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The misleading, wasteful way we measure gas mileage, explained

News Feed
Tuesday, May 21, 2024

Time for a pop quiz. Which of these trades saves more gas: A) Swapping a car that gets 25 miles per gallon (MPG) for one that gets 50 MPG, or  B) Replacing a car that gets 10 MPG with one that gets 15 MPG. If you said that A conserves more gas, you’re mistaken. And it’s not even close. Here’s why: In the first scenario, the old vehicle getting 25 MPG uses four gallons of gas to travel 100 miles, while the new one at 50 MPG uses two. In the second scenario, the vehicle getting 10 MPG needs 10 gallons to traverse those 100 miles, while the one at 15 MPG uses 6.7, saving 3.3 gallons — fully 65 percent more than in scenario A. If you answered wrong, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve succumbed to the MPG Illusion, a widespread fallacy that can easily distort perceptions of a car’s efficiency and muddle debates about transportation and climate policy. Providing the basis for federal fuel economy rules, MPG is a foundational automotive metric in the US. “Americans are very familiar with MPG,” Richard Larrick, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, told me. “But I think that familiarity means that we don’t recognize what it’s not answering, which is the question of how much gas we’re using.” Larrick co-authored a 2008 paper in Science that illuminated Americans’ “systematic misperception” of fuel efficiency when viewed through MPG. The researchers asked 77 college students questions similar to the pop quiz above. Most undervalued the benefits of rising from 18 to 28 MPG relative to going from 34 to 50 MPG.  “We think of gas savings as a kind of linear relationship with MPG,” Larrick told me. But “there are diminishing returns from MPG [improvements].” Because of the MPG Illusion, many people underestimate the benefit of addressing bona fide gas guzzlers. They give disproportionate attention to squeezing a few more MPG from models that are already comparatively efficient. In a subsequent 2015 paper, Larrick and two co-authors offered a solution: Flip MPG and turn it into “GPHM,” or gallons of gas per 100 miles of travel. Such a metric would help consumers see how much more (or less) gas they would buy if they opt for a particular model. It could also nudge public officials striving to reduce oil consumption and tailpipe emissions to focus on the low-hanging fruit: improving the most abysmally inefficient vehicles. The MPG Illusion sheds light on a host of policy issues The European Union already does this, measuring fuel economy in liters per 100 kilometers driven. “They do it that way because fuel consumed per mile is directly related to energy use and directly related to emissions, whereas our MPG is not,” said Kate Whitefoot, an associate professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon. The US remains wedded to MPG, although the 2008 Science paper drew a flurry of attention (in part because it was published at a time when the price of gas was surging to $4.05/gallon, equivalent to around $5.80 today). A few years later, the MPG Illusion seemed to catch the eye of federal regulators revising the fuel efficiency stickers affixed to new cars at dealerships. Since 2013, those stickers have included measures of gallons per 100 miles as well as an estimated annual gasoline cost (albeit in a much smaller font than the familiar MPG figure towering above). But Larrick said that climate and consumer groups have paid scant attention to his proposed “GPHM” metric, and it does not seem to have penetrated public awareness.  Worse, the MPG Illusion can lead climate advocates to misallocate political capital, downplaying the most effective opportunities to reduce emissions from transportation, the US’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.  The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, the federal policy that sets automobile fuel efficiency rules, have always been based on MPG, a big reason why the metric is so ingrained in popular consciousness. CAFE establishes one fuel economy standard for “passenger cars” (sedans and station wagons) and a second, more lenient one for “light trucks” (primarily SUVs and pickups).  The MPG Illusion helps conceal the distortions of that bifurcated structure, known as the “light truck loophole”: It reduces pressure on carmakers to improve their most inefficient SUVs, like the 2023 Chevrolet Suburban that gets a puny 16 MPG. A similar problem exists for the federal Gas Guzzler Tax, a levy that can add thousands of dollars to the cost of vehicles getting less than 22.5 MPG. Yet nonsensically, the Gas Guzzler Tax applies only to passenger cars, omitting the SUVs and trucks that now comprise more than 80 percent of the US auto market. Another lesson of the MPG Illusion: It’s better to build hybrid versions of the most gas-thirsty cars, rather than of those that are already relatively efficient. A gas-powered 2023 Hyundai Elantra, for instance, gets 37 MPG while a hybrid model gets 50 MPG. Impressive though that sounds, an equivalent 13 MPG improvement for a hybrid version of the three-ton, all-gas Cadillac Escalade which gets a measly 16 MPG, would allow the hybrid Escalade to save four times more gasoline than the Elantra, compared to their all-gas versions. (No hybrid Escalade has been available since 2013.) Purely electric car models are still more climate-friendly than hybrids, but US consumers have shown queasiness about going all-electric, and there is a solid argument that a given number of lithium-ion cells can more efficiently reduce emissions if they are deployed across numerous hybrid vehicles than in a single all-electric one. That being the case, publicly dragging a company like Toyota for prioritizing hybrids over all-electric models, as environmental groups like the Sierra Club have done, risks making the perfect the enemy of the good. One of the most powerful insights of the MPG illusion is the power of simply removing gas-guzzling cars already on the road, rather than solely focusing on making new cars ever more efficient. Many vehicles manufactured in the 1980s and 1990s got significantly worse gas mileage than current versions. A 1995 GMC Yukon, for instance, gets an estimated 12 MPG, while a 2024 Yukon reaches 17 — not much to brag about, but still a 42 percent improvement. Millions of decades-old models are still in use; last year, the average age of an American car hit 12.5 years, an all-time high. Such disparities provide a compelling argument for “cash for clunkers” initiatives like the 2009 Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), a program that offered Americans up to $4,500 off a new vehicle if they traded in an older, still drivable one that got 18 MPG or less. (Even better: A 2020 Lithuanian program offered those surrendering an old car up to €1,000 toward far more sustainable transportation modes like e-bikes, bikes, or public transit.)  The US ended its federal program in 2009, but states including California and Colorado maintain their own. Due to the resources required to produce a new vehicle, it makes sense to limit cash-for-clunkers eligibility to the most inefficient models — a feature that the old CARS program did but Colorado’s current one does not. Eventually, the MPG Illusion will lose its relevance as the American vehicle fleet becomes fully electric. But transitioning to a zero-emissions fleet will take decades, even under the most optimistic projections. Only around 1 percent of cars currently on US roads are fully electric, and more than four out of five new cars sold in the US in 2023 were fully gas-powered.  Like it or not, millions of gas cars will be plying American streets for a long time to come. Policymakers should aim to minimize the total amount of fuel those vehicles consume at the same time that they encourage electrification. They’ll have a much easier time doing so if they incorporate the MPG Illusion into their plans.

Time for a pop quiz. Which of these trades saves more gas: A) Swapping a car that gets 25 miles per gallon (MPG) for one that gets 50 MPG, or  B) Replacing a car that gets 10 MPG with one that gets 15 MPG. If you said that A conserves more gas, you’re mistaken. And […]

A price board at a gas station, showing $2.89 for regular, $3.45 for super, and $3.69 for premium.

