sources for farmers. Iowa is now second, after
Kansas, in the portion of electricity it gets from
renewables. In Newton, population 15,000, tur-
bine towers are made in a former Maytag washing
machine factory. In Montpelier, SSAB, a Swedish
steel company, forges turbine parts. The massive
heat comes not from coking coal, as in most steel
mills, but from electric arc furnaces. In two years
the furnaces will be powered entirely by clean
energy, Chuck Schmitt of SSAB Americas told me.
A steel mill in the heartland using wind to make
wind turbine parts: It felt to us like a milestone.
AS A STUDENT at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Robert “RJ” Scaringe strung
clotheslines in his apartment and did other
“time-consuming and challenging” things to
minimize his carbon footprint. Urging people
to forfeit modern conveniences, he determined,
wasn’t a winning strategy. “It’s too hard,” he told
us. Today Scaringe runs electric vehicle start-up
Rivian, which plans to release a sport utility
vehicle and a pickup this year. It also has a deal
with retail giant Amazon to build 100,000 elec-
tric delivery trucks by 2030.
What’s true of renewables is also true of elec-
tric vehicles: Things are changing fast, just not
yet fast enough. Globally, there are five million
electric cars, an increase of nearly two million
in one year. Volkswagen alone plans to build
26 million more in 10 years. But that’s in a world
of roughly 1.5 billion cars and trucks. EVs are just
2 percent of the U.S. market.
Tesla isn’t the only company trying to make
EVs cooler. Ford has unveiled an electric Mus-
tang, Harley-Davidson an electric motorcycle.
But worldwide, drivers are favoring heavy, more
polluting SUVs; there are now more than 200 mil-
lion on the road, six times as many as in 2010.
Scaringe is aiming for that market.
At Rivian’s Plymouth, Michigan, engineer-
ing and design plant, we watched workers zip
about on skateboards. Scaringe, 37, is focused on
vehicles for active, outdoor lifestyles. He plans,
with partners, to build high-speed charging sta-
tions in less traveled places, near the “edge of
the trail.” Much as teenagers can’t imagine life
before social media, Scaringe expects his own
children—all under age five—will never know a
world “where charging wasn’t ubiquitous.”
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS Guttenfelder and I
raced toward our destination: Washington, D.C.
We stopped in Ohio to tour First Solar, the biggest
U.S. manufacturer of solar panels. In Pennsylva-
nia we drove past the Three Mile Island nuclear
plant. Forty years after the notorious accident
that shut down its first reactor, the other one had
just closed as well, because it is too expensive
to run today. Seven other American nukes have
shut down since 2013; seven more plan to by- Much of their carbon-free electricity will
be replaced by emissions-rich natural gas. The
debate about the future of nuclear is complex
and increasingly ideological.
So is the debate around climate change. “Unfor-
tunately, for reasons that are hard to understand,
sustainability has become a very political issue,”
Scaringe had told me. Yet policy shifts at all levels
of government are needed to speed our transi-
tion to clean energy. Can a polarized nation be
brought together around solutions?
Days before starting our trip, I’d visited a man
who’d run for president proposing to do just that.
On an afternoon when CNN was hosting town
halls on climate with Democratic candidates, I’d
driven a Nissan Leaf south from my Seattle home
to Olympia, the state capital, to meet Washington
governor Jay Inslee. Inslee had mapped out plans
for everything from a national renewable energy
policy for utilities to a zero-carbon building stan-
dard. But his presidential campaign never caught
on, and he’d recently ended it.
Seemingly unbowed, he told me a story about
the nation’s ability to move quickly when the will
is there. In 1940 the U.S. Army asked automak-
ers to design a brand-new “light reconnaissance”
vehicle. By the end of World War II, five years
later, workers had built nearly 645,000 Jeeps.
“We are in a movie where we have not seen the
final reel,” Inslee said. “And we have the capabil-
ity of having this be a happy ending.”
A month after leaving Santa Monica, Gutten-
felder and I arrived in Washington. Ducking into
the National Museum of American History, I
spotted Horatio Jackson’s red Winton carriage—
complete with a replica of Bud the bulldog in
goggles. The exhibit, about American road trips,
also highlighted an arduous 1919 cross-country
convoy of military vehicles that had included a
young lieutenant colonel, Dwight Eisenhower.
Later, as president, Eisenhower would champion
the interstate highway system.
A display nearby traced the history of how
highways became necessary. Within a quarter
century of Jackson’s journey, cars had become