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Why is it so expensive to build affordable homes in California? It takes too long

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Guest Commentary written by Jason Ward Jason Ward is co-director of the RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness. He is also an economist at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at Pardee RAND Graduate School. The spiraling cost of housing in California has affected virtually every facet of life. California has the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population and among the highest rates of cost-burdened renters and overcrowded homes. One reason for the seemingly endless upward trajectory of rents is how expensive it is to build new apartments in California. Those costs are a major contributor to “break-even rents,” or what must be charged for a project to be financially feasible.  I recently led a study that compared total apartment development costs in California to those in Colorado and Texas. The average apartment in Texas costs roughly $150,000 to produce; in California, building the same apartment costs around $430,000, or 2.8 times more. Colorado occupies a middle ground, with an average cost of around $240,000 per unit. For publicly subsidized, affordable apartments — a sector that California has spent billions on in recent years — the gap is even worse. These cost over four times as much as affordable apartment units do in Colorado and Texas. There’s no single factor driving these huge differences. Land costs in California are over three times the Texas average. “Hard costs,” or those related to improving the land and constructing buildings, are 2.2 times those in Texas. California’s “soft costs,” which include financing, architectural and engineering fees, and development fees charged by local governments, are 3.8 times the Texas average.  There are some unavoidable California-specific costs, like ensuring buildings are resilient to shaking from earthquakes. But the truly lifesaving seismic requirements explain only around 6% of hard-cost differences, the study estimated. The state’s strict energy efficiency requirements add around 7%. California’s high cost of living may drive up the price of labor, but we found that construction wage differences explain only 6% to 10% of hard cost differences for market-rate apartments. However, for publicly subsidized apartment projects, which are often mandated to pay union-level wages, labor expenses explain as much as 20% to 35% of the total difference in costs between California and Texas.  “Soft costs” in California are a major culprit. California property developers pay remarkably high fees for architectural and engineering services — triple the average cost in Texas. It’s five times as much or more if you’re building publicly funded, affordable apartments in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas.  Read Next Explainers Californians: Here’s why your housing costs are so high by Ben Christopher and Manuela Tobias Seismic engineering requirements play a role. The bigger factor are complex and burdensome design requirements for affordable housing. These are dictated by state and local funding sources, and have little to do with habitability or safety but contribute substantially to these astonishing differences.  Development fees to local governments make up the largest soft-cost difference in California. Such fees, which were the subject of a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court case, average around $30,000 per unit. In Texas, the average is about $800. (Again, Colorado occupies a middle ground at around $12,000.)  In San Diego, for example, these fees on average eat up 14% of total development costs per apartment. But the biggest thing driving up California apartment costs? Time.  A privately financed apartment building that takes just over two years to produce from start to finish in Texas would take over four years in California. It takes twice as long to gain project approvals and the construction timeline is 1.5 times longer.  That means land costs must be carried for longer, equipment and labor are on jobsites longer, and that loans are taken out for a longer term, and so on.  Most of the differences that the study uncovered stem from policy choices made by state and local governments. Many are legacies of the so-called “slow growth movement” in California, which has shaped housing production since the 1980s.  Those efforts worked. Population growth in the state went negative for a few years after 2020, due primarily to the high cost of housing. Even more recently, California’s growth was half the numbers seen in Texas and Florida, with younger and higher earners disproportionately leaving.  These departures have dire implications for the state’s fiscal future and political influence nationally. California recently lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history. If current national population trends hold, it could lose four or five seats in 2030. The California Legislature has become increasingly focused on reducing the cost of living, but meeting this goal requires substantial progress on lowering housing costs. New proposals to exempt urban infill housing production from state environmental law and a package of permitting reforms are steps in that direction.  Will policymakers also take lessons from Texas and Colorado’s cheaper housing methods? That remains to be seen. But the future of California may well hinge on it.

Guest Commentary written by Jason Ward Jason Ward is co-director of the RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness. He is also an economist at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at Pardee RAND Graduate School. The spiraling cost of housing in California has affected virtually every facet of life. California has the nation’s largest […]

Guest Commentary written by

Jason Ward

Jason Ward

Jason Ward is co-director of the RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness. He is also an economist at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at Pardee RAND Graduate School.

The spiraling cost of housing in California has affected virtually every facet of life.

California has the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population and among the highest rates of cost-burdened renters and overcrowded homes.