Time for a pop quiz. Which of these trades saves more gas:

A) Swapping a car that gets 25 miles per gallon (MPG) for one that gets 50 MPG, or 

B) Replacing a car that gets 10 MPG with one that gets 15 MPG.

If you said that A conserves more gas, you’re mistaken. And it’s not even close.

Here’s why: In the first scenario, the old vehicle getting 25 MPG uses four gallons of gas to travel 100 miles, while the new one at 50 MPG uses two. In the second scenario, the vehicle getting 10 MPG needs 10 gallons to traverse those 100 miles, while the one at 15 MPG uses 6.7, saving 3.3 gallons — fully 65 percent more than in scenario A.

If you answered wrong, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve succumbed to the MPG Illusion, a widespread fallacy that can easily distort perceptions of a car’s efficiency and muddle debates about transportation and climate policy.

Providing the basis for federal fuel economy rules, MPG is a foundational automotive metric in the US. “Americans are very familiar with MPG,” Richard Larrick, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, told me. “But I think that familiarity means that we don’t recognize what it’s not answering, which is the question of how much gas we’re using.”

Larrick co-authored a 2008 paper in Science that illuminated Americans’ “systematic misperception” of fuel efficiency when viewed through MPG. The researchers asked 77 college students questions similar to the pop quiz above. Most undervalued the benefits of rising from 18 to 28 MPG relative to going from 34 to 50 MPG. 

“We think of gas savings as a kind of linear relationship with MPG,” Larrick told me. But “there are diminishing returns from MPG [improvements].” Because of the MPG Illusion, many people underestimate the benefit of addressing bona fide gas guzzlers. They give disproportionate attention to squeezing a few more MPG from models that are already comparatively efficient.

In a subsequent 2015 paper, Larrick and two co-authors offered a solution: Flip MPG and turn it into “GPHM,” or gallons of gas per 100 miles of travel. Such a metric would help consumers see how much more (or less) gas they would buy if they opt for a particular model. It could also nudge public officials striving to reduce oil consumption and tailpipe emissions to focus on the low-hanging fruit: improving the most abysmally inefficient vehicles.

The MPG Illusion sheds light on a host of policy issues

The European Union already does this, measuring fuel economy in liters per 100 kilometers driven. “They do it that way because fuel consumed per mile is directly related to energy use and directly related to emissions, whereas our MPG is not,” said Kate Whitefoot, an associate professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon.

The US remains wedded to MPG, although the 2008 Science paper drew a flurry of attention (in part because it was published at a time when the price of gas was surging to $4.05/gallon, equivalent to around $5.80 today). A few years later, the MPG Illusion seemed to catch the eye of federal regulators revising the fuel efficiency stickers affixed to new cars at dealerships. Since 2013, those stickers have included measures of gallons per 100 miles as well as an estimated annual gasoline cost (albeit in a much smaller font than the familiar MPG figure towering above). But Larrick said that climate and consumer groups have paid scant attention to his proposed “GPHM” metric, and it does not seem to have penetrated public awareness. 

Worse, the MPG Illusion can lead climate advocates to misallocate political capital, downplaying the most effective opportunities to reduce emissions from transportation, the US’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. 

The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, the federal policy that sets automobile fuel efficiency rules, have always been based on MPG, a big reason why the metric is so ingrained in popular consciousness. CAFE establishes one fuel economy standard for “passenger cars” (sedans and station wagons) and a second, more lenient one for “light trucks” (primarily SUVs and pickups). 

The MPG Illusion helps conceal the distortions of that bifurcated structure, known as the “light truck loophole”: It reduces pressure on carmakers to improve their most inefficient SUVs, like the 2023 Chevrolet Suburban that gets a puny 16 MPG. A similar problem exists for the federal Gas Guzzler Tax, a levy that can add thousands of dollars to the cost of vehicles getting less than 22.5 MPG. Yet nonsensically, the Gas Guzzler Tax applies only to passenger cars, omitting the SUVs and trucks that now comprise more than 80 percent of the US auto market.

Another lesson of the MPG Illusion: It’s better to build hybrid versions of the most gas-thirsty cars, rather than of those that are already relatively efficient. A gas-powered 2023 Hyundai Elantra, for instance, gets 37 MPG while a hybrid model gets 50 MPG. Impressive though that sounds, an equivalent 13 MPG improvement for a hybrid version of the three-ton, all-gas Cadillac Escalade which gets a measly 16 MPG, would allow the hybrid Escalade to save four times more gasoline than the Elantra, compared to their all-gas versions. (No hybrid Escalade has been available since 2013.)

Purely electric car models are still more climate-friendly than hybrids, but US consumers have shown queasiness about going all-electric, and there is a solid argument that a given number of lithium-ion cells can more efficiently reduce emissions if they are deployed across numerous hybrid vehicles than in a single all-electric one. That being the case, publicly dragging a company like Toyota for prioritizing hybrids over all-electric models, as environmental groups like the Sierra Club have done, risks making the perfect the enemy of the good.

One of the most powerful insights of the MPG illusion is the power of simply removing gas-guzzling cars already on the road, rather than solely focusing on making new cars ever more efficient. Many vehicles manufactured in the 1980s and 1990s got significantly worse gas mileage than current versions. A 1995 GMC Yukon, for instance, gets an estimated 12 MPG, while a 2024 Yukon reaches 17 — not much to brag about, but still a 42 percent improvement. Millions of decades-old models are still in use; last year, the average age of an American car hit 12.5 years, an all-time high.

Such disparities provide a compelling argument for “cash for clunkers” initiatives like the 2009 Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), a program that offered Americans up to $4,500 off a new vehicle if they traded in an older, still drivable one that got 18 MPG or less. (Even better: A 2020 Lithuanian program offered those surrendering an old car up to €1,000 toward far more sustainable transportation modes like e-bikes, bikes, or public transit.) 

The US ended its federal program in 2009, but states including California and Colorado maintain their own. Due to the resources required to produce a new vehicle, it makes sense to limit cash-for-clunkers eligibility to the most inefficient models — a feature that the old CARS program did but Colorado’s current one does not.

Eventually, the MPG Illusion will lose its relevance as the American vehicle fleet becomes fully electric. But transitioning to a zero-emissions fleet will take decades, even under the most optimistic projections. Only around 1 percent of cars currently on US roads are fully electric, and more than four out of five new cars sold in the US in 2023 were fully gas-powered. 

