Elon Musk’s pinned tweet is from May. It’s a chart from The Wall Street Journal showing that the US fertility rate has been below the “replacement level” since the 1970s. “USA birth rate has been below min sustainable levels for ~50 years,” was Musk’s contribution to the tweet. He’s been talking about population decline for years, actually. He’s even talked about it as one of the greatest issues facing humanity, and his solution is simple: have more kids, everybody!

Say this for Musk: dude practices what he preaches. Insider reported this week that Musk had twins last November with Shivon Zilis, a star in the AI world, a longtime colleague of Musk’s at OpenAI and Tesla, and a current executive at Neuralink. The twins came to be in the news this week because of an April filing in Texas to change their last name to Musk. They were born in late November, a few weeks before Musk and Grimes had their second kid. (In case you’re counting, that’s now nine known kids in the Musk clan.)

Musk hasn’t technically confirmed the story, but… he kinda confirmed the story? “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” he tweeted on Thursday morning. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” He also tweeted about wanting to build “a highly configurable Robovan for people & cargo,” and now I have a lot of questions and theories about what a self-driving Tesla minivan might be like. But we’ll save those for another day.

There’s been a lot of talk about the Musk family over the last couple of weeks. Musk’s daughter Vivian changed her last name to Wilson earlier this year, saying “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” The publication of that change — and the reason for it — coincided with a rare quiet period from Musk on Twitter. (To be clear, there’s no evidence those two things are related, but the timing is definitely notable.)

There’s obviously nothing wrong with having lots of kids, and we’re not here to litigate Musk’s romantic arrangements. But you just can’t hear about all this without also thinking about Musk’s other conduct within his companies — which goes beyond just secretly having kids with one of your employees. We’ve covered this extensively here at This Week in Elon, but there are the allegations that SpaceX paid $250,000 to prevent a flight attendant from speaking up after Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex (which he has loudly denied). And there are also the long-standing reports of cultures of sexual harassment within both SpaceX and Tesla. These are not isolated incidents or simple misunderstandings. This is just how Musk operates — and how his companies operate by extension.

In an open letter to SpaceX leadership last month, a group of employees asked for, among other things, “safe avenues for reporting” and to “uphold clear repercussions for all unacceptable behavior, whether from the CEO or an employee starting their first day.” The message from inside Musk’s companies has been both loud and clear: there need to be rules, and those rules need to be enforced equally and forcefully no matter your job title. There’s still exactly zero evidence that Musk plays by the rules, acknowledges those rules, or even allows rules to exist in the first place. Musk does as Musk wants — all the time, everywhere. And if you speak out? You get fired, as a number of the letter writers did.

Anyway, in other news… Musk spent the week talking about his love for socks, stealing memes about the Fourth of July and 7-Eleven, taking a few of his kids to see the pope and marking the moment with a photo that looks like everyone was photoshopped into, and making the case that getting to Mars could be a uniting force in the same way that getting to the Moon once was. He’s even back to pumping Dogecoin, though it turns out not even Musk can save the crashing prices of crypto.

The Washington Post reported that Musk’s Twitter acquisition may be falling apart but didn’t provide any reason why other than “Elon is still mad about bots.” Meanwhile, Twitter continues to go out of its way to say it does not have a bot problem. As ever, you should assume the deal is still happening until proven otherwise and that Musk is going to try everything he can to get a lower price.

We also got a couple of small hints this week about how a Musk-owned Twitter might work. When Alex Berenson announced he’d been reinstated to Twitter, Musk asked what Berenson meant by the phrase “the pressures that the government may have placed on Twitter to suspend my account.” He also responded to a year-old Glenn Greenwald thread about social media censorship and free speech by calling it “troubling …” Musk has made himself out to be something of a free speech absolutist and takes issue with the idea of social platforms stifling anyone’s voices.

Which makes it weird, really, that he seemed to have no thoughts about what happened in India this week. The Indian government has been tightening its rules for online speech and demanded Twitter remove certain accounts and posts for violating its new laws. Twitter complied just before the government-imposed deadline but also sued the Indian government in the hopes of getting judicial protection from such orders in the future.

We’ve been saying for a while that Musk’s whole “I love free speech no matter what but also follow the rules of governments” thing was never going to actually work in the real world. He doesn’t even own Twitter yet, and here we are! While he’s commiserating with people who feel canceled over their bad tweets, free speech and government oversight are coming into direct conflict in one of the world’s largest countries, and Musk says nothing. Which is roughly what we’ve come to expect when it comes to these hard decisions.

