost US oil and gas drilling and move away from Joe Biden’s focus on the climate crisis.The former interior secretary David Bernhardt relocated the land bureau’s headquarters to Colorado during Trump’s first term, leading to a spike in employee resignations. The bureau went four years under Trump without a confirmed director.The headquarters for the 10,000-person agency was moved back to Washington DC under Biden, who installed the Montana conservationist Tracy Stone-Manning at the bureau to lead his administration’s efforts to curb oil and gas production in the name of fighting the climate crisis.Sgamma will be charged with reversing those policies, by putting into effect a series of orders issued last week by Burgum as part of Trump’s plan to sharply expand fossil fuel production.Burgum ordered reviews of many of Stone-Manning’s signature efforts, including fewer oil and gas lease sales, an end to coal leasing in the country’s biggest coal fields, a greater emphasis on conservation and drilling and renewable energy restrictions meant to protect a wide-ranging western bird, the greater sage grouse. Burgum also ordered federal officials to review and consider redrawing the boundaries of national monuments that were created under Biden and other presidents to protect unique landscapes and cultural resources.Sgamma said on social media she was honored to be nominated.She said she greatly respects the agency’s work to balance multiple uses for public lands – including energy, recreation, grazing and mining — with stewardship of the land. “I look forward to leading an agency that is key to the agenda of unleashing American energy while protecting the environment,” she wrote on LinkedIn.But environmentalists warned that Sgamma would elevate corporate interests over protections for public land. “Kathleen Sgamma would be an unmitigated disaster for our public lands,” said Taylor McKinnon at the Center for Biological Diversity, adding that Sgamma has “breathtaking disdain for environmental laws, endangered species, recreation, or anything other than industry profit”.The Wyoming governor, Mark Gordon, said Sgamma’s nomination was an “excellent choice”.“I know she is well-qualified and knowledgeable when it comes to Wyoming, the West, and multiple use of public lands,” Gordon, a Republican, said in a statement.Trump nominated Brian Nesvik to lead the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which also is under the interior department and helps recover imperiled species and protect their habitat.Nesvik until last year led the Wyoming game and fish department, where he pushed to remove federal protections for grizzly bears. That would open the door to public hunting for the first time in decades after the animals bounced back from near-extinction last century in the northern US Rocky Mountains.The Biden administration in its last days extended protections for more than 2,000 grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, a move that was blasted by Republican officials in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. More

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      in Elections

      The New NIMBY Battle Over the Waste From the L.A. Fires

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      Federal and state officials say the temporary sites for processing hazardous waste pose no threat, but residents are worried about their air and water.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California visited Altadena on Tuesday to praise the progress of the cleanup after the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires, vowing to complete debris removal at “unprecedented, record-breaking speed.”Catalina Pasillas has a problem with the debris, but her home is far from Altadena. She lives near one of the four federal staging areas where hazardous materials from the rubble are being stored.Ms. Pasillas, a real estate agent who lives in Duarte, about a mile from one of the sites in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, said smoke from the fires had exacerbated her asthma. Now, she worries that the waste site, in Lario Park, will poison the air even more.“I understand they need to put the toxic waste somewhere,” she said. “But it feels like they chose our city because they thought we wouldn’t say anything.”Near the ruins of the Los Angeles fires, a new battle has been emerging over how to dispose of the toxic waste left behind.Federal officials said the four temporary sites processing the debris pose no threat to public health or to the environment. But some local leaders and residents worry that their neighborhoods could suffer long-term environmental harm and accuse officials of selecting them because they are working-class Black and Hispanic communities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump signs order to bring back plastic straws claiming paper ones ‘explode’

