Electric vehicle sales in the United States set a record this past quarter and are on track to break the 1 million mark in 2023, which would be an unprecedented figure and a milestone for the industry. This surge comes even as many vehicle models have lost their eligibility for federal, and some state, incentives.
Analysts at both Wards Intelligence and Cox Automotive reported that consumers bought nearly 300,000 EVs between the beginning of April and the end of June. That represents a year-over-year jump of roughly 50 percent, and included growth in May and June, the first two months after federal tax credit rules became more stringent. Plug-in hybrid sales climbed as well.
“There are some vehicles that are intriguing enough to buyers that you don’t need a rebate,” Christie Schweinsberg, a sustainability analyst at Wards, said, noting the ever-increasing range of EVs and options for consumers to choose from. “People will still want to buy.”
But there are signs that the torrential pace of sales growth may not be sustainable. According to Cox, at the end of June dealers had, on average, about a 53 day supply of internal combustion vehicles in stock. The inventory runway for EVs, on the other hand, was more than double that. Overall, there were more than 92,000 electric vehicles available in the second quarter, compared to about 20,000 a year prior.
“The demand is not keeping up with production, which is the opposite story of a year ago,” Michelle Krebs, executive analyst at Cox Automotive, said about electric vehicles. “We call it the ‘Field of Dreams’ moment. Automakers are building more but not enough consumers have come to the field.”
Krebs attributes the glut to both a post-pandemic boost in production and traditional consumer hesitations about buying electric vehicles. Price, she said, is the primary barrier among buyers that Cox surveys, because EVs remain generally more expensive than a similar gas-powered model. Concerns about charginginfrastructure is another reason that would-be-owners stay on the sidelines.
The landscape for incentives on electric vehicles has become more confusing as well, said Krebs. At this time last year, dozens of models qualified for a federal tax credit of up to $7,500, with many cities and states offering additional incentives. Since then, some places, such as Oregon and New Jersey, have run out of money for their rebate programs. The Inflation Reduction Act that Congress passed last year established manufacturing standards aimed at encouraging automakers to invest in U.S. production facilities and battery supply chains. That legislation has, at least in the short-term, significantly trimmed the list of models eligible for a tax credit.
“We certainly see an impact because of it,” said Michael Stewart, a spokesperson for Hyundai, which saw its vehicles, which don’t currently meet the new requirements, drop off the federal list. While sales of all of Hyundai’s EV models grew despite losing the credit, he believes that progress toward the company’s, and country’s, ambitious EV sales targets could have been even greater with them.
Still, the Hyundai Kona and BMW i4, which also does not qualify for federal tax credits, saw sales nearly triple. Market leader Tesla benefited from having recently regained access to tax credits and saw a 76 percent jump in sales of its popular Model Y.
Companies have combated the gaining EV headwinds in part by lowering prices – the average cost of an electric vehicle has dropped almost 20 percent, to $53,438, in the last year alone. Manufacturers have also utilized a loophole in the Inflation Reduction Act that allows them to claim a credit on vehicles they lease rather than sell. Hyundai has been particularly aggressive about promoting leases, which Stewart says have gone from accounting for around 5 percent of the cars the company moves off the lot to about 30 percent.
In the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act, Hyundai and other companies have announced plans to produce more electric vehicles in the United States and source more battery components domestically. This would make more models eligible for federal tax credits in the future. But, for now, both Schweinsberg and Krebs say the growing inventory indicates that the growth of electric vehicle sales could start to drop.
One factor, said Schweinsberg, is that cars often see a decline in sales within a year or two of a new model being introduced – a threshold that some EVs are reaching. “Typically it does well when the new generation comes out,” she said, adding that it’s probably too early to tell exactly what the trajectory for electric vehicles might look like.
Krebs predicts that EV sales will continue to grow, though “maybe not at the pace that a lot of people had hoped for.” To her, that’s not necessarily surprising given the dramatic shift the industry is attempting to make.
“It’s the biggest change in the industry since Henry Ford’s moving assembly line,” she said. “There are going to be bumps in the road.”
More than half of the world’s oceans have changed colors in the past 20 years, becoming more green than blue. The culprit? Climate change. In a study, published Wednesday in Nature, decades worth of research showed 56 percent of the world’s oceans experienced color change between 2002 to 2022.