The thing with Musk is that, in his mind, the ends always justify the means. Always. He has these big goals — make gas cars obsolete, get to Mars, fix traffic, understand the human brain, on and on — and has proven he doesn’t particularly care what it takes to accomplish them. Sometimes that means telling your employees to be okay with grueling stints at work; sometimes it means yelling at them to come back to the office or quit; and sometimes it means forcing them to tolerate a sexist, discriminatory work culture in the name of getting the job done faster. He runs his companies seemingly by the seat of his pants because he just doesn’t care about it — only the end results matter.

And, as ever, the one thing Musk seems to know for sure is that he can always just tweet through the short-term stuff. With every scandal, it becomes a little more obvious why he sees Twitter as so valuable: it’s an unparalleled narrative-control machine with which he can tell 100 million people at a time that everything’s a lie or a joke or not as big a deal as you think or irrelevant because all we should care about is Mars. Twitter is, to borrow a phrase from Apple, Musk’s reality distortion field. And for that, $44 billion is a bargain.

According to a report by Business Insider, Elon Musk is the father of twin children with current Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis. Business Insider shared a court document from this May with Zilis and Musk petitioning for a name change for both children, making “the children’s last name to be their father’s, and for their mother’s last name to be contained in their middle name.” CNN Business obtained a Travis County, Texas, court docket showing the petition was filed in April 2022 and obtained in May.

Seemingly in response to the article, Musk tweeted, “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” followed by “mark my words, they are sadly true.”

According to a LinkedIn page, Zilis is a Yale graduate and has worked at Neuralink, Musk’s company focused on building brain-computer interface technology, since 2017. She also lists a job at Tesla Motors from 2017 through 2019 working on AI with the Autopilot and chip design teams as well as employment starting in 2016 with OpenAI, the nonprofit AI safety group Musk helped found. She has been a board member of OpenAI since 2020. Speaking during the Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI last year, she said she met Musk through her role with OpenAI.

Zilis is from Canada, and her profile lists board seats at two Canadian AI organizations in the past. As the Business Insider report mentioned, she appeared on a Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in 2015 based on her role as a founding member of the investment team at Bloomberg Beta. She’s written about the state of machine learning and was in Do You Trust This Computer?, a documentary about the challenges of AI.

In May, Business Insider reported that one of Elon’s other companies, SpaceX, paid a flight attendant $250,000 in exchange for not suing or speaking out about her allegation that the executive exposed himself and propositioned her for sex. In a tweet at that time, Musk said, “For the record, those wild accusations are utterly untrue.” Women are suing Tesla over “rampant” sexual harassment that some claim had been worsened by Musk’s tweets, and last year, five former SpaceX employees spoke to The Verge about the culture of sexual harassment they experienced working there.

In April, a Vanity Fair report revealed that Elon Musk had a second child who was born via surrogate in late 2021 with his former partner, the singer Grimes, in addition to their son X Æ A-12. Musk now has nine known children, which include the five he cited as a reason for building a grade school for the children of SpaceX employees.

It’s always fun to check in with SpaceX, Elon Musk’s least dysfunctional company — oh wait, what’s this? The workers at SpaceX are upset?

Last week, as first reported by The Verge, a group of SpaceX workers wrote a letter to Musk about his tweets. “Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks,” the letter states. “As our CEO and most prominent spokesperson, Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX — every Tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company. It is critical to make clear to our teams and to our potential talent pool that his messaging does not reflect our work, our mission, or our values.”

The plan was to hand-deliver signatures of those who agreed with the letter to SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, who effectively runs the company. Sure, Musk’s title is CEO, but he’s largely a spokesmodel (although I suppose he’s probably also taken on the project of berating the Starship engineers to go faster). Shotwell’s been working in aerospace since 1988, when Musk was still in college. Musk might be the “ideas guy,” but SpaceX is Shotwell’s show.

This is obvious if you think about it even a little. Consider Tesla, which is the focus of most of Musk’s attention: constantly in crisis mode, incapable of meeting deadlines, and currently pretending that it’s manufacturing a Westworld knockoff robot. SpaceX is not like this! It’s also plagued by delays, but it manages to fulfill its government contracts. There’s much less drama around SpaceX, which can only mean Musk isn’t running it. Someone who’s competent at basic management is — and that’s Shotwell.