One reason for the seemingly endless upward trajectory of rents is how expensive it is to build new apartments in California. Those costs are a major contributor to “break-even rents,” or what must be charged for a project to be financially feasible. 

I recently led a study that compared total apartment development costs in California to those in Colorado and Texas. The average apartment in Texas costs roughly $150,000 to produce; in California, building the same apartment costs around $430,000, or 2.8 times more. Colorado occupies a middle ground, with an average cost of around $240,000 per unit.

For publicly subsidized, affordable apartments — a sector that California has spent billions on in recent years — the gap is even worse. These cost over four times as much as affordable apartment units do in Colorado and Texas.

There’s no single factor driving these huge differences. Land costs in California are over three times the Texas average. “Hard costs,” or those related to improving the land and constructing buildings, are 2.2 times those in Texas. California’s “soft costs,” which include financing, architectural and engineering fees, and development fees charged by local governments, are 3.8 times the Texas average. 

There are some unavoidable California-specific costs, like ensuring buildings are resilient to shaking from earthquakes. But the truly lifesaving seismic requirements explain only around 6% of hard-cost differences, the study estimated. The state’s strict energy efficiency requirements add around 7%.

California’s high cost of living may drive up the price of labor, but we found that construction wage differences explain only 6% to 10% of hard cost differences for market-rate apartments. However, for publicly subsidized apartment projects, which are often mandated to pay union-level wages, labor expenses explain as much as 20% to 35% of the total difference in costs between California and Texas. 

“Soft costs” in California are a major culprit. California property developers pay remarkably high fees for architectural and engineering services — triple the average cost in Texas. It’s five times as much or more if you’re building publicly funded, affordable apartments in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas. 

Seismic engineering requirements play a role. The bigger factor are complex and burdensome design requirements for affordable housing. These are dictated by state and local funding sources, and have little to do with habitability or safety but contribute substantially to these astonishing differences. 

Development fees to local governments make up the largest soft-cost difference in California. Such fees, which were the subject of a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court case, average around $30,000 per unit. In Texas, the average is about $800. (Again, Colorado occupies a middle ground at around $12,000.) 

In San Diego, for example, these fees on average eat up 14% of total development costs per apartment.

But the biggest thing driving up California apartment costs? Time. 

A privately financed apartment building that takes just over two years to produce from start to finish in Texas would take over four years in California. It takes twice as long to gain project approvals and the construction timeline is 1.5 times longer. 

That means land costs must be carried for longer, equipment and labor are on jobsites longer, and that loans are taken out for a longer term, and so on. 

Most of the differences that the study uncovered stem from policy choices made by state and local governments. Many are legacies of the so-called “slow growth movement” in California, which has shaped housing production since the 1980s. 

Those efforts worked. Population growth in the state went negative for a few years after 2020, due primarily to the high cost of housing. Even more recently, California’s growth was half the numbers seen in Texas and Florida, with younger and higher earners disproportionately leaving. 

These departures have dire implications for the state’s fiscal future and political influence nationally. California recently lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history. If current national population trends hold, it could lose four or five seats in 2030.

The California Legislature has become increasingly focused on reducing the cost of living, but meeting this goal requires substantial progress on lowering housing costs. New proposals to exempt urban infill housing production from state environmental law and a package of permitting reforms are steps in that direction. 

Will policymakers also take lessons from Texas and Colorado’s cheaper housing methods? That remains to be seen. But the future of California may well hinge on it.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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The Bad River Band is suing to protect its wild rice from an oil pipeline

The lawsuit targets a federal permit for Enbridge’s Line 5, which the tribe says puts wetlands, rivers, and treaty-protected resources at risk.