The ocean changes color for many reasons, such as light bouncing off of particles and sediments in the water, and decaying organic matter, but the main color-changing factor is varying populations of phytoplankton: tiny plantlike microbes that capture and store carbon dioxide and are considered the foundation of the marine food chain. Phytoplankton contain chlorophyll, like terrestrial plants do, and scientists involved in the study were able to monitor ocean health by studying changes to chlorophyll in phytoplankton and measuring how much blue and green light were reflected from the surface to satellites in space.
Much of the ocean appears blue to the human eye, but the ocean’s color actually contains a mix of wavelengths, including blue, green, and even red. Using data gathered from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiomete also known as MODIS, on NASA’s Aqua satellite, researchers were able to utilize sensors that recognize colors too subtle for human eyes to differentiate, helping scientists confirm that the world’s oceans are changing color. Additionally, researchers found tropical ocean regions near the equator have become steadily greener over time as opposed to other parts of the world
The study’s authors say that natural instances, like seasonal or yearly variations to phytoplankton blooms, don’t explain the oceans’ shift in color, and don’t account for the change. Instead, researchers say the greening might better be explained by carbon dioxide absorption by plankton and algae communities and could signal an even more serious problem: Oceans absorb nearly 25 percent of the world’s carbon emissions and may not be able to absorb more in the future.
California’s Imperial Valley is one of the few places where a 95-degree day can be described as unseasonably cool.
In the shade of a sissoo tree, with a dry breeze rustling its leaves, JB Hamby called the weather “pretty nice” for mid-June. Over his shoulder, sprinklers ticked away over a field of onions. Every few minutes, a tractor rumbled across the broiling asphalt of a nearby road.
Hamby is a water policy bigwig, especially around these parts. He helps shape policies that define how water is used by arguably the most influential water users along the Colorado River. Hamby holds two jobs – he serves on the board of directors for the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) and was recently appointed to be California’s top water negotiator.
And he’s only 27 years old.
The Colorado River is governed by more than a century of legal agreements, most of which were hammered out by generations of older white men. The ranks of the river’s top policy negotiators have begun to diversify in recent years, including more women and people of color, but still tend to skew older. Hamby’s inclusion marks the first time a member of Generation Z will be at the negotiating table, making deals for the Southwest’s most important water source.
“I think every generation has an opportunity to do it better or worse than the prior one,” Hamby said. “My hope, at least, is being one representative of a generation about trying to make things better.”
The Imperial Valley holds a special place in the Colorado River conversation. It uses more water than any other single entity along the river – which includes dozens of farming districts and big cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Denver. Using that allocation, the valley produces about $3 billion in crops and livestock each year. The district has been described as brash, combative, and eager to push back on its critics.
The district is situated in California, the state with the largest allocation of the river. During negotiations in the winter of 2022-2023 the state became the lone holdout to a watershed-wide consensus deal to reduce uses along the dwindling river, much of that due to reluctant agricultural districts like IID.
JB Hamby browses old documents inside an archival vault at Imperial Irrigation District headquarters on June 21, 2023.
Alex Hager / KUNC
As climate change shrinks the Colorado River’s water supply, the Imperial Valley is increasingly in the crosshairs. Water managers from the seven states that use the river are squeezing every last drop out of a finite supply, and looking for new ways to conserve. They’ve turned to IID, and other farm districts, and cranked up pressure to cut back on agricultural water use as states draw up new rules for water use before 2026, when the current guidelines expire.
Hamby was elected as chairman of the Colorado River Board of California in January, giving him a seat at the river’s most important negotiating tables alongside other state delegates generations his senior – representing nearly half of the river’s roughly 40 million users.
And he’s taking that seat at one of the most critical moments in the river’s management, where users are collectively trying to figure out how to get by with a lot less water by making decisions that could upend generations of policy and attitudes around the West’s water.
Agricultural roots
Hamby was raised in Brawley, California, where about 25,000 people live amidst a sea of sprawling crop fields. Hamby’s family has lived in the Imperial Valley since his great grandfather left Texas during the Great Depression. He got a job digging irrigation ditches for the same water district his descendant now helps run.