But even Shotwell can’t prevent Musk’s chaos from hitting SpaceX, especially now that he’s threatening to take over a major social media company. Thus, the letter, which led to SpaceX firing five people.

Shotwell wrote an email delivered to the entire company that had an actual audience of one — her boss — noting that SpaceX had a lot of work to do and characterizing the letter as interfering with SpaceX employees’ “ability to focus on and do their work.” No mention was made of the actual issues raised by the employees, such as the allegations that the company’s “no asshole” policy isn’t real and neither is its “zero-tolerance” sexual harassment policy. Nor was any mention made of Musk’s bid for Twitter, which is what prompted this cycle of Musk shitposting activity, which, in turn, created a distraction that interfered with SpaceX employees’ ability to focus on their work.

The “zero-tolerance” sexual harassment policy is a particular issue for SpaceX since SpaceX reportedly paid $250,000 to a flight attendant who says Musk exposed his penis to her and offered to buy her a horse if she gave him an erotic massage. This does not seem like a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment; it seems like a zero-tolerance policy for complaints about sexual harassment.

And, besides, Shotwell doesn’t think the case uncovered by Business Insider is real: “I believe the allegations to be false; not because I work for Elon, but because I have worked closely with him for 20 years and never seen nor heard anything resembling these allegations,” Shotwell wrote in a separate email that was also sent to the whole company. “Anyone who knows Elon like I do, knows he would never conduct or condone this alleged inappropriate behavior.”

A company paying out for its CEO’s bad behavior is consistent with an unenforced “zero-tolerance” sexual harassment policy. Five former workers also alleged last year that SpaceX doesn’t take sexual harassment seriously. A former mission integration engineer also posted an essay where she described being groped during her internship and persistent sexual advances during the rest of her career there. “I reported each incident of sexual harassment I experienced to HR, and nothing was done,” wrote Ashley Kosak, the former employee, in her essay. “I was told that matters of this nature were too private to openly discuss with the perpetrators.”

Anyway, back to this recent letter. I don’t know if these now-fired employees are going to take their case to the National Labor Relations Board, though some experts The Verge spoke to last week suggested their firing was illegal. Musk has already had run-ins with the NLRB, which slapped him on the wrist for anti-union activity at Tesla. As part of its judgment against Musk, he was ordered to delete a tweet. It is still live.

Indeed, one service Elon Musk has provided for America is demonstrating exactly how sclerotic our legal and administrative state actually is. I have been waiting with some interest for NASA to say literally anything about this dust-up. I suppose if I wait long enough, NASA will say this is “not appropriate behavior” just like it did with the Joe Rogan weed thing, where Musk hit a blunt on Rogan’s popular podcast. After an investigation following said blunt-hitting, NASA rewarded SpaceX with a bonus $5 million for “employee education.”

I got impatient, waiting for NASA, so I emailed the agency to ask for an interview about how it plans to handle all of this. Spokesman Joshua Finch told me that he’d try to get me a written response but didn’t think he’d be able to meet my deadline. Indeed, he didn’t.

This is kind of an awkward area for NASA, because NASA is also a boys’ club. According to a memoir by Lori Garver, the second-in-command during the Obama administration, Garver was “called an ugly whore, a motherfucking bitch, and a cunt; told I need to get laid, and asked if I’m on my period or going through menopause” when her co-workers disagreed with her.

More to the point, though, SpaceX is the only US company that offers a ride to the International Space Station. SpaceX and Boeing both made deals with NASA as part of the Commercial Crew Program; at the time, NASA was relying on Russian rockets to ferry its astronauts. Boeing’s competing Starliner, which has been beset by delays, has not yet carried people; it only just managed to complete an uncrewed test.

It’s not just NASA that relies on SpaceX. It’s also the US military, though, unlike NASA, the military has options. Just last weekend, SpaceX launched a communications satellite called Globalstar-2, but satellite trackers believe the mission also carried covert payloads, which may or may not be related to the US military.

The Twitter acquisition is occupying less than 5 percent of his time, Musk has claimed. Given how public that 5 percent of his time is, it has an outsized effect on his other companies. Shotwell now has to manage SpaceX through her boss’ increasingly erratic public behavior. But this underlines her actual problem: she’s not really the CEO of SpaceX — even though she is, in many ways, functionally indistinguishable from most CEOs. One difference? When the actual CEO makes a mess, she’s the one who has to clean it up.

