Author: News Polite

Last week, Tesla laid off most of its electric car charging team, raising doubts about the feasibility of the Biden administration’s ambitious E.V. expansion plans.

Though Tesla accounts for more than half of the fast E.V. chargers currently installed in the United States, and though it has continued to build them faster and cheaper than anyone else, the E.V. charging market may no longer need Tesla to lead it.

In fact, experts I spoke to believe the E.V. charging industry is set to expand quickly over the next few years. Let me explain why.

At first, Tesla’s move seemed like a blow to a sector that may seem like it’s struggling to grow despite the $7.5 billion investment from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed by President Biden in 2021. The administration’s goal is to build a network of a half million fast and slow chargers in the country by 2030, more than double what the U.S. has today. But roughly two and a half years after the bill’s passage only eight federally funded charging stations have opened in six states, according to government data.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s C.E.O., hasn’t explained why he decided to cut back on charger construction, but some analysts interviewed by my colleagues Jack Ewing and Ivan Penn said he had probably concluded that it would become harder to make money from charging as more companies entered the market.

As Ewing and Penn wrote, last year all major automakers selling cars in North America agreed to use the charging plug developed by Tesla, which has a reputation for being reliable and easy-to-use.

That leaves the question I set out to answer. What’s holding back the expansion of America’s electric charging infrastructure? Spoiler alert: The picture isn’t nearly as grim as it may seem.

“We’re not seeing a lag in process or progress,” Ellen Kennedy, a transportation expert at RMI, a clean energy think tank, told me. “I think that people have been taking a dim view of this without actually considering that what has been happening is amazing.”

Jumping through hoops

You might think Kennedy is being overly optimistic, but she’s not alone in thinking the U.S. is turning the corner on E.V. chargers.

My colleague Ewing, who has been covering automakers for decades, told me he has been hearing much of the same thing from experts. “A lot of people told me that the charger infrastructure has a momentum of its own,” he said. “Things are going up pretty fast.”

Including the federally funded program, the U.S. has added an average of about 2,800 fast and slow charging ports a month over the past year, according to government data. (A charging station can have several ports.) Many companies are excited, Ewing said, about the prospect of building out E.V. stations that can offer entertainment, dining and shopping options for drivers. That’s already happening in Norway.

The point of the federal government’s program isn’t simply to add more chargers to the network, but rather to guarantee there is an equitable distribution across the country, and to match charging infrastructure to demand.

“The charging networks, you know, just aren’t building these charging stations where there’s very little E.V. traffic,” Loren McDonald, the C.E.O. of EVAdoption, an industry data and analysis company, told me. “But it’s a chicken and egg thing, and that’s what this program is trying to solve.”

In a statement, the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which is responsible for the federal charger program, said, “We want to get it right to ensure we have a charging network that makes it easier for Americans to find a charge than to fill up on gas.”

The obstacles remaining

Still, coordination between the federal government, states and utilities can take time. Most of the money for E.V. chargers is federal, but states are the ones that need to spend it. And then, utilities must connect charging stations to the grid.

Utilities often delay projects. It can take months after a station is built for the local utility to connect it to the grid. A shortage of transformers and switch gears can add another layer of delays.

The good news is that every state, as well as Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., have presented plans for how they will spend federal resources. But staffing can be an issue. States with high E.V. adoption, like New York, have more experienced staff handling charger expansion efforts than states where fewer people own electric cars, such as South Carolina.

The layoffs at Tesla won’t help any of this go faster. But the company picked up only 14 percent of the contracts from the federal charger program so far, according to EVAdoption. Dozens of competitors, like Francis Energy and Love’s Travel Stop, are working to build the rest.

Overcoming these obstacles is taking time. But all the experts I’ve spoken to expect that to change soon.

Right now, federally funded new stations are opening roughly one a month. McDonald said he expects them to open once a week or once a day by the end of the year.

McDonald also pointed out that public chargers, some of which can recharge a battery in less than half an hour, aren’t where most E.V. charging happens. Most charging happens at home, at work or wherever people park, using slower chargers that can take several hours to charge a car up, but get the job done.

