News Reporter: Climate Coach: The $2,100 electric car 🚙

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Climate Coach
Down-to-earth advice for life on our changing planet.

(Illustration by Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; iStock)

By Michael J. Coren

Welcome. This week, Bug B&Bs and billionaire climate taxes. But first, the $2,100 electric car.

I purchased my last car, a used 2010 Honda Fit with 60,000 miles on it, for a few thousand dollars. After years of transporting my family on California road trips, my purple workhorse, "Blackberry," was still humming more than a decade after rolling off the factory floor.

Does such a deal exist for all-electric fans?

Until recently, a cheap electric car was a contradiction in terms. The average price of an EV in 2022 reached $66,000, about $17,000 more than a comparable gasoline vehicle. The cheapest ones couldn't compete with budget gasoline cars. Used ones, if you could find them, sometimes sold for more than the original price.

But the gap is shrinking fast. In some cases, it no longer exists. New EVs are expected to reach price parity with gas cars around 2027. Used EVs, in some cases, are already there or sell for less thanks to generous government incentives, rising supply and fierce competition.

Automotive analysts say the market for buying a used EV has never been this good or this big: Used electric car sales hit a record of roughly 400,000 vehicles last year, double the volume in 2020, as prices sink to record lows.

And used EVs may be key to decarbonizing our roads. "For every new car, there are two used ones on the road," says Liz Najman, a climate researcher and director of market insights at Recurrent, a start-up monitoring EV battery health. "To meet any climate targets, we need to have people comfortable driving in a used EV."

So, is it now possible to get the equivalent of an electric Blackberry?

Read my column to find out how you can score a deal.

I found an EV for $2,100.

Write me with your questions at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails.

Click here to read the column

Field Sample

Florida, home to the world's third-largest reef, has lost 90 percent of its corals over the past 40 years. Can humans save them?

The Post's Amudalat Ajasa, Whitney Leaming and Carolyn Van Houten dove in the waters off Key Largo to see how a team led by Sam Burrell, a senior reef restoration associate at the Coral Restoration Foundation, the largest nonprofit coral restoration group in the Florida Keys, is trying to save them.

The organisms, survivors of mass extinctions that have outlived the dinosaurs, sustain underwater habitats nurturing more than 7,000 other marine plants and animals. Burrell's team and others are rescuing and repopulating corals to restore parts of Florida's 360-mile-long coral reef: "Returning these corals felt a bit like a loved one leaving the hospital," says Burrell.

But after another summer of catastrophic loss, when shallow-water temperatures reached 101 degrees in places, some scientists are wondering whether coral rescue efforts are a last line of defense or "false hope?" Read more here.

Learning Curve

Brian Deese, a fellow at MIT and director of the National Economic Council from 2021 to 2023, argues China manufactures too much, especially for the clean energy economy.

China's manufacturing surplus (the gap between the value of manufactured goods it exports and those it imports) represents nearly 2 percent of global gross domestic product, exceeding that of Japan in the 1980s and Germany in the early 2000s.

That has three impacts, Deese argues in an opinion piece for The Post: limiting China's own growth prospects, hollowing out the industrial base of the United States and other countries, and threatening the long-term viability of the energy transition by ensuring unsustainably low prices.

"The right approach," he says, "is for the United States to build an international coalition to send a clear message to China that its current policy choices are neither acceptable nor sustainable." Read more here.

Snapshot

Jet stream winds scooped up a thick plume of Saharan dust turning skies orange across North Africa and parts of southern Europe last week. The hot, dust-laden air shattered temperature records with several countries observing their hottest April weather on record, including a temperature spike to 102.7 degrees in Cyprus, the hottest April day in history.

Here, a couple sits on a hill in Athens on April 23 amid clouds of Saharan dust, one of the worst such episodes to hit the country since 2018.

Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images

The Second Degree

After writing about how to give insects a home (and avert the insect apocalypse), many of you wrote to share your stories. "I wish someone would inventory the insects on my property, after 38 years of NO pesticides," wrote JB of Yellow Springs, Ohio. "Every year I see new ones. I have trophic levels all the way up into trees, numerous ponds and marshes, all native grasses and sedges with plenty of flowers sprinkled in."

Jennifer Savage of the Surfrider Foundation's Plastic Pollution Initiative, a San Clemente, Calif.-based environmental nonprofit, found a second act for her vegetable garden. "Since I live in a relatively rainy place and lack time to properly garden in the first place, we have by default created lazy garden in our backyard," she wrote. "But we also deliberately allow the kale, broccoli, etc., to continue on after bolting, as the bees and other pollinators seem to adore the flowers."

On the Climate Front

From The Post:

Cicadas are emerging — and they're so loud, some called the sheriff.

This is why the U.S. struggles to replace millions of lead pipes. 'We're just stuck.'

Our special report, The Drowning South, shows where the seas are rising at alarming rates.

Here is what happens when a motor sport goes all-electric.

From elsewhere:

South Koreans accused the government of violating their constitutional right to a healthy environment over climate inaction, the first such case in Asia, reports NPR.

Don't worry about Tesla and its rivals, admonishes the Economist. EV demand is likely to pick up.

Economist Esther Duflo, the youngest person to win the Nobel Prize in economics, is proposing a billionaire tax to pay for climate damages, reports Heated.

Solar is about to get a lot more affordable for low-income households, says Canary Media

Eileen Haflich of Penngrove, Calif., shared her "Bug B&B" assembled from materials in and around her home.

"The structure was removed from a former aviary and repurposed into a chicken coop," she writes. "I don't know how many bugs are residing, they have requested 'Do not disturb.'"

Send me your photos and stories at climatecoach@washpost.com