Elon Musk may want out of his deal with Twitter, but he has some ideas about how to run the bird app, and they involve layoffs, subscriptions, and… a sarcasm button. Musk turned up on Thursday for a video chat with Twitter employees, and the employees promptly leaked its contents to reporters — including my Verge colleague Alex Heath and The New York Times’ Mike Isaac, who ran a liveblog of the event while it was happening. An apparent digression about aliens notwithstanding, the meeting’s results were fairly predictable but illuminating for anybody who’s spent too much time obsessing over ominous phrases like “authenticate all humans” in the past few months.

In Thursday’s meeting, Musk had the energy of a rich MMORPG fan who buys a studio so he can implement his totally rad spell and weapon designs while beleaguered game designers worry about the day-to-day operations of their jobs. (In fairness to rich gamers, when this once literally happened, at least the devs weren’t imploring their new boss to stop trash-talking them in public.) Twitter employees asked repeatedly about whether they’ll be able to work from home, getting a pledge from Musk that “exceptional” workers can remain remote. In less positive developments, Musk reiterated hints that Twitter will cut jobs to become profitable. That plan sits alongside tactics like upselling Twitter users on subscriptions and adding TikTok-style algorithmic recommendations, plus your average internet-company mainstays like payment processing.

Playing Twitter technoking might be more fun than dealing with the rest of Musk’s business empire this week. Tesla’s cars are getting more expensive (along with everything else) and employees are getting laid off. His lawyers are still seeking a sympathetic court for his years-long tweet-fueled battle with the SEC, and they’ll probably bill Musk a few more hours to handle a crypto buyer’s long-shot lawsuit accusing him of Dogecoin racketeering. The FAA is asking SpaceX to make a round of changes in its Texas launch site, while SpaceX employees are circulating an open letter asking Musk to, for God’s sake, stop tweeting. SpaceX has reportedly responded by firing at least five of them, a move reminiscent of some retaliation that got him in legal hot water back at Tesla.

At Twitter, Musk still has no responsibilities. He told employees that he wants to “drive the product in a particular direction” in the long term, but he’s “​​not hung up on titles” and doesn’t really care about being CEO. For now, he can just dial in on his crappy hotel Wi-Fi and riff on potential new features like an “irony” label that indicates whether tweets are serious or not. But the more Musk talks about what he’d change, the more contradictory his vision gets.

As funny as I find the concept of an irony button, it’s a classic type of addition to the service: something users hacked together a solution for years ago, integrated into the formal interface. (/srs!) But Musk also seems to be simply throwing ideas at the wall and walking them back when questioned, with no clear vision beyond “get a billion users and become wildly profitable,” a far cry from his early calls for unfettered speech. He’s willing to casually propose plans that would upend how Twitter works, but when pressed, he retreats into positions the company has effectively held for years.

Take the aforementioned authentication of “all” humans, something Musk promoted as a way to fight spambots. Verifying that each Twitter user represents a real person would likely be disruptive and erode anonymity, a feature pre-Musk Twitter has fought to preserve. Possibly for that reason, Musk scaled the idea back in Thursday’s meeting, discussing a possible Twitter Blue authentication service where people would pay to prove they’re a human and have their allegedly more trustworthy tweets prioritized. The thing is, Twitter already prioritizes things like replies based on account credibility. And if you’re concerned about freedom of speech, there’s a real tradeoff to massively prioritizing users based on their ability to pay. So Musk’s proposal will either involve slightly tweaking something Twitter already does, or it will seriously compromise ordinary non-billionaire users’ ability to speak.

Musk drew a similarly well-trodden distinction between “freedom of speech” and “freedom of reach” on Thursday. “I think people should be allowed to say pretty outrageous things that are within the bounds of the law, but then that doesn’t get amplified, it doesn’t get, you know, a ton of reach,” he said. “We have to strike this balance of allowing people to say what they want to say but also make people comfortable on Twitter, or they simply won’t use it.” The speech / reach division has been a common talking point for years among platform executives, and reducing sketchy content’s visibility is standard operating procedure for Facebook and Twitter itself. It’s a core piece of the vision for Bluesky, the open-source Twitter offshoot that predates Musk, and more time-tested decentralized platforms like Mastodon have grappled with the complications of the principle.