The Biden administration’s “messaging has perhaps overly focused on the fast charging aspect of it,” McDonald said. “The biggest sort of challenge is, well, just education.”

For people considering buying an electric car, seeing charging stations pop up everywhere may help dispel some of their concerns. “We have this saying in the industry that the charger anxiety has replaced range anxiety,” McDonald said.

Still, when it comes to the Biden administration’s expansion plans, McDonald said “it actually is fair to say that by and large, the program is on track.”

Today on The Daily: Our warming oceans

Ocean temperatures have been hitting record highs for more than a year now, puzzling scientists and raising the prospect of cataclysmic changes to life on Earth.

On Tuesday’s episode of The Daily, David Gelles and Raymond Zhong explain why the oceans are so hot, how the heat is already upending marine life and weather patterns, and what even bigger changes might be in store.

Climate change has been making oceans warmer for decades. But starting last March, scientists noticed a sharp jump in sea surface temperatures. Oceans have absorbed much of the excess heat produced by global warming, but that alone doesn’t explain the spike recorded over the past year.

Another factor was likely the current El Niño cycle, which typically has an overall warming effect on the world’s oceans. Still another likely cause has been the recent changes in shipping regulations that led to reduced air pollution over the North Atlantic, which counter-intuitively allowed more of the sun’s energy to reach the ocean, warming it up. But even when factoring in all those dynamics, scientists are still perplexed by the record heat.

All that extra heat is already having effects. As Catrin Einhorn has reported, coral reefs around the world are experiencing a mass bleaching event. Corals are vitally important parts of marine ecosystems, and responsible for some $2.7 trillion of economic activity. Their disappearance is a problem for the oceans and humans alike.

The warm oceans are also expected to contribute to an active hurricane season. As Judson Jones reported last month, a key area of the Atlantic Ocean where hurricanes form is abnormally warm, conditions that one leading scientist called “unprecedented,” “alarming” and an “out-of-bounds anomaly.”

Even bigger changes could be in store. A key current that moves warm water from the equatorial region up into the North Atlantic is showing early signs of collapsing. The last time that happened, more than 12,000 years ago, Europe was plunged into an ice age.

A bipartisan group of senators is pushing to halt the expansion of facial recognition technology at airports in the United States and restrict its use as part of the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that is making its way through Congress.

Citing privacy concerns, Senators Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, are proposing to block the expansion of the technology until 2027 and require the transportation security administrator to make clear that passengers can opt out at airports where it is in use.

With a Friday deadline for renewing the aviation law, the proposal is among the amendments likely to get a vote before the bill can pass. It has pit privacy advocates in both parties against consumer and industry groups that argue that the technology has the potential to vastly cut down on wait times at airports and increase convenience and safety.

The Federal Aviation Administration is planning to expand facial recognition technology to more than 430 airports, from 25, as part of an effort to speed up the check-in process. Using kiosks with iPads affixed to them, passengers have their photographs taken and matched to an image from a government database instead of presenting a physical identification card.

Mr. Merkley said he had grown concerned about the technology after encountering it at Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C. While a facial scan is optional, many passengers feel pressured to comply, he said.

The senator often insists on his right to decline the facial scan, but he said some airport security workers pushed back. Until recently, he said, there was no sign clearly indicating that passengers are not obligated to have their faces scanned at security checkpoints.

“Because I made such a fuss over it, they put a little postcard that says this is optional, but what you really see is an iPad that says, ‘Follow instructions’ or ‘Follow the orders,’” Mr. Merkley said. “So people just do not believe they have this option. They’re afraid of getting arrested. People are nervous.”

The U.S. Travel Association is raising alarm about the amendment, arguing that it would create a “severe and troubling scenario for travelers.”

Geoff Freeman, the association’s president and chief executive, said the proposal to crack down on facial recognition technology at airports was “dangerous, costly and threatens to create chaos at America’s airports.”

“Eliminating the use of biometrics — such as facial scans — will set America back by decades,” he said, “and only misinformed members of Congress are to blame.”

If facial recognition software is not expanded, the travel lobby says, passengers will end up waiting an additional 120 million hours in security lines each year. The U.S. Travel Association also says failure to use the technology could result in national security risks.