Like it or not, millions of gas cars will be plying American streets for a long time to come. Policymakers should aim to minimize the total amount of fuel those vehicles consume at the same time that they encourage electrification. They’ll have a much easier time doing so if they incorporate the MPG Illusion into their plans.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Louisiana's Governor Raises Major Doubts About a Stalled $3 Billion Coastal Restoration Project

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is raising serious objections to a $3 billion project that has long been hailed key to restoring the state’s eroding coastline

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry raised serious objections Thursday to a $3 billion project long hailed as key to restoring the state's eroding coastline, decrying the growing cost and predicting dire harm to a coastal culture dependent on fishing, shrimping and oyster dredging.The Republican governor's remarks to a Senate committee in Baton Rouge were his most extensive — and most decisively negative — on the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project since he took office in January. They come a month after federal authorities warned that money for the project channeled to the state by the federal government would have to be returned if the state could not provide a clear commitment to the plan.Landry stopped short of calling for an end to the project altogether but said a compromise must be reached with opponents of the project. The chair of the Senate Committee, Republican Sen. Pat Connick, said lawmakers would have to weigh the next move. The project would channel 75,000 cubic feet (2,100 cubic meters) of sediment per second from the Mississippi River into the nearby Barataria Basin in southeast Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish to create between 20 to 40 square miles (52 to 104 square kilometers) of new land over five decades. It has drawn opposition from some in Plaquemines Parish and now Landry. “This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said, likening the projected damage to shrimp and oyster harvesters to the diminishing of the Cajun French language generations ago when southwest Louisiana school children were forced to speak nothing but English.Ground was broken on the project in August 2023, but state and federal litigation by various interests has stalled it. Landry's remarks added to doubts about its future, despite support from environmental groups.Supporters of the project, which is being funded from a settlement arising from BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, quickly pushed back during and after Landry's committee testimony. “I really think, again, the proper course of action is to remain and build as properly permitted as already funded with BP oil spill dollars ... Every day that we wait and delay we’re costing the state more money," Rep. Joseph Orgeron, a Republican from Cut Off, told Landry. While Landry called the project experimental, Orgeron said other, smaller diversion projects have worked.“As we continue to lose wetlands to open water, that’s just less and less breeding grounds, less and less protection for all of our juvenile shrimp, crab, finfish, you name it,” Corey Miller, community engagement director with the nonprofit Pontchartrain Conservancy, said in an interview. “We have to figure out a way to reestablish that connection between the river and our estuaries in order to rebuild deltas to protect all of our communities.”The project was planned in response to a rapidly vanishing coastline caused by a variety of natural and man-made factors. Those include land subsidence, sea-level rise, the cutting of canals through coastal wetlands by oil and gas companies, and the artificial control of the Mississippi River via levee systems that protect populations from floods but also prevent the natural flow of water that would ordinarily deposit sediment and rebuild land. The conservation group Restore the Mississippi River Delta said Landry's remarks represent a “dramatic shift” in coastal restoration efforts: “Not building this project as designed, permitted and funded will put citizens and businesses at increased risk from future storms.”Landry said delays have pushed the Mid-Barataria project cost over the years from around $1.5 billion to more than $3 billion, and he predicted costs above $2.9 billion will have to be passed on to Louisiana taxpayers. Associated Press reporter Jack Brook in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, contributed to this story.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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9 minutes, $195: We tested a heli-taxi vs. an Uber to the airport

On a Blade helicopter, a one-way trip from Manhattan to John F. Kennedy International Airport runs $195.

On paper, the 16-mile commute between New York City and its biggest airport sounds like a cakewalk. But the reality of getting to John F. Kennedy International Airport is neither short nor sweet.At peak times, a cab from Manhattan can take an hour and costs $70 before surcharges, tip and tolls. With surge pricing, Uber fares can far exceed $100. For under $20, there’s the train, which can take anywhere between a half-hour and 75 minutes, depending on where you hop on.Or, if you really can’t wait, you could take a helicopter.Blade, a New York-based helicopter taxi service, promises to shuttle customers between the city and JFK (or Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey) in five minutes. Its base fare for a one-way trip is $195. No switching trains, no hurried cabbies — just smooth sailing over the gridlock below.Blade takes customers to airports and the Hamptons on Long Island by helicopter (or fancy bus), and it offers private jet charters in the region and beyond. Blade is also the largest dedicated air transporter of human organs in the United States, said CEO Rob Wiesenthal, who founded the company in 2014.While a $900 jaunt to the Hamptons is exponentially out of my price range, Blade’s airport service is less far-fetched.On a recent Sunday, before a late-afternoon flight from JFK to D.C., my cheapest Uber option from the Upper West Side was $146. For a comparable price (with a first-time-rider coupon), I could take back a half-hour of my time and pretend to be a character in “Succession.”To compare experiences, I sent my husband in an Uber while I tried Blade.The booking processLike Uber, booking a ride with Blade can be done quickly through its app or website. Unlike Uber, you can’t hail an affordable ride around-the-clock.Wiesenthal wouldn’t say how many flights Blade offers per day but said that during the week, “you can fly to Newark or Kennedy pretty much 12 hours a day.”The standard window for “by-the-seat” trips (vs. chartering the entire cabin) to JFK generally runs weekdays between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m., and from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sundays. There are no such flights on Saturdays.Customers can “crowdsource” flights that aren’t on the schedule. After requesting a specific time, Blade will open slots for the public to book; the more people who join in, the less it costs the original requester. Alternatively, you can book the entire aircraft for yourself and up to seven other guests, starting at $1,875.I booked my seat a couple days in advance — and still had limited options. The best one for my schedule left an hour before my Delta flight boarded and cost $265, which was $70 higher than the advertised base fare. Again, like Uber — or commercial airlines — the company practices dynamic pricing. The same trip during the week of Thanksgiving, for example, was $325.With my first-time-flier coupon registering a $50 discount, the total came to $215.The loungeBlade operates from three heliports across the city. My trip departed from Lounge West, located on the Hudson River near Hudson Yards.It’s a portable building like you’d find at a construction site, but it’s painted matte black (save a few white Blade logos). A black chain-link fence with privacy netting surrounds the tarmac, protecting the identity of the travelers beyond. Wiesenthal told me that 60 percent of customers use the airport shuttle for business travel; leisure travelers account for the rest — not only people who want to get out of Dodge fast, but also tourists who want one last sightseeing adventure.The company recommends arriving at least 15 minutes before takeoff; I got there with 20 to spare to enjoy the perks. A friendly receptionist checked me in, took my luggage and gave me a colored wristband to indicate my flight group. There was no metal detector or TSA staff to flag my liquids. Then I was free to enjoy the 1960s-themed lounge.The place felt designed with Instagram in mind. Andy Warhol prints, neon acrylic tables, mushroom lamps. The furniture — like tulip chairs and leather barstools — looked the part but felt flimsy, more Temu than TWA Hotel.While my husband texted from crawling Brooklyn traffic, I sat at the bar and ordered a glass of complimentary white wine. There was Acqua Panna water and packaged snacks such as a maple blueberry protein bar and “skinny dipped” dark-chocolate-covered almonds.The rideBlade has a reputation for being on time; my chopper-mate told me he’s taken the airport service 50 times and it had never been late before. But that afternoon we ran 15 minutes behind schedule.Air traffic can cause delays. So can weather. Blade will cancel flights if the weather is deemed unsafe or heavy turbulence is expected and will take you to the airport by car instead.It wasn’t clear why we were held up, but the staff apologized for the delay. Soon, a helicopter landed in front of the lounge window and our wristband group was called. We filed into a line by the door, were given instructions on how to board and were escorted to the aircraft. I must have missed dibs on the shotgun seat next to the pilot and was slotted in the main cabin with two other fliers.The ethical dilemmaThe helicopter took off after a quick safety briefing from the pilot, who was wearing a hoodie, and in seconds we were hovering over the city skyline.Every passenger had their phone out at some point to capture the splendor. It felt surreal and a little nauseating — mostly because I’m prone to motion sickness, but also metaphorically. As we descended, and the skyscrapers gave way to houses, I thought about the people living below. The helicopter was incredibly loud; it had to be annoying to hear us screech past.The luxury is controversial. Nonessential helicopter traffic has been increasing for years, and residents living under the flight paths are filing evermore noise complaints. The New York nonprofit Stop the Chop also cites high carbon emissions among its primary reasons for a push to ban nonessential flights over the region.“Taking a helicopter ride is definitely more environmentally damaging than an hour-long Uber ride,” Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University who studies atmospheric air pollution, told me in an email.Blade says it plans to transition to cleaner, quieter electric vertical aircraft once they’re available in the coming years.There wasn’t much time for my guilt to fester; we were on the ground about nine minutes (not five) after liftoff.In addition to the potential for small delays, travelers should factor in that Blade can’t drop you off at the curb like a taxi. Once we landed on the JFK chopper tarmac, a Blade attendant wheeled our bags on a luggage trolley through a small lobby and out to a parking lot, where chauffeurs were waiting to drive us to our respective airport terminals.I hopped in an SUV but was told I could have paid to upgrade to a Mercedes-Maybach. Depending on airport traffic, the ride can add another five to 10 minutes to your ETA.The takeawayMy driver told me that celebrities, like musicians and National Basketball Association players, are fans of Blade. If it wasn’t for the noise and environmental concerns, I’d be a fan of Blade, too. (Okay, I didn’t love being queasy afterward, either.) Once the company goes electric and I win the lottery, maybe we’ll talk.In the end, my husband got the last laugh. Factoring in the 20 minutes it took me to get to the Blade helipad, my lounge time and the flight, he actually beat me to JFK in his hour-long Uber ride, arriving with enough padding to get some Shake Shack and relax.