Around August of each year, when temperatures swell in the Great Lakes region, wild rice — or manoomin in the Ojibwe language — begins to flower. Rice stalks can grow as high as 10 feet in the shallow waters, and to harvest, sticks and poles are used to knock seeds loose into boats or canoes. The harvest is critical each year to the Ojibwe. But those ricing waters are under threat as the Canadian oil transport company Enbridge looks to reroute its controversial pipeline, Line 5, through prime harvesting areas. Now, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, one of six Ojibwe bands in northern Wisconsin, has filed a lawsuit against the United States Army Corps of Engineers, or USACE, to stop construction. “For hundreds of years, and to this day, the Band’s ancestors and members have lived, hunted, fished, trapped, gathered, and engaged in traditional activities in the wetlands and waters to be crossed by the project,” the lawsuit says. In October, USACE granted Enbridge a permit to build a 41-mile addition to Line 5 in order to circumvent the Bad River reservation, but Earthjustice, a nonprofit litigation organization representing the tribe, argues the permit failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. Earthjustice says the pipeline will cross waterways that flow onto the Bad River Reservation and leaks would threaten the watershed and ecosystem, needed for wild rice harvesting and fishing. After the largest inland oil spill from Enbridge’s pipelines in the U.S. in 2010 — flooding more than a million gallons into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan — the largest spill in Wisconsin’s history happened last year. The company reported around 69,000 gallons of oil spilled onto the ground near a rural town in the south of the state. Initially, the spill was reported as two gallons; it was a month before the public officially knew the spill’s size.  Line 5 has operated for more than 70 years and has become a major legal battle for multiple tribal nations in the Great Lakes region. During the 1950s, for the Lakehead Pipeline, the company fitted 12 miles of pipeline across the 124,655-acre reservation to transport oil from western Canada to eastern Canada. Despite the treaty of 1854 that established permanent reservation territory and the treaty of 1842, cementing the right to hunt, gather, and fish, the company did not initiate talks with the tribe on pipeline siting.  In 2019, the Bad River Band sued Enbridge to cease operations on their land, ordering the company to remove its pipeline from the reservation. In 2023, a federal judge backed the nation, ruling that the company had three years to remove its property from the reservation and pay a $5.1 million fine for trespassing. The tribe said the proposed 41-mile addition would impact at least 70 different waterways as Enbridge will need to use explosives and horizontal drilling to build the extension. “Oil and gas contribute to pollution in a number of ways, and the Trump administration is focused on energy dominance,” said Gussie Lord, a member of the Oneida Nation and an attorney at Earthjustice. “It’s cut out renewable energy from the equation to the extent it can, and it just really feels like a backward-looking playbook to me.”  Last year, under the Biden administration, the USACE conducted an environmental assessment on the proposed route rather than an environmental impact study. Environmental assessments allow for faster review, while environmental impact studies are more thorough and require more time and resources to evaluate a project’s impact. They also allow for consultation with tribal nations to determine if a project violates treaty rights, cultural resources, or access to clean water. In neighboring Michigan, Enbridge is also up against tribal nations and state officials in order to operate a nearly 5-mile pipeline segment under the Great Lakes to replace a 72-year-old section of Line 5. This month, a federal judge blocked Michigan from enforcing an order to shut the pipeline down, ruling that pipeline safety is a matter of federal responsibility, not states. In March, the Army Corps fast-tracked a permit for the segment under the Trump administration’s energy emergency declaration, allowing the agency to bypass regulatory laws, like the National Environmental Policy Act. Shortly after, seven tribal nations withdrew from discussions, citing the federal government’s failure to engage with tribal governments. Currently, the initial permit hasn’t been signed or finalized by the USACE. “Until the permit is signed, USACE has not engaged in a judicially reviewable final agency action,” a spokesperson for Enbridge said. “Enbridge will move to intervene in the lawsuit and defend the USACE’s forthcoming permit decision.” In Wisconsin, the Bad River Band has also initiated litigation against the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources over its state permitting of Enbridge in August.  Gussie Lord of Earthjustice said litigation is going to be an uphill battle, but adds that the Bad River Band believes it’s their responsibility to protect the area’s watershed and environment. “We need people who are going to be thinking about what makes sense, for the future, not just 10 years from now, but 50 years, 100 years from now,” Lord said. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Bad River Band is suing to protect its wild rice from an oil pipeline on Dec 23, 2025.

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‘Bonkers': DOI letter halts all five in-progress offshore wind farms

The Interior Department announced Monday it is pausing leases for all five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction in America, citing unspecified issues of national security. Canary Media obtained a copy of a letter notifying one of the affected wind farm developers, providing new details about the…