It’s also a supremely ironic thing for Musk to call for because Musk has complained repeatedly about Twitter restricting the reach of content, particularly his content. In April, he was speculating about a “shadow ban council” suppressing a tweet insulting Bill Gates, and shadowbanning is the purest expression of limiting reach: you can see your pretty outrageous tweet, but other people don’t have to. Musk has suggested that it’s different if the limits are transparent, so Twitter can solve any problems by making its recommendation algorithms “open source” and letting people examine them. As Will Knight at Wired has explained, this is a red herring. There are real benefits to opening up social networks’ algorithmic black boxes, but it almost certainly won’t tell the average person whether their “Bill Gates looks like a pregnant man” tweet should organically have more faves.

Musk has, for lack of a better term, a commitment to a particular free speech aesthetic. He likes provocative trolling and portrays himself as part of a common-sense straight-talking middle of American politics, stating in Thursday’s meeting that he is “the center of the normal distribution of political views in the country.” (It’s true that he has his political bases with both parties covered, but he also recently tweeted support for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — a stridently far-from-centrist Republican — becoming president.) He frequently describes his support for speaking “within the bounds of the law,” repeating the phrase at least three times in the Q&A.

When confronted with the many problems that stated commitment poses, though, Musk sounds like any other risk-averse social network operator. If anything, he seems unusually interested in shaping what gets seen on Twitter. Per Recode’s meeting transcript, one of his big-picture goals is for Twitter to offer a more socially conscious version of TikTok’s powerful recommendation algorithm, pushing interesting and informative tweets to users (I’ve lightly edited the quote for a bit more, uh, clarity):

It’s important to make Twitter as attractive as possible. And really, that means not showing people content that they would find hateful or offensive, or even frankly content they would find boring is not good. We don’t even want them to see boring content. Unless — we were talking about TikTok last night. And TikTok obviously does a great job of making sure you’re not bored.

[…]

You know, TikTok is interesting, but, like, you want to be informed about serious issues as well. And I think Twitter, in terms of serious issues, can be a lot better for informing people about serious issues. I do think it’s important that if there are two sides to an issue, it’s important to represent multiple opinions. But you know, and just make sure that we’re not sort of driving narrative. There’ll be — give people an opportunity to understand the various sides of issues.

TikTok is a fascinating case study on the line between moderation and invasive censorship. It has almost completely escaped accusations of political bias, even during that weird period where Trump wanted to ban it from the country — possibly because the people who shape free speech discourse don’t congregate there much. But far from not “driving narrative,” its algorithm has produced a bizarre emergent vocabulary thanks to soft bans on words like “suicide” and has changed the way a generation speaks. Algospeak is everywhere. It’s the kind of system that should prompt deep consideration of social networks’ power.

Instead, Musk seems as confident as ever in his power to dictate apolitical and neutral moderation — assuming he ever actually gets to wield the banhammer.

SpaceX is starting to make deals with airlines to provide its Starlink satellite internet to sky travelers everywhere. It announced a deal on Monday with Hawaiian Airlines, and last week made a similar deal with charter carrier JSX. None of the involved parties shared the financial details of their deals, but both airlines did say they’re planning to offer the in-flight Wi-Fi for free, which is both a semi-miraculous fact and a sign of hope that free Wi-Fi is becoming the industry standard. Delta meanwhile, confirmed last week that it’s running “exploratory” Starlink tests.

In-flight Wi-Fi has been on the minds of Team Starlink for a while. Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX’s VP of Starlink and commercial sales, said last year that the company was building an aviation product, and was “in talks with several of the airlines.” It’s a natural place for the company to focus, really: in-flight Wi-Fi is a billion-dollar market and growing fast, and it’s currently dominated by Viasat and Gogo, two products nobody would accuse of being fast-moving innovators. And maybe best of all for Starlink, there are none of those pesky trees or buildings in the sky to get in the way! In the long run, there might be lots of competition here, including from companies like OneWeb and Amazon, which are also making big bets on satellite internet. But for now, the industry appears ripe for disruption.

Over the last couple of years, the company has been busy launching more satellites, seeking FCC approvals, and building out the capability to let satellites talk to each other without needing to communicate with ground stations.

When it all comes together, Hofeller promised it’ll be a huge step up in the speed and quality of in-flight Wi-Fi. (Starlink currently promises downloads speeds up to 200Mb/s for its earthbound users.) Now, if you’ve ever paid extra for “fast” internet on a flight, you know just how loosely that term gets used, so don’t get your hopes up too high. And there’s still a lot to work out, both on the regulatory and product fronts, and even Starlink’s existing products have bugs and issues. But the current in-flight bar is definitely low enough to make it easy for Starlink (or someone else) to do better.