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‘Business as usual:’ Why the $27B ‘green bank’ could survive Trump

One of the Inflation Reduction Act’s most celebrated programs — a nationwide “green bank” to help fund climate projects that struggle to secure private-sector loans — has also been one of the most reviled by Republican lawmakers. Last October, House Republicans dogged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over…

One of the Inflation Reduction Act’s most celebrated programs — a nationwide ​“green bank” to help fund climate projects that struggle to secure private-sector loans — has also been one of the most reviled by Republican lawmakers. Last October, House Republicans dogged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over its management of the program, known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), calling it a “$27 billion slush fund of taxpayer money.” In January, they accused the Biden administration of directing the money to ​“favored special interest organizations.” House Republicans have also seized on a report from the EPA’s Office of Inspector General stating that the speed at which the program was moving could lead to ​“waste, fraud, and abuse.” But the green bank program appears to be well positioned to survive the next four years, despite the fact that Republicans won control over Congress and the presidency earlier this month. That’s assuming the Trump administration follows the law and regulations that established the program, however — and in any case, the administration will still have opportunities to slow the program down. “As a Democrat, of course I’m disappointed” in the election results, Reed Hundt, head of the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), one of the entities in charge of allocating green bank funds, told Canary Media. ​“But as the CEO of CGC, there’s no change at all in what we’re going to do. It’s completely and totally business as usual.” Hundt, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair during the Clinton administration, is a longtime champion of a national green bank. More than a decade of work on the concept paid off in 2022 with the inclusion of a green bank program in the landmark IRA climate law. The idea is to create a nationwide version of the government-backed and nonprofit green banks now operating in 17 states, offering low-cost loans for rooftop solar, efficiency retrofits, electric heat pumps, EV charging, and similar carbon-cutting projects. The law gave the EPA $27 billion to grant to states, tribes, nonprofit groups, and public-private consortiums. Those grantees, in turn, can lend or grant funds to projects and initiatives across the country — and bring in other private-sector lenders and financial backers to boost the impact of the money. In April, the EPA picked eight coalitions to receive a collective $20 billion of this green bank capital, including $5 billion for the CGC. That month, the EPA also picked 60 recipients for its $7 billion Solar for All program. And in August, the EPA announced it had ​“obligated the full $27 billion” of its GGRF funds to selected recipients. That means that CGC now has ​“a contract with the government that tells us and our network partners what we must do,” Hundt said. ​“We have the money, and we’re going to fulfill the contract.” Having these funds ​“obligated” is important, said Adam Fischer, vice president at Waxman Strategies, a Washington, D.C.–based policy and lobbying firm founded by Henry Waxman, a former Democratic U.S. House member. Under the statutory language of the IRA, once GGRF funds are obligated, ​“EPA is now under contract with all 68 awardees” across all of its programs, he said. “As such, any attempt by the incoming administration to claw back or otherwise upend disbursement of obligated funds would be a breach of contract,” said Fischer, who led development and drafting of the GGRF while working at the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce. ​“If they do try to meddle with contracts for unjustifiable reasons, they’ll face lawsuits.” That view was echoed by Michael Catanzaro, the CEO of CGCN Group, a Republican lobbying firm, and a former special assistant for domestic energy and environmental policy in the first Trump administration. “It’s going to be difficult, I think, for an EPA to come in and claw that back,” Catanzaro said during a November 14 panel discussion hosted by the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. ​“I think you’re going to create some serious legal problems if you try to do that. […] EPA worked pretty diligently to get the money out the door, knowing that the election could go south on them.” The future of the green bank under Trump That’s not to say that the GGRF won’t face attacks from the Trump administration or the Republican-controlled Congress, however. The program has ​“been a long-standing target of House Republicans and Republicans generally in the Congress since the IRA was finalized and EPA began work to figure out where that money would go,” Catanzaro said. Though the Trump administration may not be able to outright eliminate the GGRF program, several people who spoke to Canary Media on condition of anonymity said that the EPA under Trump could take actions to disrupt it, such as refusing to approve loans made by recipients. Those actions could be legally challenged, they said — but those disputes would take time to play out, leaving financing from the program in an extended state of limbo. In the face of that risk, the program’s best defense may be its value to communities in Republican-dominated states and congressional districts.