“This blasting hot, tough place with tough people that have struggled and made hardscrabble existences in time and have had dreams to be made and dashed and made a living and a life out of hardscrabble desert,” Hamby said, “I think it shapes all of us. And I don’t think I’m any different.”
Hamby’s passion for water issues goes hand in hand with his interest in history. He was a history major during his time at Stanford University, and unlike many students, long nights in the library have lingered long after graduation.
Now, he spends a lot of free evenings among stacks of leather-bound documents and rolled-up maps in the district’s archives.
During some downtime between meetings on a June afternoon, Hamby twisted a dial and swung open the antique vault door that seals off a dusty room full of papers going back more than a century. In here, he’s spent hours rifling through minutes from the district’s earliest meetings.
“There’s really nothing new under the sun in the Colorado River space,” he said. “People change, some of the words we use to describe things change, but the core themes and issues are the same ones we deal with now than as we did 100 years ago.”
Hamby plucked a stiff maroon folder from a chest-high shelf in the corner of the vault.
“Here’s a good one,” he said, leafing through the yellowed pages within.
Hamby began reading from a handout given to local farmers in the 1940s or 50s during an information campaign against the Central Arizona Project, warning them of “subversive attempts” to “mislead” California growers on Colorado River issues.
The Imperial Irrigation District and the Central Arizona Project, a canal that carries water to Phoenix through more than 300 miles of desert, have carried their tensions into the 21st century.
Rows of crops grow in Imperial Valley, California on June 20, 2023. The scorching hot valley produces about $3 billion in crops and livestock each year using the Colorado River’s largest single water allocation.
Alex Hager / KUNC
“Your own experience is a very painful and expensive teacher,” Hamby said. “So it’s good to learn off of other people’s expense.
A seat at the table
Even decades before the current supply-demand imbalance put Colorado River water users in a bind, meetings were heated. Hamby recalled hearing about a particularly “spirited discussion” where the district’s board members sat around a table, each stashing a gun in the drawer in front of them.
While this century’s water negotiations have perhaps included fewer firearms, contentious and well-publicized water debates played out during Hamby’s childhood in the Imperial Valley. His curiosity grew as negotiators drew up the Colorado River’s current managing guidelines in 2007, and then re-upped its rules with the drought contingency plan in 2019. When he got old enough to get involved himself, Hamby felt it was important to help prepare the Imperial Valley and the state of California for the next wave of negotiations.
“I had a real strong interest in history,” Hamby said. “Particularly of our region and the history of the Colorado River and happened to grow up in the very place that really kick started all these discussions about a century ago.”
Armed with that robust knowledge of the past, Hamby plays his youth close to the chest.
“I’m sure other people occasionally think about it,” he said. “But it’s not something I really dwell on.”
Hamby’s colleagues agree that his age isn’t a hindrance.
“I think he’s turned it into a positive and brought sort of our fresh look at things,” said Tina Shields, IID’s water department manager. “You do things for so long and you do them because you’ve always done them. And I think he can shake things up a little from that perspective.”
Shields said the group of people shaping Colorado River policy has a long way to go in terms of diversity, but already looks different than it did in the early days of her career, when she would attend meetings in Las Vegas and be treated “like a cocktail waitress.”
“Maybe the diversity isn’t where it needs to be,” she said. “But I think it’s not the old white guys you see in the pictures from the old days.”
Hamby has had to balance any fresh perspective he brings to negotiating rooms with the needs of the people he represents. Right in his backyard, legions of growers make big money on farms that have belonged to their families for generations.
John Hawk, a farmer and county-level politician, took Hamby under his wing around 2019, when he first ran for the district’s board with the campaign slogan “Water is Life.”
“Some of the growers in the valley look at the value of the water as far as dollars and cents,” Hawk said. “But many of us in the farm community look at it as the value of producing crops. And I think JB looks at it that way.”
Perhaps Hamby’s most arduous task is to dig in his heels and try to keep water in California, just like so many of the state’s water negotiators before him. California’s Colorado River allocation isn’t just the largest among the seven Colorado River basin states – it’s also the most legally untouchable.
The 1922 Colorado River Compact dictates how water is shared in the arid Western watershed. The legal system prioritizes older uses of water, like agricultural districts, meaning their shares will be the last to be shut off in times of shortage. The legal scaffolding built on top of the compact shields the Imperial Valley’s voluminous uses.