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      On Monday, Donald Trump took aim at a “ridiculous situation” that directly affects his daily life: paper straws.He signed an executive order that rolls back a Biden administration policy to phase out federal purchases of single-use plastics, including straws, from food service operations, events and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035.“It’s a ridiculous situation. We’re going back to plastic straws,” Trump told reporters at the White House as he signed the order. “These things don’t work,” he said, referring to paper straws. “I’ve had them many times, and on occasion, they break, they explode.”But Trump, such a fan of drinking Diet Coke that he has installed a button in the Oval Office in order to summon staff to deliver the drink, has long railed against any restrictions upon plastic straws. When attempting to gain re-election in 2020, his campaign sold reusable straws on its website claiming that “liberal paper straws don’t work”.View image in fullscreenWhile plastic straws have been blamed for polluting oceans and harming marine life, Trump said on Monday that he thinks “it’s OK” to continue using them. “I don’t think that plastic is going to affect the shark very much as they’re … munching their way through the ocean,” he said at a White House announcement.White House staff secretary Will Scharf, who presented the executive order to Trump, told him the push for paper straws has cost the government and private industry “an absolute ton of money and left consumers all over the country wildly dissatisfied with their straws’.’The order directs federal agencies to review procurement processes to allow use of plastic straws. “It really is something that affects ordinary Americans in their everyday lives,” Scharf said.The plastic manufacturing industry applauded Trump’s move.“Straws are just the beginning,” Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, said in a statement. “‘Back to Plastic’ is a movement we should all get behind.”The world is undergoing a glut of new plastic production, and a summit among countries last year failed to come to a deal to address this despite growing recognition of the harm caused by waste that takes hundreds of years to break down. Global annual plastic production doubled in the two decades since 2000 to about 460m tonnes and is expected to quadruple again by 2050.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenLess than 10% of this plastic waste is now being recycled. The rest invariably ends up in the environment, with the equivalent of one truck filled with plastic dumping its contents into the ocean every minute, according to experts’ estimates. Much of this trash is composed of single-use plastics, such as straws, which make up about 40% of plastic production.The result of this boom has been a world riddled with plastics, with large or microscopic fragments of the material found in every corner of the planet, even in the air. Plastics choke and throttle marine creatures and birds and microplastics have been found deep within the bodies of animals, including humans. Research has found plastics present in people’s brains, testicles, blood and even placentas.More than 390m straws are used every day in the United States, mostly for 30 minutes or less, according to advocacy group Straws Turtle Island Restoration Network. Straws take at least 200 years to decompose and pose a threat to turtles and other wildlife as they degrade into microplastics, says the group.“To prevent another sea turtle from becoming a victim to plastic, we must make personal lifestyle alterations to fight for these species,’’ the group said in a statement.Oliver Milman contributed to this report More

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      in US Politics

      Air traffic control to Sir Keir: turbulence ahead | Stewart Lee

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      To Elon Musk, I say this! To perform oneNazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, might be considered a misfortune. To perform two Nazi salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, begins to look like carelessness.I didn’t write that joke. I have cannibalised it from one by the gay Irish Victorian Oscar Wilde, a typical diversity hire who would have achieved nothing had his work not been promoted by the famously woke 19th-century British establishment. Luckily, Wilde was dead long before he had the opportunity to emigrate to the US and take an air traffic controller job from a more deserving straight white male, where his gayness would have caused planes to crash.And dead also is Wilde’s contemporary Little Tich, the resilient dancing midget, whose spectacular gravity-defying boots can still be seen on display in Bloomsbury’s bijoux Museum of Comedy, alongside Tommy Cooper’s fez and a jar of thoughts John Cleese was forbidden from articulating owing to political correctness. But I dread to think of the havoc a capering music hall midget might have wrought on today’s international flight paths. It is a relief that Trump has targeted the diversity policies that could lead, directly up the gently sloping access ramp of woke inclusivity, to millions of appalling aviation disasters.Call me a textbook member of the tofu-munching north London wokerati, but I am proud to live in a world where people of shorter stature, while still entitled to dance in funny shoes if they so desire, can also be air traffic controllers. And call me a textbook member of the cinnamon latte-guzzling liberal elite, but it does seem wrong for the new president of the US to blame dwarf diversity hires and lazy amputees and those pesky epileptics for an air crash, without any evidence, especially when he’s reportedly just laid off loads of air traffic controllers.On a recent Friday in York, I had a lovely north African tapas lunch with a longstanding comedy promoter who, though still young, was old enough to remember working for a special bowling alley in Blackpool, where small people in crash helmets mounted on little trolleys were ricochetted down the aisles at speed towards clusters of vulnerable skittles by violently drunk stag parties. In the end, this massively popular seaside attraction – dwarf bowling – closed early, not because someone in Blackpool had a belated anxiety about whether it was ethical, but because of the injuries sustained by those being bowled down the lanes by the intoxicated revellers.In the 1920s, Blackpool’s midgets lived in their own Midget Town on top of the Blackpool Tower, where tourists paid to see them go about their daily business in suitably scaled-down settings. It was a living. But when Midget Town finally closed, the pre-PC future offered only pantomime, seasonal work and bowling. It’s a world Trump would like to return to.Ah, well! Meet our potential major trading partner, whose return, according to Boris Johnson, was to be celebrated as another welcome victory over the woke. Witnessing the adjudicated sex abuser and convicted felon’s inauguration, Johnson, perhaps scenting his own second chance in the offing, related in the Daily Mail how, as the “invisible pulse of power surged” from the battered bible into the hand of Trump: “I saw the moment the world’s wokerati had worked so hard to prevent.” I can’t even be bothered to write anything funny about a man who could pen something so cynical, stupid and self-serving. I wish Johnson, the wounded wild pig of world politics, wandering around the central reservation wailing, having been winged by a passing Winnebago, would just fuck off. For ever.Too many of our politicians and pundits seem willing to take a wait-and-see approach to the wild swings of Trump’s pendulous wrecking balls. We should stand strong against Trump alongside Canada, the harmless honey bear of international politics suddenly rearing up like an animatronic grizzly in an 80s B-movie. Keir Starmer is in danger of being on the wrong side of history, his only consolation being that, at the current rate of collapse, there may not be much history left. Like the natural world Starmer wishes to destroy, it seems history may be a finite resource.“Drill, baby, drill!” cries Trump, as Los Angeles burns and Greenland’s permafrost unfreezes to the point where the previously unexploitable country may actually be worth him invading. Meanwhile, Starmer’s cry is the same but more complex and no less stupid. “Build a third runway and drill in the Rosebank oilfield, baby, build a third runway and drill in the Rosebank oilfield! And while you’re at it, lock up peaceful environmental protesters too. Especially the elderly.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStarmer can’t really criticise Trump’s planet-pulverising withdrawal from the Paris agreement, let alone his baseless hostility to a phalanx of imaginary disabled air traffic incompetents, when he too has decided to throw all life on Earth under the bus, despite having once been an idealistic teenager who left his “village and went to the city of Leeds” and “discovered a whole new world of indie bands – like Orange Juice and the Wedding Present”. Bless!I began this supposedly funny column on Monday morning, when the US president was still saying Starmer was “very nice” and there’d be no UK tariffs. Then I travelled to Oxford to do a show, and one takeaway coffee and a homemade sausage sandwich later, the UK seemed to have drifted back into Trump’s target zone, depending on which interpretation of his last mouth-fart of vengeful gobbledy-vomit you chose to believe. There’s no point trying to make plans around the whims of Trump. Starmer may as well throw cake at a hippo or try to cajole a box jellyfish. Go to Brussels on bended knee and beg for brotherhood.

      Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July

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      in US Politics

      Trump administration suspends $5bn electric vehicle charging program

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      The Trump administration has ordered US states to suspend a $5bn electric vehicle charging station program in a further blow to the environmental movement since the president’s return to the White House.In a memo issued on Thursday to state transportation directors, the transportation department’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) ordered states not to spend any funds allocated to them under the Biden administration as part of the national electric vehicle infrastructure (NEVI) program.“The new leadership of the Department of Transportation … has decided to review the policies underlying the implementation of the NEVI Formula Program,” Emily Biondi, the FHWA’s associate administrator for planning, environment and realty, wrote in the memo. “Accordingly, the current NEVI Formula Program Guidance dated June 11, 2024, and all prior versions of this guidance are rescinded,” Biondi added.“As result of the rescission of the NEVI Formula Program Guidance, FHWA is also immediately suspending the approval of all State Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Deployment plans for all fiscal years. Therefore, effective immediately, no new obligations may occur under the NEVI Formula Program until the updated final NEVI Formula Program Guidance is issued and new State plans are submitted and approved,” she wrote.Biondi added that until new guidance is issued, reimbursements of existing obligations for designing and building charging stations will be allowed in order to prevent the disruption of current financial commitments.According to an existing page on the energy department’s website, the NEVI program provides funding to states to strategically deploy EV chargers. Funding is available for up to 80% of eligible project costs including the acquisition, installation and network connection of EV chargers, proper operation and maintenance of EV chargers, and long-term EV charger data sharing.Politico reports that as of Thursday, the FHWA removed several website pages that provided information on the NEVI program.In a statement to Politico, Andrew Rogers, a former deputy FHWA administrator under the Biden administration, said that the memo “appears to ignore both the law and multiple restraining orders that have been issued by federal courts”.The outlet further reports Roger saying that the memo appears to be “in direct violation” of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, a law that restricts presidents from withholding congressionally approved funding.Currently, 14 states have at least one operational EV station, according to EV States Clearinghouse. As of last November, there are 126 public charging ports in operation across 31 NEVI stations in nine states, marking an 83% increase in open NEVI ports since last quarter, according to a NEVI report.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt added that a total of 41 states have released at least their first round of solicitations, with 35 having issued conditional awards or put agreements in place for more than 3,560 fast-charging ports across more than 890 charging station locations.Throughout his campaign, Trump railed against EVs, at one point saying that supporters of the vehicles should “rot in hell” and that Biden’s support of EVs would bring a “bloodbath” to the US’s automotive industry.Last month, as part of a flurry of executive orders he signed during his first days back in office, Trump revoked a Biden-era order from 2021 that had aimed to make half of all new vehicles sold in the US in 2030 electric. More