The Interior Department’s press release about the pause also cites claims not included in the letter to Dominion Energy, including mention of a 2024 Department of Energy study that determined offshore wind turbines could cause radar to ​“miss actual targets” while also noting that ​“wind energy will play a leading role in the nation’s transition to a clean energy economy.” Dominion Energy did not respond to a request for comment.  A spokesperson for Equinor, the partially state-owned Norwegian energy firm that is developing the Empire Wind project off the coast of New York, said, ​“We are evaluating the order and seeking further information from the federal government.”  The Trump administration had previously hit two of the affected projects — Empire Wind and Revolution Wind — with stop-work orders. Both installations were later allowed to proceed, although that construction pause cost Equinor nearly $1 billion. The remaining three projects, Coastal Virginia, Vineyard Wind, and Sunrise Wind, had been spared until now. Several of these projects are more than halfway complete; Revolution Wind is at least 80% finished. Monday’s announcement is not the first time the administration has used national security as an excuse for throwing sand in the gears of offshore wind.  But between 2020 and 2023, the Revolution Wind project endured an extensive regulatory review, including by the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration. BOEM approved the project under the condition that all turbines be built to lighting and marking standards that would ensure they’re visible to aircraft at night. No mitigation for radar is mentioned. In August 2023, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — a branch of the military — co-signed the authorization of plans for Danish developer Ørsted to build 65 wind turbines for the Revolution Wind project.  “Was the military at the table, represented and consulted with during this stakeholder process? The answer is: very much so,” wind energy veteran Bill White told Canary Media in August. From 2009 to 2015, White represented Massachusetts on a BOEM-led intergovernmental task force focused on the siting of New England offshore wind energy areas.  In February 2024, a Brown University research group examined 441 claims made against offshore wind during the first six months of 2023. They found multiple times ​“military readiness” and ​“radar interference” were mentioned in ways that the researchers found misleading or problematic.  “[S]uggesting that our military is unaware of this issue or has done nothing to address it is completely untrue,” the report concluded.  J. Timmons Roberts, a co-author of the report and a professor of environmental studies and sociology at Brown University, called the administration’s halt to five approved wind farms because of classified national security information ​“bonkers.” “These claims aren’t new and they have been, in the past, shown to be quite baseless,” he said. { if ($event.target.classList.contains('hs-richtext')) { if ($event.target.textContent === '+ more options') { $event.target.remove(); open = true; } } }" >

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Dakota Access Pipeline Should Continue Operating, US Army Corps of Engineers Says

By Georgina McCartneyHOUSTON, Dec 19 (Reuters) - The ‌U.S. ​Army Corps of ‌Engineers on Friday released a long-anticipated Environmental Impact ​...

HOUSTON, Dec 19 (Reuters) - The ‌U.S. ​Army Corps of ‌Engineers on Friday released a long-anticipated Environmental Impact ​Statement for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), recommending that operations of the ‍oil pipeline continue with ​some conditions.The EIS, a document required by U.S. law ​to ⁠evaluate the environmental effects of major federal actions, is a win for DAPL operator Energy Transfer and a step closer to the end of a lengthy court battle between the company and ‌nearby Native American tribes, who have been fighting for ​the pipeline's ‌closure.The document recommends the continued ‍operation ⁠of DAPL, on the grounds that safeguards are put in place such as groundwater monitoring, fish tissue residue analyses and water and sediment sampling, as well as the deployment of new leak detection technology.A U.S. court in 2022 ordered the federal government to undertake a more intensive ​EIS of the 1,100-mile (1,800-km) crude pipeline's route as part of the dispute between Energy Transfer and the tribes who have cited risks to water quality as the pipeline runs through Lake Oahe, with the crossing around half a mile north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.The pipeline has continued to operate while the review is being carried out. It is the biggest oil pipeline ​from the Bakken shale oil basin and can transport up to 750,000 barrels of oil per day from North Dakota to Illinois.It is not known whether USACE's ​recommendation will be implemented. (Reporting by Georgina McCartney in Houston; Editing by Paul Simao)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

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We need to grow the economy. We need to stop torching the planet. Here’s how we do both.

The first thing that struck me about this year’s most talked-about policy book, Abundance (perhaps you’ve heard of it?), is a detail almost no one talks about.  The book’s cover art sketches a future where half of our planet is densely woven with the homes, clean energy, and other technologies required to fill every human […]