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Climate
Government

Randy Newman’s Genius for Political Irony

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Most musicians on the left write songs that lack a decent sense of humor about serious matters, whether past or present. Earnest idealists abound: Think of Woody Guthrie warbling about “Pastures of Plenty” or Pete Seeger musing what he could do “If I Had a Hammer.” The radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s did spawn blunt satirists, such as Malvina Reynolds, who scorned suburbanites who lived in “Little Boxes,” and Phil Ochs, who spitefully pleaded, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Yet even the best of such creations, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” are hard to appreciate now with any emotion save nostalgia. If a revolution ever occurs in the United States, it will most certainly be seen and heard on billions of screens of every conceivable size.Randy Newman has been a great exception to this unhappy norm. He has never explicitly identified with any ideological tendency, preferring to let his music express his thoughts, he tells Robert Hilburn in the new biography, A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman. But for nearly 60 years, Newman has been churning out wise and witty lyrics, set to genres from rock to blues to country, about a stunning variety of topics and individuals, political and historical. Among them are slavery, empire, racism, nuclear destruction, religion, patriotism, apartheid, environmental disaster, homophobia, Karl Marx, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump, and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. To list them so baldly obscures the imagination behind his best political songs. In many of them, characters talk about and for themselves, voicing odious sentiments that Newman recognizes are vital to making the United States the intolerable yet alluring mess it has always been. He “inhabits his characters so completely,” a New York Times critic once wrote, “that he makes us uneasy, wondering how much self-identification he has invested in their creation. His work achieves its power by that very confusion.”Take “Political Science,” a novel ditty he wrote during the early 1970s, when demonstrators on multiple continents were raging against the carnage the United States was perpetrating in Indochina. The song takes up the voice of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. “No one likes us, I don’t know why, / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try,” sings Newman with a casualness that quickly segues to a most ghastly of all solutions: “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.” Think of the glorious result: “There’ll be no one left to blame us.” And “every city the whole world round / Will just be another American town. / Oh, how peaceful it will be, / We’ll set everybody free.” “Political Science” is a hymn to American exceptionalism as imagined by a genocidal innocent: After the nuclear holocaust, no one will be alive except Americans. Well, he would spare Australia: “Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo / We’ll build an all-American amusement park there / They got surfing, too.”Unlike popular songs by leftists that seek to spark outrage or exultation or urge listeners to get out in the street and march, Randy Newman’s political music nudges you to reflect on the roots of your own beliefs and prejudices, and appreciate the power of characters you despise. “I believe in not hurting anybody,” he has said. That simple line is a version of the motto of PM, a left-wing daily paper published in New York City during the 1940s: “We are against people who push other people around, just for the fun of pushing, whether they flourish in this country or abroad.” Randy Newman has fun getting under such people’s skin.The irony about this virtuoso of political irony is that his best-known works are entirely apolitical. Born in 1943, Newman began his career in the early 1960s writing for such artists as Bobby Darin and Irma Thomas, as well as recording his own pop and rock songs. But since the 1970s, Newman has written music for 29 films, including such animated blockbusters as Toy Story (1, 2, 3, and 4), Monsters, Inc., and A Bug’s Life, as well as The Natural, the dark drama about an ill-fated baseball star, played by Robert Redford. When I ask students if they have heard of Newman, most draw a blank. But nearly all can recite a few lines from “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” which he wrote for the first Toy Story, a staple of kids’ cinema since Pixar released it in 1995. He has won two Oscars for his music and been nominated for many others.Newman was to the film business born: Three of his uncles wrote acclaimed scores, and his physician father wanted his son to be a musician more than he did. Newman shed that reluctance when he discovered he had a gift for writing songs. Shortly after he graduated from high school, the Fleetwoods, a pop trio with a brace of No. 1 songs to their credit, recorded his ballad, “They Tell Me It’s Summer,” in which a teenager laments, “it just can’t be summer / When I’m not with you.” The banal, if catchy, tune climbed as high as No. 36 on the Billboard chart.Over his long career, Newman has written far better, if similarly painful, songs about longing and depression, covered by the likes of Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Bonnie Raitt, and Neil Diamond. In “Guilty,” recorded back in 1974, he captured with perfect pith the forlorn mood of a man on drugs: You know, I just can’t stand myselfAnd it takes a whole lot of medicineFor me to pretend that I’m somebody elseSuch songs appear on the same albums as do the overtly political creations, and Newman would probably object to the idea that there is a fundamental difference between them. “I’m interested in this country,” he told one interviewer, “geography, weather, the people, the way people look, what they eat, what they call things … maybe American psychology is my big subject.”In his political songs, however, Newman deploys satire in deft and original ways to highlight a horrific aspect of the nation’s past. Perhaps the greatest example is “Sail Away,” recorded in 1972. As the strings of an orchestra swell behind him, a slave trader eager to dispatch people in bondage across “the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay” speaks to a gathering of unwitting Africans. His offers them a P.R. pitch for the American dream, laced with condescending clichés: In America you get food to eatWon’t have to run through the jungleAnd scuff up your feetYou’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all dayIt’s great to be an American…In America every man is freeTo take care of his home and his familyYou’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey treeYou’re all gonna be an AmericanSail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySo climb aboard that big ship and don’t pay any heed to any chains you may see laying around. For you will soon be on your way to the promised land, like those Europeans who came before and will come after you. The despicable con job underlines a sober truth: To be proud to “be an American,” one should be able to enjoy “the fruits of Americanism,” as Malcolm X put it. “A secret ambivalence of four hundred years” of life in this country “finds a voice in this song,” wrote the critic Greil Marcus. “It is like a vision of heaven superimposed on hell.”Newman’s best-known commentary on white supremacy in America was also his most controversial song. “Rednecks,” the lead track on the 1974 album Good Old Boys, scores white liberals’ hypocrisy about racism. The song’s protagonist is a white dude from Dixie who freely admits to “keepin’ the n—s down.” He defends Lester Maddox—the one-term governor of Georgia and unabashed segregationist who threatened to attack any Black people who tried to eat in his fried chicken restaurant—as one of his own (“he may be a fool but he’s our fool”) while sneering at “some smart-ass New York Jew” who ridiculed Maddox in a TV interview show. Newman’s “redneck” embraces a slew of stereotypes about uncouth figures like himself: “We talk real funny down here / We drink too much and we laugh too loud”; “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.” Up to this point in the song, one might scoff at the benighted fellow’s easy acknowledgment of his racism and his other faults, too.Then the lyric takes a sharp turn away from mocking such not-so-good old boys. Up North, the redneck points out, white folks claim they “set the n— free” and call him a “Negro.” But oppression reigns there too. Black people are “free to be put in a cage / In Harlem in New York City” and “in the South Side of Chicago / And the West Side” and in Hough in Cleveland, in East St. Louis, in San Francisco and in Roxbury in Boston, the song goes on. To accuse one’s adversary of committing the same sins, without realizing it, is one of the oldest moves in ideological combat. It should have stung liberals who didn’t take responsibility for their own share of injustice. But the song may have been too clever for some. Newman stopped performing it in public when white audiences in the South began singing right along to it, n-word and all.For Newman, the meaning of Americanism always swings between elegiac hope and justifiable rage. He loves his countrywomen and men, but it’s the affection of a brutal realist. In the 2006 song Robert Hilburn chose as the title of his biography, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” Newman contrasted President George W. Bush’s misgoverning of the nation with the muddled decency of its citizens:I’d like to say a few wordsIn defense of our countryWhose people aren’t badNor are they meanNow, the leaders we haveWhile they’re the worst that we’ve hadAre hardly the worstThis poor world has seenNewman then ticked off the regimes of bloodthirsty tyrants, like King Leopold of Belgium, whose minions caused the deaths of millions of Congolese, and the Spanish monarchs who oversaw the Inquisition that lasted for centuries. He wasn’t apologizing for the debacle of the invasion of Iraq, motivated by lies, but warning that the United States could be rushing toward the same fate that befell such once mighty domains:The end of an empire is messy at bestAnd this empire is endingLike all the restLike the Spanish Armada adrift on the seaWe’re adrift in the land of the braveAnd the home of the freeThe New York Times published an abridged version of this casual message of terminal decline as an op-ed. Yet, in cold type and pixels, it fails to capture the power of a satirist whose laid-back vocals assail the myopia and cruelties of U.S. history.Newman always conveys that critique with the affection of an artist who will never abandon the place that, in another song, he embraces: “This is my country / These are my people / And I know ’em like the back of my own hand.” I think Newman would nod in agreement with the American protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, an undercover spy in France, who remarks, “I miss being at home in a culture.… Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and … our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.”Hilburn’s biography does not explain how this rather shy fellow from a well-to-do Jewish family managed to create such provocative music about a cornucopia of subjects and the characters who embody them. He dispenses a surfeit of details about Newman’s personal life, but few bear on the content of his works, political and otherwise. Having conducted many hours of interviews with his subject, Hilburn can dwell at length on the highs and lows of Newman’s prolific career and two marriages. But to learn which of his albums made lots of money and which flopped or why he split from his first wife but is happily married to the second reveals almost nothing about what inspired his songs. Hilburn even fails to make clear why Newman has always sung with a gentle Southern drawl—although he spent just two infant years in New Orleans and has long lived in the leafy comfort of West L.A. The result is a biography seemingly intended for readers who already adore Newman’s music but might enjoy having a chronological reference book around as they listen to it.To his credit, Hilburn reprints all the words to a remarkable Newman song from 1999 that fans of classics like “Sail Away” may have missed. “The Great Nations of Europe” is something quite rare in popular music: a witty critique of empire inspired by a book written by a distinguished historian. In Ecological Imperialism, published in 1986, Alfred Crosby argued that adventurers from the Old World were able to subjugate the inhabitants of the New because they not just had plenty of “guns for conquest” but, without being aware of it, also carried in their cargo and bodies “infectious diseases for decimating indigenous populations.” Newman lifted a few shocking details from Crosby’s influential book and tied them together with a catchy chorus:The great nations of EuropeHad gathered on the shoreThey’d conquered what was behind themAnd now they wanted moreSo they looked to the mighty oceanAnd took to the western seaThe great nations of Europe in the sixteenth centuryHide your wives and daughtersHide the groceries, tooGreat nations of Europe coming throughThe Grand Canary IslandsFirst land to which they cameThey slaughtered all the canariesWhich gave the land its nameThere were natives there called GuanchesGuanches by the scoreBullets, disease, the Portuguese, and they weren’t there anymoreNewman offers no hope for collective liberation in this or any other song. They could never serve as the soundtrack for a left-wing gathering as “Solidarity Forever” or “This Land Is Your Land” once did. But the skeptical humor of his best creations may be more valuable to the left than the romantic uplift in such radical standards. Just as Mr. Burns in The Simpsons has probably taught more Americans to ridicule corporate moguls than have reams of Marxian essays, so “Sail Away” debunks the ideal of American exceptionalism with a panache no leftist scholar has equaled. “The common discovery of America,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “was probably that Americans were the first people on earth to live for their humor; nothing was so important to Americans as humor.”Now in his eighties, Newman has not performed in recent years and may never mount a stage again. But I will never forget the times I saw this small, froggish man sit down at a piano and drawl out doses of grim reality that made me grin and think about this land that’s our land—for better and for worse.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Most musicians on the left write songs that lack a decent sense of humor about serious matters, whether past or present. Earnest idealists abound: Think of Woody Guthrie warbling about “Pastures of Plenty” or Pete Seeger musing what he could do “If I Had a Hammer.” The radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s did spawn blunt satirists, such as Malvina Reynolds, who scorned suburbanites who lived in “Little Boxes,” and Phil Ochs, who spitefully pleaded, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Yet even the best of such creations, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” are hard to appreciate now with any emotion save nostalgia. If a revolution ever occurs in the United States, it will most certainly be seen and heard on billions of screens of every conceivable size.Randy Newman has been a great exception to this unhappy norm. He has never explicitly identified with any ideological tendency, preferring to let his music express his thoughts, he tells Robert Hilburn in the new biography, A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman. But for nearly 60 years, Newman has been churning out wise and witty lyrics, set to genres from rock to blues to country, about a stunning variety of topics and individuals, political and historical. Among them are slavery, empire, racism, nuclear destruction, religion, patriotism, apartheid, environmental disaster, homophobia, Karl Marx, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump, and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. To list them so baldly obscures the imagination behind his best political songs. In many of them, characters talk about and for themselves, voicing odious sentiments that Newman recognizes are vital to making the United States the intolerable yet alluring mess it has always been. He “inhabits his characters so completely,” a New York Times critic once wrote, “that he makes us uneasy, wondering how much self-identification he has invested in their creation. His work achieves its power by that very confusion.”Take “Political Science,” a novel ditty he wrote during the early 1970s, when demonstrators on multiple continents were raging against the carnage the United States was perpetrating in Indochina. The song takes up the voice of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. “No one likes us, I don’t know why, / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try,” sings Newman with a casualness that quickly segues to a most ghastly of all solutions: “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.” Think of the glorious result: “There’ll be no one left to blame us.” And “every city the whole world round / Will just be another American town. / Oh, how peaceful it will be, / We’ll set everybody free.” “Political Science” is a hymn to American exceptionalism as imagined by a genocidal innocent: After the nuclear holocaust, no one will be alive except Americans. Well, he would spare Australia: “Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo / We’ll build an all-American amusement park there / They got surfing, too.”Unlike popular songs by leftists that seek to spark outrage or exultation or urge listeners to get out in the street and march, Randy Newman’s political music nudges you to reflect on the roots of your own beliefs and prejudices, and appreciate the power of characters you despise. “I believe in not hurting anybody,” he has said. That simple line is a version of the motto of PM, a left-wing daily paper published in New York City during the 1940s: “We are against people who push other people around, just for the fun of pushing, whether they flourish in this country or abroad.” Randy Newman has fun getting under such people’s skin.The irony about this virtuoso of political irony is that his best-known works are entirely apolitical. Born in 1943, Newman began his career in the early 1960s writing for such artists as Bobby Darin and Irma Thomas, as well as recording his own pop and rock songs. But since the 1970s, Newman has written music for 29 films, including such animated blockbusters as Toy Story (1, 2, 3, and 4), Monsters, Inc., and A Bug’s Life, as well as The Natural, the dark drama about an ill-fated baseball star, played by Robert Redford. When I ask students if they have heard of Newman, most draw a blank. But nearly all can recite a few lines from “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” which he wrote for the first Toy Story, a staple of kids’ cinema since Pixar released it in 1995. He has won two Oscars for his music and been nominated for many others.Newman was to the film business born: Three of his uncles wrote acclaimed scores, and his physician father wanted his son to be a musician more than he did. Newman shed that reluctance when he discovered he