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      in US Politics

      Elon Musk’s journey from climate champion to backing EV-bashing Trump

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      Donald Trump’s attempts to slash incentives for electric cars would cause sales of the vehicles to plummet, with this effort cheered on by a seemingly confounding supporter – Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and erstwhile champion for action on the climate crisis.Trump has said that he “will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers”.The US president, who previously suggested supporters of EVs “rot in hell” before somewhat tempering his rhetoric, has already ditched an aspirational goal for half of all car sales to be electric by the end of the decade, halted some funding for EV chargers and began reversing vehicle pollution standards that prod auto companies to shift away from gasoline models.A key tax credit for Americans buying an EV, worth up to $7,500, is also a major target for elimination, although to overturn this Trump will require Republicans in Congress. Should he succeed, though, the impact would be significant, with a recent study finding that electric car sales could fall by 27% without the incentive.“Turning off the credits would affect a meaningful share of the EV market,” said Joseph Shapiro, a University of California, Berkeley, economist and co-author of the study, who added that while a growing number of people would still go electric, the total number of cars sold would shrink by more than 300,000 a year than if the incentives stayed in place.“You could say that it would be a speed bump in the road but if the US goes all electric in 2090 rather than 2050, say, that matters a lot for the planet,” he said. “A lot of carbon would be emitted in that time.”Trump’s agenda has been enthusiastically backed by Musk, despite the world’s richest person heading Tesla, the market-leading EV company that also relies upon some parts made in China that may be targeted by tariffs imposed by Trump.Musk has said, though, that removal of EV subsidies will hurt rivals such as Ford and General Motors more than Tesla. “Take away the subsidies,” Musk wrote on X, another of his companies, in July. “It will only help Tesla.”There is some logic to this, Shapiro said. Tesla is comfortably the largest EV brand in the US, accounting for nearly half of all sales, and makes more profit per car than its rivals, meaning the removal of incentives would be disproportionately felt by other manufacturers.View image in fullscreen“If the tax credit is removed Tesla could survive and have less competition, they have more headroom to withstand a decrease in the market size,” Shapiro said. Stock in Tesla surged following Trump’s election win.However, Tesla will still be affected. Weakening federal pollution rules, for example, could see a reduction in the amount of carbon credits Tesla sells to other car companies – amounting to $2.7bn just last year – to offset their emissions and avoid fines. Tesla’s sales dipped slightly for the first time in 2024, amid concern among some of its traditionally liberal customer base about Musk’s rightward political turn.“Tesla isn’t immune to sales being impacted, they have some brand loyalty although we don’t know what the impact Elon Musk has had on polarizing consumers yet, that’s still a bit of an unknown,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, which estimates EVs will have a 10% share of US car sales this year, up from 8% in 2024.Regardless, Musk’s focus has now seemingly shifted away from EVs to other areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence and his SpaceX venture, Valdez Streaty said. He has also embraced rightwing fixations shared by Trump. In a speech after the president was inaugurated, Musk made no mention of cars but said that the “future of civilization is assured” with “safe cities, secure borders, sensible spending, basic stuff”.He added: “We’re going to take Doge to Mars,” in reference to the “department of government efficiency” he heads in an effort to curb spending. “Can you imagine how awesome it will be to have American astronauts plant the flag on another planet for the first time? Bam. Bam. Yeah. How inspiring would that be?”Concern over the climate crisis is seemingly no longer one of Musk’s priorities, despite previously saying he is “super pro-climate” and in 2016 calling for a “popular uprising” against the fossil fuel industry because the world was “unavoidably headed toward some level of harm and the sooner we can take action, the less harm will result”.When Trump removed the US from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, Musk said he was quitting a presidential advisory body in protest. “Climate change is real,” he tweeted at the time. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”But Musk has had little to say after Trump, who memorably called climate change “a giant hoax”, once again pulled the US from the Paris deal and issued a flurry of orders to ramp up oil and gas drilling and stymie renewable energy production. In January, Musk said: “Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim.”Critics say it is unlikely Musk will reflect the growing alarm voiced by scientists, and the American public, over the impacts of dangerous global heating within the Trump administration.“It just shows he’s an opportunist, really,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House. “He now downplays the dangers of climate change, but I think in the back of his mind he’s thinking about using government contracts for geoengineering as the costs of climate change become so undeniably expensive.”Those who know Musk say that he soured on Democrats in part after not being invited to a major summit on electric cars held by the White House in 2021, after Joe Biden became president.“That was an unforced error by Biden,” said Robert Zubrin, a leading advocate for human exploration of Mars who said he helped introduce Musk to the idea of Martian expansion. “And in the past two years, Elon Musk has redefined himself from the white knight of environmentalists to a Bond villain.”Zubrin said that Musk’s “central motivation is the desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds. He wants to save civilization because he wants to be famous for saving civilization.“This desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds has motivated his primary accomplishments, Tesla and SpaceX,” he added. “But it also has a dark side to it, and this has been exploited.”Tesla was contacted about its stance towards the EV tax credits but did not respond. More