Mr. Merkley rejected the criticism, pointing out that his amendment would merely preserve the status quo.

“How does this create a delay? We’re just freezing in place what’s there right now,” he said. “We think it’s an important issue for Congress to wrestle with.”

Mr. Merkley, who as a state legislator in Oregon sought to curb the use of red-light cameras and cellphone tracking, said his focus on facial recognition at airports stemmed from a number of civil liberties concerns. No Americans should be forced to have their photograph taken without their consent, he said, adding that he was worried about the government building an ever-increasing database of Americans’ faces that could be misused. He also argued that the technology was inaccurate and had unacceptable error rates.

“I come from rural Oregon, so I’ve always had a bit of concern about government having too much ability to track individuals,” Mr. Merkley said.

Mr. Merkley and Mr. Kennedy were among 14 senators who recently sent a letter to Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, outlining their concerns.

“This technology poses significant threats to our privacy and civil liberties, and Congress should prohibit T.S.A.’s development and deployment of facial recognition tools until rigorous congressional oversight occurs,” the letter said. It was signed by a mix of lawmakers from both parties, including some prominent liberals and Republicans known for their work on civil liberties issues.

Mr. Schumer included the amendment on a list of proposals that should get a vote before the bill passes, but he has not publicly taken a position on it.

Mr. Kennedy said he was particularly concerned that government workers could potentially abuse the data after scanning millions of faces each day. “Unless Congress reins in this program through our amendment to the F.A.A. reauthorization bill, I fear bureaucrats will start seizing and hoarding the biometrics of millions of travelers without explicit permission,” he said in a statement.

Lisa Gilbert, the executive vice president of the progressive group Public Citizen, has been pushing for the amendment.

“They’re touting this as something that sort of makes traveling safer or more efficient, but there’s actually no data or proof to that,” she said. “And there are real ramifications for travelers’ privacy and how their data is used.”

In February of last year, President Biden changed the U.S. standard for cutting off weapons deliveries to foreign militaries that harm civilians during wartime.

Under the new arms transfer policy, Mr. Biden said countries that were “more likely than not” to violate international law or human rights with American weapons should not receive them. Previously, U.S. officials were required to show “actual knowledge” of such violations, a higher bar to clear.

A few months later, in August, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken issued a directive instructing State Department officials overseas to investigate incidents of civilian harm by foreign militaries using American weapons and recommend responses that could include halting arms deliveries.

Hamas attacked Israel two months later, triggering the war in Gaza and plunging Mr. Biden and Mr. Blinken into an intense global debate about how Israel is using U.S. arms. To Mr. Biden’s critics, his steadfast refusal to limit arms deliveries to Israel runs counter to those initiatives and badly undermines his goal of positioning the United States as a protector of civilians in wartime.

His policies face new tests this week. Israel is threatening a full invasion of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, against Mr. Biden’s firm opposition. And the Biden administration plans to deliver a report to Congress this week assessing whether it believes Israel’s assurances that it has used American weapons in accordance with U.S. and international law.

If the report finds that Israel has violated the law, Mr. Biden could restrict arms deliveries. Eighty-eight House Democrats wrote to Mr. Biden last week questioning the credibility of Israel’s assurances and urging him “to take all conceivable steps to prevent further humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

When the Biden administration issued the initiatives last year — the White House’s Conventional Arms Transfer Policy and the State Department’s Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance — officials described them as part of a new emphasis on human rights in American foreign policy, an upgrade from their lower priority during the Trump administration.

“Part of it was to highly differentiate America’s role in the world under Biden from Trump,” said Sarah Margon, the director of foreign policy at the Open Society Foundations.

At the time, people familiar with the deliberations said, the Biden administration was focused on other countries, including Saudi Arabia, whose U.S.-armed military campaign in Yemen had killed thousands of civilians and contributed to a humanitarian nightmare.

In one of his first major acts as president, in February 2021, Mr. Biden even halted the delivery of offensive arms to the Saudis, who are fighting Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen. “This war has to end,” he said. Mr. Biden has since restored the deliveries.

Within months, the Hamas-led assault would incite a war that has drawn intense new scrutiny to Israel’s reliance on $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid, which includes bombs and ammunition that have been used in Gaza.