California’s biggest water users would like to see that legal priority stay in place. When pressed on their role in negotiations about the river’s future, Hamby and other California water managers point to existing laws and say they should be followed. Water policy experts say California’s protected status on the river is unlikely to change without messy court battles, which states generally agree are best avoided.
“[Hamby] looks at the letter of the law and he says ‘It’s written, this is legal, and let’s support it,” Hawk said. “And I think you can’t ask for much more than that.”
Hamby seems to be sticking to that letter-of-the-law approach so far. Both California and the Imperial Irrigation District have signed on to conservation deals in recent months, but their contributions still lag behind Arizona’s agreed-to cutbacks.
In October 2022, the district was one of four agencies which agreed to cut back on water use by a combined 400,000 acre-feet each year from 2023 to 2026, reducing California’s total water use by about 9 percent. Imperial is allotted 2.6 million acre-feet each year, and is set to contribute more than half of the state’s entire conservation commitment.
JB Hamby speaks at a conference in Boulder, Colorado on June 8, 2023. Hamby, along with delegates from the other six states that use water from the Colorado River, must agree on new water sharing rules by 2026.
Alex Hager / KUNC
In January of 2023, just weeks after Hamby began his tenure as California’s top water negotiator, the state was the lone holdout on a water conservation proposal signed by all six of the other states which use water from the Colorado River.
After that proposal was released, Hamby told KUNC the process by which it was created was “horribly broken,” and not carried out in good faith.
Since then, Hamby said he’s worked to build better relationships with water leaders from other states, making things more conversational and less adversarial.
In May, California, Arizona, and Nevada agreed to conserve a combined 1 million acre-feet each year until 2026. They did so once promised at least $1.2 billion in federal funds, designed to help incentivize farmers to pause some water use.
Arizona’s top negotiator, Tom Buschatzke, credited his relationship with Hamby as a factor that helped clinch the deal among the two feuding states.
“JB and I met in Yuma and kind of just had a good one on one conversation. It wasn’t really even business. It was just, let’s lay our cards on the table personally, get to know each other and build a relationship,” Buschatzke said at a recent University of Colorado river symposium. “And I think that jump started where we got among Arizona and California in the end.”
That rings true from Hamby’s perspective as well.
“The Colorado River is history,” Hamby said. “It’s science, it’s law, but it’s relationships that are perhaps equal, if not greater than any of those things.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
Join Workiva and PwC as they dive into the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and double materiality. The ESRS, on the verge of approval by the European Commission, is set to help revolutionize corporate ESG disclosures, impacting thousands of EU-based companies as well as US and other non-EU headquartered companies as early as the FY ’24 reporting period.
A new study led by researchers from The University of Sydney has found that agricultural pesticides leach into the world’s rivers and oceans each year at an alarming rate, damaging a variety of ecosystems.
Every year, agricultural operations around the world use more than three million tons of pesticides, but not a lot is known about precisely where these toxic chemicals go after they are applied to crops, a press release from The University of Sydney said.
The study looked at where 92 of the most frequently used agricultural pesticides travel after application and found that every year about 77,162 tons of potentially hazardous chemicals leach into aquifers. These pollutants have a damaging effect on freshwater resources and ecosystems.
“Our study has revealed that pesticides wander far from their original source. In many cases these chemicals end up a long way downstream and often, though in much smaller amounts, all the way to the ocean,” said associate professor Federico Maggi, the study’s lead author from The University of Sydney’s School of Civil Engineering, in the press release.
The study, “Agricultural pesticide land budget and river discharge to oceans,” was published in the journal Nature.
The study revealed that approximately 80 percent of pesticides applied to crops end up degrading into byproducts known as “daughter molecules” in the surrounding soil.
“This degradation of pesticides often occurs as a ‘cascade’ of molecules into the surrounding environment, which can persist in the environment for a long time and can be just as harmful as the parent molecule or applied pesticide. One such example is glyphosate. Although it is highly degradable, it breaks down into a molecule known as AMPA that is both highly persistent and toxic,” Maggi said in the press release.