had a gift for writing songs. Shortly after he graduated from high school, the Fleetwoods, a pop trio with a brace of No. 1 songs to their credit, recorded his ballad, “They Tell Me It’s Summer,” in which a teenager laments, “it just can’t be summer / When I’m not with you.” The banal, if catchy, tune climbed as high as No. 36 on the Billboard chart.Over his long career, Newman has written far better, if similarly painful, songs about longing and depression, covered by the likes of Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Bonnie Raitt, and Neil Diamond. In “Guilty,” recorded back in 1974, he captured with perfect pith the forlorn mood of a man on drugs: You know, I just can’t stand myselfAnd it takes a whole lot of medicineFor me to pretend that I’m somebody elseSuch songs appear on the same albums as do the overtly political creations, and Newman would probably object to the idea that there is a fundamental difference between them. “I’m interested in this country,” he told one interviewer, “geography, weather, the people, the way people look, what they eat, what they call things … maybe American psychology is my big subject.”In his political songs, however, Newman deploys satire in deft and original ways to highlight a horrific aspect of the nation’s past. Perhaps the greatest example is “Sail Away,” recorded in 1972. As the strings of an orchestra swell behind him, a slave trader eager to dispatch people in bondage across “the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay” speaks to a gathering of unwitting Africans. His offers them a P.R. pitch for the American dream, laced with condescending clichés: In America you get food to eatWon’t have to run through the jungleAnd scuff up your feetYou’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all dayIt’s great to be an American…In America every man is freeTo take care of his home and his familyYou’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey treeYou’re all gonna be an AmericanSail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySo climb aboard that big ship and don’t pay any heed to any chains you may see laying around. For you will soon be on your way to the promised land, like those Europeans who came before and will come after you. The despicable con job underlines a sober truth: To be proud to “be an American,” one should be able to enjoy “the fruits of Americanism,” as Malcolm X put it. “A secret ambivalence of four hundred years” of life in this country “finds a voice in this song,” wrote the critic Greil Marcus. “It is like a vision of heaven superimposed on hell.”Newman’s best-known commentary on white supremacy in America was also his most controversial song. “Rednecks,” the lead track on the 1974 album Good Old Boys, scores white liberals’ hypocrisy about racism. The song’s protagonist is a white dude from Dixie who freely admits to “keepin’ the n—s down.” He defends Lester Maddox—the one-term governor of Georgia and unabashed segregationist who threatened to attack any Black people who tried to eat in his fried chicken restaurant—as one of his own (“he may be a fool but he’s our fool”) while sneering at “some smart-ass New York Jew” who ridiculed Maddox in a TV interview show. Newman’s “redneck” embraces a slew of stereotypes about uncouth figures like himself: “We talk real funny down here / We drink too much and we laugh too loud”; “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.” Up to this point in the song, one might scoff at the benighted fellow’s easy acknowledgment of his racism and his other faults, too.Then the lyric takes a sharp turn away from mocking such not-so-good old boys. Up North, the redneck points out, white folks claim they “set the n— free” and call him a “Negro.” But oppression reigns there too. Black people are “free to be put in a cage / In Harlem in New York City” and “in the South Side of Chicago / And the West Side” and in Hough in Cleveland, in East St. Louis, in San Francisco and in Roxbury in Boston, the song goes on. To accuse one’s adversary of committing the same sins, without realizing it, is one of the oldest moves in ideological combat. It should have stung liberals who didn’t take responsibility for their own share of injustice. But the song may have been too clever for some. Newman stopped performing it in public when white audiences in the South began singing right along to it, n-word and all.For Newman, the meaning of Americanism always swings between elegiac hope and justifiable rage. He loves his countrywomen and men, but it’s the affection of a brutal realist. In the 2006 song Robert Hilburn chose as the title of his biography, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” Newman contrasted President George W. Bush’s misgoverning of the nation with the muddled decency of its citizens:I’d like to say a few wordsIn defense of our countryWhose people aren’t badNor are they meanNow, the leaders we haveWhile they’re the worst that we’ve hadAre hardly the worstThis poor world has seenNewman then ticked off the regimes of bloodthirsty tyrants, like King Leopold of Belgium, whose minions caused the deaths of millions of Congolese, and the Spanish monarchs who oversaw the Inquisition that lasted for centuries. He wasn’t apologizing for the debacle of the invasion of Iraq, motivated by lies, but warning that the United States could be rushing toward the same fate that befell such once mighty domains:The end of an empire is messy at bestAnd this empire is endingLike all the restLike the Spanish Armada adrift on the seaWe’re adrift in the land of the braveAnd the home of the freeThe New York Times published an abridged version of this casual message of terminal decline as an op-ed. Yet, in cold type and pixels, it fails to capture the power of a satirist whose laid-back vocals assail the myopia and cruelties of U.S. history.Newman always conveys that critique with the affection of an artist who will never abandon the place that, in another song, he embraces: “This is my country / These are my people / And I know ’em like the back of my own hand.” I think Newman would nod in agreement with the American protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, an undercover spy in France, who remarks, “I miss being at home in a culture.… Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and … our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.”Hilburn’s biography does not explain how this rather shy fellow from a well-to-do Jewish family managed to create such provocative music about a cornucopia of subjects and the characters who embody them. He dispenses a surfeit of details about Newman’s personal life, but few bear on the content of his works, political and otherwise. Having conducted many hours of interviews with his subject, Hilburn can dwell at length on the highs and lows of Newman’s prolific career and two marriages. But to learn which of his albums made lots of money and which flopped or why he split from his first wife but is happily married to the second reveals almost nothing about what inspired his songs. Hilburn even fails to make clear why Newman has always sung with a gentle Southern drawl—although he spent just two infant years in New Orleans and has long lived in the leafy comfort of West L.A. The result is a biography seemingly intended for readers who already adore Newman’s music but might enjoy having a chronological reference book around as they listen to it.To his credit, Hilburn reprints all the words to a remarkable Newman song from 1999 that fans of classics like “Sail Away” may have missed. “The Great Nations of Europe” is something quite rare in popular music: a witty critique of empire inspired by a book written by a distinguished historian. In Ecological Imperialism, published in 1986, Alfred Crosby argued that adventurers from the Old World were able to subjugate the inhabitants of the New because they not just had plenty of “guns for conquest” but, without being aware of it, also carried in their cargo and bodies “infectious diseases for decimating indigenous populations.” Newman lifted a few shocking details from Crosby’s influential book and tied them together with a catchy chorus:The great nations of EuropeHad gathered on the shoreThey’d conquered what was behind themAnd now they wanted moreSo they looked to the mighty oceanAnd took to the western seaThe great nations of Europe in the sixteenth centuryHide your wives and daughtersHide the groceries, tooGreat nations of Europe coming throughThe Grand Canary IslandsFirst land to which they cameThey slaughtered all the canariesWhich gave the land its nameThere were natives there called GuanchesGuanches by the scoreBullets, disease, the Portuguese, and they weren’t there anymoreNewman offers no hope for collective liberation in this or any other song. They could never serve as the soundtrack for a left-wing gathering as “Solidarity Forever” or “This Land Is Your Land” once did. But the skeptical humor of his best creations may be more valuable to the left than the romantic uplift in such radical standards. Just as Mr. Burns in The Simpsons has probably taught more Americans to ridicule corporate moguls than have reams of Marxian essays, so “Sail Away” debunks the ideal of American exceptionalism with a panache no leftist scholar has equaled. “The common discovery of America,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “was probably that Americans were the first people on earth to live for their humor; nothing was so important to Americans as humor.”Now in his eighties, Newman has not performed in recent years and may never mount a stage again. But I will never forget the times I saw this small, froggish man sit down at a piano and drawl out doses of grim reality that made me grin and think about this land that’s our land—for better and for worse.