Airlines seem to be just as enthusiastic about the idea. Executives have noted repeatedly over the last few years that passenger expectations are way ahead of the available in-flight technology, and things have slowly begun to get better. Delta opened up some bandwidth to allow users to message throughout a flight, for instance, and JetBlue made in-flight Wi-Fi free for its passengers. But there’s still nothing out there that even comes close to rivaling your home internet, or even what you’d get at a crowded coffee shop. SpaceX thinks Starlink can change that, and a number of airlines seem to be open to the idea.

As for when all this is coming to your aisle seat? JSX said it’s already testing Starlink service and plans to roll it out to its fleet later this year, while Hawaiian Airlines said that it’s “in the initial stages of implementation and expect[s] to begin installing the product on select aircraft next year.” That’s a vague timeline, and Elon Musk-owned companies are not exactly famous for hitting their deadlines. But it’s happening. And these are not likely to be the last airlines that start looking for a place to mount a Starlink antenna.

In an attempt to lower gas prices, the Biden administration wants to turn to a fuel that’s potentially even dirtier than regular gasoline, the White House announced today. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to issue an emergency waiver that will allow the year-round sale of a fuel called E15, which is banned in most of the US during the summer months when smog is a bigger risk.

E15 is a gasoline blend with up to 15 percent ethanol — a fuel made of plant material. The move is supposed to save Americans money while reducing dependence on foreign oil supplies because ethanol can be made with domestically-grown corn.

Most gasoline in the US is already mixed with up to 10 percent ethanol. The summertime ban has been in effect since 2011 and was based on concerns that more ethanol in fuel might lead to more smog. The added boost of ethanol could increase the amount of smog-causing pollutants entering the atmosphere. Those pollutants can react with sunlight to create more smog — a big problem during sunnier summer months. Growing all that corn to make the fuel can potentially also result in more greenhouse gas emissions.

The EPA “will work with states across the country to ensure there are no significant air quality impacts through the summer driving season,” a White House fact sheet says.

Fans of E15 have argued for years that the fuel isn’t significantly worse for air quality than other gasoline blends. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have recently introduced bills that would lift restrictions on E15. The Trump administration also tried to roll back the summertime ban in 2019, but a federal court blocked that effort.

The purported costs savings with E15 are a matter of debate, too. The White House fact sheet says that E15 can save consumers 10 cents per gallon of gasoline, on average. But while it might be cheaper, ethanol has about a third less energy than gasoline. So costs at the pump have to be low enough to offset the slight loss in fuel efficiency that comes with a higher portion of ethanol in the fuel.

At the moment, E15 is not very popular in the US anyway. It’s sold in just 2,300 gas stations in 30 states. But that could start to change. The fact sheet distributed by the Biden administration mentions that the “EPA is also thinking about additional action to facilitate the use of E15 year-round.”

“The Administration’s strategy to spur the development of homegrown biofuels is critical to expanding Americans’ options for affordable fuel in the short-term and to building real energy independence in the long-term by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels,” the fact sheet says.

US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg unveiled stricter fuel economy standards today that he said would save Americans money at the pump, as well as help reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change.

“When these standards take effect, Americans buying a new vehicle will spend less on gas than they would have if we hadn’t taken this step,” Buttigieg said at a Friday news conference in Washington, DC. “We estimate that today’s rule will prevent 5.5 trillion pounds of carbon dioxide from going into our atmosphere between now and 2050.”

By 2026, the average new vehicle in the US will get 49 miles of travel per gallon of gasoline (mpg) under the revised Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, Buttigieg said. The new standards will increase fuel efficiency by 8 percent annually for model years 2024–2025 and 10 percent annually for model year 2026. They will also increase the estimated fleetwide average by nearly 10 miles per gallon for model year 2026, relative to model year 2021.

“That means if you’re filling up four times a month, that would become three times a month by model year 2026 based on those averages,” Buttigieg said. “And, of course, that would save a typical American household hundreds of dollars.”

The new standards, which were first unveiled last year, are part of a larger effort by President Joe Biden to reverse the rules put in place by Donald Trump and return to the Obama-era fuel economy standards from nearly a decade ago.

