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The Electric Vehicle Revolution Is Still Non-Union
The United Auto Workers’ six-week strike has won large concessions from the Big Three American automakers, including substantial wage hikes.But in order to win the war over the future of unionized labor in the auto industry, the UAW will need to do something even harder than extracting raises from Ford, Stellantis, and GM: It will have to grow the union by bringing foreign automaker and non-union workforces into the UAW, something it has largely failed to accomplish. Today, it only represents around 15% of the roughly one million autoworkers in the United States.The UAW leadership had tread a narrow...
New York’s Offshore Wind Future Is Being Dragged Down By Its Past
This hasn't been a good month for the offshore wind industry in New York, but the state is pushing ahead to try to reach its aggressive decarbonization goals. Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Tuesday contracts for three big offshore wind projects slated to go into operation in 2030 and bring four gigawatts of renewable energy to the grid.As evidenced by the attendance of a senior White House official, Ali Zaidi, at the announcement, both the Hochul and Biden administrations are excited about New York’s offshore wind plan — or at least committed to making it work, despite the challenges...
Chickens Might Be Self-Aware. Yikes!
Like the question of what lies beyond the universe and what happens when we die, thinking too long or too hard about the implications of what it means if the things we eat have self-awareness can drive you a little mad. Certainly, it’s deeply uncomfortable to contemplate at length.Take it from me: Earlier this year, I tried to weigh the ethical dilemma of eating more chicken — which would be vastly better for the planet, short of the impossibility of everyone becoming a vegetarian — and the fact that replacing beef and pork in our diets with more poultry...
How to Make Sense of Electric Cars’ Month of Disarray
This has not been a good week for the electric-vehicle transition. On Wednesday, General Motors scrapped a self-imposed plan of building 400,000 electric vehicles by the middle of next year. Then it jettisoned plans with Honda to build a sub-$30,000 EV. On Thursday, Mercedes Benz announced that its profits had fallen in part due to turbulence in the EV market, and Hertz ditched a plan to have EVs make up 25% of its fleet by 2024. Nor has the past month been much better. Ford has slowed down its EV factory build-out. Elon Musk announced that Tesla was taking a...
The New House Speaker Once Helped Force the Government to Pay for a Noah’s Ark Theme Park
It is perhaps less surprising who the House elected as its new speaker than the fact that they managed to actually elect someone at all. After 22 days, 14 failed candidates, and in mounting desperation and embarrassment, Republicans finally rallied — unanimously! — around Mike Johnson, a northern Louisiana lawmaker who’s been described as “obscure” and “largely unknown” even by his home-state newspaper. Given that Johnson is the least experienced speaker in 140 years, that obscurity is understandable. With only four terms in the House under his belt, he doesn’t have much of a track record for the media to...
The Tesla Cybertruck Isn’t a Pickup. It’s a Low-Priced Hummer.
The debut of the Tesla Cybertruck in November 2019 was less a car show-and-tell and more a screaming, all-caps metaphor. The meme-able moment when Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen flung a metal orb at the war rig’s windows, shattering the shatterproof glass, felt like an open invitation to belittle the hubris of it all.That’s exactly what happened. Gleeful tweets ridiculed the Cybertruck’s stainless steel body, awkward proportions, and poorly rendered pointy shape. Some mocked the steel monstrosity for being useless for the things trucks are supposed to do — actual work and off-road driving — or for having...
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