The researchers found that, while just a fraction of pesticides make their way into river systems after they are applied, when they do reach the water most of their active ingredients eventually end up in the world’s oceans, bringing negative impacts to coral reefs and marine life, putting both freshwater and marine food chains at risk.
“On paper, 0.1 percent leaching into fresh waterways might not sound like much,” Maggi said. “But it only takes a tiny amount of pesticides to have a negative impact on the environment.”
The research revealed that 805 tons of pesticides end up in rivers annually, causing about 8,078 miles of rivers to have chemical concentrations that are higher than the safety limits for some invertebrates and aquatic plants.
“We must urgently adopt sustainable management strategies to promote reductions in field applications of harmful pesticides and set in place systems to effectively monitor their use under the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda,” said Dr. Francesco Tubiello, senior environmental statistician at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and co-author of the paper, in the press release.
For the study, the scientists used publicly available geospatial data. But because the analysis did not include all pesticides, the study’s authors said their finds are a conservative estimate. The study did not consider pesticides used in public spaces, private residences, aquaculture or legacy pesticides — chemicals like DDT that have been banned or discontinued due to health risks — and thus the risk of chemical exposure for people and ecosystems could be higher than the findings suggest.
Maggi said it was possible to reduce pesticides globally while maintaining food security as long as pesticide toxicity and use are reduced in collaboration with food producers, since even low amounts of various highly toxic pesticides present a high risk for some organisms.
“It is not the pesticide use only that is important,” Maggi said, as The Guardian reported. “What is important is the load – that is, the applied mass and toxicity of individual active ingredients.”
Maggi and a separate research team outline recommendations for reducing the use of pesticides in another paper published last month in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
“Globally, there is a lot of room to increase efficiencies and yield while still supporting an abundant food supply through new technology and modern crop management practices,” Maggi said in the press release.
We already know that plastic is a top threat to marine life, with over 12.7 million metric tons of plastic waste entering the oceans each year. But a new study has found that 92% of global coral reefs surveyed, even remote reefs, are covered in plastics.
The study, published in the journal Nature, surveyed 84 coral reef systems, both shallow and deep, at 25 locations across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. They found that the coral reefs were more impacted than other marine ecosystems (outside of coastal ecosystems like beaches and wetlands) by plastic and other waste.
“Plastic pollution is one of the most pressing problems plaguing ocean ecosystems, and coral reefs are no exception,” Hudson Pinheiro, lead author of the study and biologist at the Center for Marine Biology of the University of São Paulo, said in a statement. “From macroplastics that spread coral diseases to fishing lines that entangle and damage the structural complexity of the reef, decreasing both fish abundance and diversity, pollution negatively impacts the entire coral reef ecosystem.”
The researchers found that the deeper into the oceans they studied, the more plastic they found. About three-fourths of the plastic debris found in the study was from fishing gear. Most of the plastic debris found, about 88% of the total debris, was larger than two inches.
“It was surprising to find that debris increased with depth since deeper reefs in general are farther from sources of plastic pollution,” Luiz Rocha, senior author of the study and curator of ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences, said in a statement. “We are almost always the first humans to set eyes on these deeper reefs, and yet we see human-produced trash on every dive. It really puts the effect we have had on the planet into perspective.”
The researchers hypothesize that the higher amounts of trash at greater depths could be because of waves carrying trash away, humans collecting trash from shallow reefs, or shallow reefs growing over the debris.
In the study, scientists found that Comoros, a country of three islands off the coast of eastern Africa, had the highest pollution density. Here, they found about 84,500 pieces of debris per square kilometer.
The researchers recommended that in addition to improvements in waste management and reducing single-use plastic, there needs to be innovations in fishing gear to make it biodegradable.
“How can we change the ropes, the nets?” Pinheiro told NPR. “We need to find a biodegradable material, like made from fibers as we used to do before.”
We can also look to places that were found to have less plastic pollution, such as the Marshall Islands, for inspiration on curbing this pollution.
“Despite the disturbing overall trend, there were some places where we found relatively little debris, which shows us that there are effective strategies for preventing plastic pollution,” study co-author Bart Shepherd, director of the California Academy of Sciences Steinhart Aquarium, said. “If we act fast and employ science-based solutions, there absolutely is hope for coral reefs.”