The first thing that struck me about this year’s most talked-about policy book, Abundance (perhaps you’ve heard of it?), is a detail almost no one talks about.  The book’s cover art sketches a future where half of our planet is densely woven with the homes, clean energy, and other technologies required to fill every human need, liberating the other half to flourish as a preserve for the biosphere on which we all depend — wild animals, forests, contiguous stretches of wilderness. It’s a beautiful ecomodernist image, suggesting that protecting what we might crudely call “nature” is an equal part of what it means to be prosperous, and that doing so is compatible with continued economic growth. It’s a visual rebuke to those who argue that we must choose between the two.  How would we do it?  The US and its peer countries today are spectacularly rich — unimaginably so, from the vantage of nearly any point in human history — and it might be tempting to think that we have grown enough, that our environmental crisis is so grave that we should save our planet by shrinking our economy and freeing ourselves from useless junk. I understand the pull of that vision — but it’s one that I think is illusory and politically calamitous, not to mention at odds with human freedom. A world where economic growth goes into reverse is a world that would see ever more brutal fighting over shrinking wealth, and it is far from guaranteed to benefit the planet. Yet that doesn’t change the essential problem: Climate change and the destruction of the natural world pose grave immediate threats to humans, and to the nonhuman life that is valuable in itself. And we are not on track to manage it.  It’s not easy to reconcile these realities, but it is possible and necessary to do so in a way that’s consistent with liberal democratic principles. Instead of deliberately shrinking national income, we can seek out the areas of greatest inefficiency in our economy and chart a path that gets the most economic gain for the least environmental harm. If growing the economy without torching the planet is feasible in principle — and I think it is — then we should fight for it to grow in the best direction possible.  Inside this story • Meat and dairy, plus our extreme dependence on cars, are two huge efficiency sinks: they produce a big share of emissions and devour land, and they aren’t essential to economic growth or human flourishing. • Shifting diets toward plant-based foods and freeing up land could act like a giant carbon-capture project, buying time to decarbonize. • Reducing car dependence would slash transport emissions, make land use more efficient, and make Americans healthier and safer — without sacrificing prosperity. We’ll need to build out renewables at breakneck speed and electrify everything we can, of course. But some of the most powerful levers we have to decouple economic growth from environmental impact challenge us to do something even harder — to begin outgrowing two central fixtures of American life that are as taken-for-granted as they are supremely inefficient: our extreme dependence on meat and cars.  Changing those realities is so culturally and politically heretical in America that this case is almost never made in climate politics, but it deserves to be made nonetheless. And doing so will require examining the trade-offs that we too often treat as defaults.  Two great efficiency sinks It’s probably not news to you that cars and animal-based foods are bad for the planet — together they contribute around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions both globally and within the US. Animal agriculture also devours more than a third of habitable land globally (a crucially important part of our planetary crisis) and 40 percent of land in the lower 48 US states, while car-dependent sprawl fragments and eats into what’s left at the urban fringe.  We obviously need food and transportation, but meat and cars convert our planet’s resources into those necessities much more wastefully than the alternatives: plant-based food, walking, public transportation, and so on. And in a climate-constrained economy that still needs to grow, we don’t have room to waste. Beef emits roughly 70 times more greenhouse gases per calorie than beans and 31 times more than tofu; poultry emits 10 times more than beans and four to five times more than tofu. Mile-for-mile, traveling by rail transit in the US emits about a third as much as driving on average, while walking doesn’t emit anything.  For all that resource use, animal agriculture and autos are not indispensable to our economy or to our continued economic growth. The entire US agricultural sector, plus the manufacture and servicing of automobiles, make up a tiny share of our GDP; like other advanced economies, America’s is largely service-based, employing workers in everything from health care to law firms to restaurants and retailers like Amazon and Walmart. Of course, agriculture, energy, and manufacturing are foundational to everything else in the economy — without farming, Chipotle and Trader Joe’s would have no food to sell, and more importantly, we would starve. To say that agriculture isn’t a major part of our economy isn’t to say that it’s not really important to having an economy.  But it is, unsurprisingly, those foundational parts of the economy that disproportionately drive resource use and environmental impact — and because they’re a small share of the economy, we have a lot of room to change their composition without crashing GDP.  If we shifted a chunk of our food production away from meat and dairy and toward plant-based foods, for example, the already economically tiny ag sector might shrink somewhat. Meanwhile, we would save a lot of greenhouse gas emissions and land, and it would be reasonable to infer that the food service and retail sectors, which make up a significantly larger share of US GDP than agriculture does, would function all the same because we’d still eat the same number of calories and buy the same amount of food. With less meat consumption, the US might even have a significantly bigger alternative protein sector, with cleaner, better jobs than farm or slaughterhouse work.   