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This seaside town will power thousands of homes with waves

A test site off the Oregon coast could be key to unlocking wave power in the United States. Surprisingly, residents aren’t opposed.

NEWPORT, Ore. — At a moment when large offshore wind projects are encountering public resistance, a nascent ocean industry is showing promise: wave energy.It’s coming to life in Newport, a rainy coastal town of nearly 10,500 people located a couple of hours south of Portland. Home to fishing operators and researchers, Newport attracts tourists and retirees with its famous aquarium, sprawling beaches and noisy sea lions. If you ask anyone at the lively bayfront about a wave energy project, they probably don’t know much about it.And yet right off the coast, a $100 million effort with funding from the Energy Department aims to convert the power of waves into energy, and help catch up to Europe in developing this new technology. The buoy-like contraptions, located several miles offshore, will deliver up to 20 megawatts of energy — enough to power thousands of homes and businesses.As federal officials look to shift America’s electricity grid away from fossil fuels, they are seeking alternatives to solar and wind, which can only deliver energy when the sun shines or the wind blows. Waves — constant and full of untapped energy — have emerged as a promising option. And because wave energy projects are relatively unobtrusive, they’re far less controversial than offshore wind, which has generated fierce opposition on both U.S. coasts. In September, the Biden administration announced up to $112.5 million would go toward the development of wave energy converters, the largest federal investment in marine energy.There’s enough energy in the waves off America’s coasts to power one third of all the nation’s homes, said Matthew Grosso, the Energy Department’s director of the water power technologies office.Spanning 2.65 square miles and located seven miles out from shore, the PacWave test site is expected to be a “game changer for marine energy,” he said in an interview.Under the water, subsea connectors are waiting to be plugged in like extension cords to wave energy converters developed by teams around the world. With deep-sea offshore testing, companies will see how much power these energy converters can produce, whether they can hold up in rough ocean conditions, what environmental impacts they might have and how the devices will interact with each other.PacWave, a project of Oregon State University (OSU), represents a necessary step for commercializing wave energy, experts said.“The research that’s been done in the past 15 years is reaching the point of what we can do just in labs or in theory,” Grosso said. “We’ve got to start testing some of this stuff out and see what works and what doesn’t.”How wave energy worksUnlike other forms of renewable energy, engineers have not yet settled on a single model of wave energy converters. While wind turbines have converged into the three-blade turbine shape, there’s many types of wave energy converters in development, turning the motion of the wave into electrical energy in different ways.You can feel the energy in the waves, when it laps at the shore or when it rocks your boat. Created by wind over the sea, it’s one part of the ecosystem of renewable energy that’s available to us. But since waves don’t move in a linear motion, they’re harder to capture energy from than the flow of wind over a turbine, for example.One wave energy converter may not work in all environments, either — models can vary based on the depth of water and conditions the converter will operate in. Some use rotating cylinders; some are buoys that move up and down with the waves; others look like snakes with joints that move when waves roll through.But all of these devices use the oscillating or orbital motion of a wave to generate an electrical current, explained PacWave Chief Scientist Burke Hales, in the same way that turbines use rotations to generate a current.With four different berths, the site can host devices by multiple developers at once. The cables carrying the electricity are buried under the seafloor, running 12 miles diagonal to the shoreline to avoid a rocky reef. On land, an operating site measures the energy output and sends the energy to the Central Lincoln power utility.Because there’s no wave energy converters plugged in yet, there’s still a clear view of the horizon from Newport’s beaches. But even the larger devices are unlikely to be visible to the naked eye once they’re there in the new year.Coexisting with fisheriesThe PacWave site sits where crabbers set out their pots to catch Dungeness crab, one of the West Coast’s most important seafood species. And yet, unlike an offshore wind project a hundred miles down the coast that sparked strong opposition, most residents are either unaware of the wave energy project or support it. The fact that the project is limited, and unlikely to spur commercial activity offshore that could damage the town’s fishing economy, has helped its cause.When deciding where to locate the project, Newport won out for its proximity to OSU’s main campus in Corvallis and the local fishing fleet’s openness to the idea. The town also hosts the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Operations Center for the Pacific, which has its own research fleet.PacWave also brought the promise of jobs, said Belinda Batten, who conducted outreach for PacWave when she directed the Energy Department’s Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center. Many here remember how NOAA’s move to Newport in 2011 created employment opportunities.Perhaps most importantly, OSU already had a strong relationship with the community given the marine center in town, according to Charlie Plybon, who lives in Newport and is the Oregon senior policy manager for the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation.It took years of outreach and many town hall meetings for Batten, who now serves as a senior adviser to the OSU provost, and Kaety Jacobson, Lincoln County commissioner and a fisherman’s daughter, to cement their trust with the community. When they assembled some fleet members to decide the site, it took all of 10 minutes for the crabbers to draw a plot on a map of the ocean for a location that could work for everyone involved.That area was important fishing grounds for the fleet, said crabber Bob Eder. In his button-down shirt and sneakers, Eder knows he doesn’t look like a stereotypical fisherman, but he’s one of the most well-respected crabbers in the fleet and still goes out in the waters every season at the age of 73. The PacWave site could represent a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars for the fleet every crabbing season, he said. On the navigation system in his boat, he pointed to a map that showed he had previously crabbed in the area that was now off limits.But the operators agreed to give it up for the sake of the experiment.Eder, a representative of the fishing community during the process, said that the agreement with Oregon State was a show of goodwill from the fishing community, whose members care about the environment and want to preserve their livelihood.“[Climate change] definitely affects those of us whose work is directly involved with the environment,” he said. “And so every fishery is at an environmental risk.”Where wave energy could thriveIn states like Oregon, where an abundance of renewable energy has lowered the price of electricity to around 3½ cents per kilowatt hour, wave energy isn’t a competitive option. The first large-scale commercial wave energy project, by contrast, is expected to produce electricity costing 12 to 47 cents per kilowatt hour.But in small, remote communities that depend on more expensive diesel fuel, wave power could ease energy woes.“There’s remote communities in Alaska where everyone is running on diesel generators, they’re not on the grid, they have no electrical system,” said PacWave Director Dan Hellin.The wave industry first has to overcome several challenges. The consensus in the industry is that wave energy’s development is 20 years behind that of wind. But Tim Ramsey, the Energy Department’s marine energy program manager, pointed out that wind began to take off at that point, in the early 2000s.In addition, putting something into offshore waters usually requires extensive federal permitting, which can take years. That’s why this test site is important for developers — PacWave’s operation offers a site that has already earned the necessary approvals.In order for wave energy to be economically viable, developers need to lower its cost. Technological advancements can help, and just as solar and wind energy have received government subsidies, federal support could help get wave energy off the ground.Members of the Newport fishing fleet — even those who aren’t fans of the project — have hope that this renewable energy offers possibilities.Crabber Bob Kemp, 75, said he isn’t thrilled that he won’t be able to fish for crab in that part of the ocean anymore, but he’s counting on the researchers to make good use of the space they’ve taken.“I want to make sure the project has some kind of pressure on it to keep going and not just [move on] like a contractor moves on to a new house,” Kemp said. “I want them to stay on that.”

Business
Climate
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