But critics say Mr. Biden is making a political decision to flout U.S. law and his own administration’s directives in the case of Israel.

“In practice, it may be a policy call from the White House — but that’s not the way it should work,” said Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group who spent a decade in the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser until 2021. “U.S. law should be applied. If the outcome is something you don’t like, tough luck.”

That law originated in the 1970s as concern was rising about human rights abuses by some of America’s Cold War allies and as some members of Congress were angry with the Nixon and Ford administrations for giving them little notice before arming several Middle Eastern countries.

Leading the charge was the liberal Democratic senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, who complained in 1976 that the American people had “become justifiably concerned with a highly secretive national policy which seems to disregard our long-term security interests in a stable, more democratic world.”

Humphrey pushed through legislation declaring that the United States could not send military assistance to any foreign government that “engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Congress defined those violations to include “torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” arbitrary detention and “other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty or the security of person.”

Experts have interpreted that last clause to include things like indiscriminate bombing or disproportionate civilian casualties. A 2017 American Bar Association report focused on U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia found that “serious violations of international humanitarian law resulting in the loss of civilian life” would qualify.

International humanitarian law is generally grounded in the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements that call for protecting civilians in war, and outlaw attacks on medical facilities and personnel.

The 1970s-era U.S. law also granted a president the power to waive penalties against arms recipients on the grounds of urgent national security interest.

The U.S. government generally lacks clearly defined procedures for evaluating whether militaries that receive American arms might be breaking laws, experts said. Nor is it able to closely monitor how those weapons are used, experts said.

Ms. Margon, who served as a senior aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, could not recall an instance in which the United States had halted foreign military aid over human rights violations.

The report due from the administration this week is the product of increased pressure from Democrats in Congress. In February, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, drew up legislation invoking a 1995 law that bars U.S. aid to any country that blocks the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid. Many aid groups and legal experts accuse Israel of intentionally impeding humanitarian supplies into Gaza, including aid provided by the United States; Israel has blamed Hamas and logistical issues for the shortages.

As Mr. Van Hollen’s amendment began to gather support among Democrats, the White House moved to co-opt the effort. Mr. Van Hollen’s measure “was unlikely to succeed — but it would still cause embarrassment for the administration,” said John Ramming Chappell, a fellow at the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

Working with Mr. Van Hollen, the White House drafted a national security memo similar to his Senate measure. It included a requirement that all recipients of U.S. military aid provide written “assurances” that they had complied with applicable domestic and international law when using American weapons. Israel, the clear reason for the measure, was not singled out by name.

Israel submitted its assurances to the State Department in late March. Mr. Blinken is now overseeing the delivery of the report to Congress assessing “any credible reports or allegations” that U.S. arms have been used to violate the law, and whether the country in question “has pursued appropriate accountability.”

The report must also say whether the country has “fully cooperated” with U.S. efforts to provide humanitarian aid to a conflict area where it has used American weapons.

“This is going to be a test of the credibility of the administration, and whether it’s willing to reach some inconvenient truths,” Mr. Van Hollen said in an interview. “This report is supposed to be driven by hard facts and the law.”

“The question is, what does the Biden administration do to verify any claims? It’s not enough to say, ‘Oh, you know, we’ve asked the Israeli government and they say it’s justified,’” he added.

Experts who track the issue are skeptical that the report will incriminate Israel, at least without finding ways to continue arms deliveries.

The Biden administration rejects such talk. “The same standard should be applied to every conflict everywhere in the world, including this one,” Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, told reporters last week. But the Gaza conflict, he added, is “a little bit more difficult” than most because Hamas fighters hide in densely populated civilian areas.

If the report finds that Israel’s assurances are not credible, it must describe steps “to assess and remediate the situation.” According to Mr. Biden’s original memo, that can include anything from “refreshing the assurances” to cutting off arms transfers.

Mr. Miller has said the department is separately investigating an unspecified number of episodes under the internal policy established by Mr. Blinken in August.

But that system is devised only to encourage policy discussion “to reduce the risk of such incidents occurring in the future,” Mr. Miller said in February. It outlines no specific penalties.