Last August, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed new standards that would increase fuel efficiency by 8 percent annually for vehicle model years 2024–2026 and increase the estimated fleetwide average by 12 miles per gallon for model year 2026, relative to model year 2021. Under the new rules, car owners are estimated to save $140 billion in fuel savings for new vehicles sold by 2030 and $470 billion by midcentury.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a set of parallel rules, said that passenger vehicles would be required to achieve an average of 55 miles of travel per gallon of gasoline (mpg) by 2026 — slightly over Obama’s goal of 54 mpg but a major increase over the 38-mpg rule put in place by Trump. The EPA estimated that the new standard would prevent the release of 3.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide through 2050 and will save car owners $420 billion in fuel costs.

Buttigieg also called on Congress to pass Biden’s stalled Build Back Better package, which would enact a slate of environmental initiatives, including tax cuts for new electric vehicle purchases. “That would take, for example, the American-made electric pickup trucks we saw a lot of ads for during the Super Bowl, from about 40,000 bucks down into the 20s,” he said. “We could do that through policy that is available right now.”

The need for new EV tax credits speaks to the problem with the cars on America’s roads today, which is that many of them are old. There are around 280 million cars and trucks on the road in the US today, only 3 percent of which are electric.

Americans typically buy 16–17 million cars every year, which would mean it would take roughly 16 years of EV-only sales to completely replace all of the gas cars currently on the road. Also, we would need a total ban on the sale and use of gas cars, and so far, the Biden administration doesn’t appear willing to do that.

Last year, Biden signed an executive order directing the federal government to spend billions of dollars to purchase electric vehicles, upgrade federal buildings, and leverage the power of the government to shift to cleaner forms of electricity. And just this week, Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up the mining and processing of key minerals used in batteries for renewable energy and electric vehicles.

The rules would also keep in place the so-called “light-duty truck loophole,” in which vehicles that are bigger and heavier, like SUVs and pickup trucks, are allowed to pollute more than smaller vehicles. The American auto industry has essentially stopped producing small vehicles and sedans in favor of large trucks and SUVs, which have higher margins and are more profitable for automakers. (A spokesperson for NHTSA did not immediately respond to a question about the light-duty truck loophole.)

Electric and hybrid vehicles drove emissions from new cars in the UK down to a record low in 2021, according to new data from a local industry group. But more investments in charging stations and public transport are needed for the UK to meet its goal of cutting emissions by 78 percent by 2035.

Average emissions for new cars fell by more than 11 percent to about 120 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer driven last year, according to UK trade association Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT). That means drivers turning to EVs are helping to shrink emissions from the UK’s biggest source of pollution. Transportation — mostly on roads — pumps out more than a quarter of the UK’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Zooming out, however, private vehicle sales jumped 64 percent this January compared to January 2021. While sales haven’t yet rebounded to what they were before the pandemic curbed commutes, more cars on the road still means more pollution since a majority of vehicles are still gas-guzzling. Even after the number of battery electric vehicle sales more than doubled year on year in January 2022, they still only made up 12.5 percent of new cars registered in the UK that month.

Together with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, some 20 percent of January new car sales can plug into the grid, which the UK is working to decarbonize. While SMMT expects new EV and hybrid sales to keep growing rapidly this year, consumers’ concerns about available charging stations are still a roadblock slowing down EV adoption, the trade group says. The UK plans to ban the sale of internal combustion vehicles from 2030 and hybrid cars from 2035.

Experts say putting more EVs on the road shouldn’t be the only way we address transportation’s contribution to the climate crisis. We also need to reduce the number of cars on the roads overall by designing more walkable cities and making public transportation more robust. Unfortunately, UK roads got significantly more congested with motor vehicle traffic between 1990 and 2019 — part of the reason emissions from transportation haven’t changed much overall despite gains in fuel efficiency and the growing popularity of electric vehicles.

“There is still a mountain to climb to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions from cars. The 90,000 internal combustion engines that rolled off forecourts this month will continue to pollute and hit motorists in their pockets for another 14 years, on average,” Ben Nelmes, head of policy and research at thinktank New AutoMotive, told The Guardian.

While the UK has a long way to go to get rid of planet-heating pollution from cars, much of the world is even further behind. Globally, less than 5 percent of passenger car sales were electric or hybrid vehicles in 2020. And while pollution from transport eased in 2020 as a result of the pandemic, around the world, emissions have already begun to rebound.