Which is not to say there wouldn’t be any losers in the short run — job losses and stranded capital in industries that are regionally concentrated and politically powerful. But those transitions can be managed, just as we have been managing the transition away from fossil fuels.   This is exactly what decoupling — the idea that we can grow richer while decreasing emissions and other environmental impacts — looks like. The US, like a lot of other developed countries, has largely managed that in carbon emissions from energy consumption, which have fallen around 20 percent since 2005, even as the economy has grown about 50 percent in real terms. Agriculture has become more efficient, too, but it still lags on decoupling; the sector’s emissions are mostly flat or rising. Road transport tells a similar story: cars and trucks have gotten more efficient, but total emissions from driving are still stuck near their mid-2000s levels. Admittedly, it’s easier to decouple for energy than it is to change the way we eat or move around. A megawatt is a megawatt, whether it’s produced by coal or solar, while switching from steak to beans is not the same experience. But learning how to use resources more efficiently is, after all, a big part of how wealthy nations have become wealthy, including in these tougher sectors. Despite how inefficient our food system still is, the US has managed to significantly decrease how much land it uses for farming over the last century, while producing much more food. We could go much further if we weren’t so reliant on eating animals.  Now, you might be thinking, so what if American GDP doesn’t depend on meat and cars? People like them, and they’re part of what it means to be rich and comfortable in the modern world. And you would have a point. No one would say that heating and cooling shouldn’t exist (well, the French might) just because they use a lot of energy and make up a tiny share of the economy.   But every choice we make in the economy is a trade-off against something else, and everything we spend our limited carbon budget on is a choice to forgo something else. Our task is to decide whether high meat intake and extreme car dependence are worth that trade — whether they make up for their toll on the planet in contributions to our economy or to our flourishing as human beings.  The “eating-the-Earth” problem We can start with animal agriculture, because however bad for the planet it looks on first impression, it’s actually worse.  Estimates of the livestock industry’s greenhouse gas emissions range from around 12 to 20 percent globally; in the US, it’s around 7 percent (despite the lower percentage, per capita meat consumption is substantially higher in the US than it is globally — it’s just that our other sources of emissions are even higher). But those numbers don’t account for what climate scientists call the carbon opportunity cost of animal agriculture’s land use.  This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter Sign up here for Future Perfect’s biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com! Recall that farming animals for food takes up a massive amount of land, because we need space for the animals and for the crops needed to feed them. Meat and dairy production hogs 80 percent of all agricultural land to produce what amounts to 17 percent of global calories. Much of it could instead be rewilded with climate-stabilizing ecosystems, which would support biodiversity and also happen to be among our best defenses against global warming because of how good they are at sequestering carbon.  How big would the impact be? The canonical paper on the carbon opportunity cost of animal agriculture finds that a 70 percent reduction in global meat consumption, relative to projected consumption levels in 2050, would remove the equivalent of about nine years of carbon emissions, while a global plant-based diet would remove 16 years of emissions; another study concludes that a rapid phaseout of animal agriculture could effectively freeze increases in all greenhouse gases over the next 30 years, and offset most carbon emissions this century. It’s worth pausing to appreciate just how miraculous that is. Freeing up even some of the land now used for meat and dairy turns it into a negative-emissions machine better than any existing carbon capture technology, giving us a carbon budget windfall that could ease the phaseout of fossil fuels and buy time for solving harder problems like decarbonizing aviation. This is as close as it gets to a free lunch, as long as you’re willing to make it a vegan lunch.  Organizing society around cars doesn’t make sense  We can think of car dependence as the other big resource black hole in US society. Transportation is the top source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, and cars are the biggest source within that category, accounting for about 16 percent of all US emissions. Globally, gas-powered cars are in retreat — a very good thing for both climate change and deadly air pollution, though the US is increasingly falling behind peer countries in auto electrification.  Still, if it were just a matter of swapping out gas-guzzlers for EVs, auto transportation wouldn’t be an obstacle to truly sustainable growth. But EVs alone aren’t a silver bullet for repairing the environmental problems of cars.  One influential paper on the subject found as much in 2020, concluding that, at any realistic pace of electrification, EV growth wouldn’t be enough to meet climate targets, and even with universal adoption, EVs aren’t emissions-free. They take lots of energy to make — especially those heavy batteries — and an enormous amount of steel and critical minerals. These are scarce inputs that we also need to decarbonize the electric grid and build other green infrastructure.  That isn’t to say that EVs aren’t better for the climate than gas-powered vehicles — they absolutely are. But as the lead author of that paper wrote in an accompanying commentary, “The real question is, do you even need a car?” The problem is not the existence of cars, but our total dependence on them. In most of the country, Americans have no other convenient transportation options. And remember, we’re trying to optimize for the least resources used for the most economic upside. Organizing society around the movement of hundreds of millions of two-ton metal boxes is… obviously not that, and the reasons why go well beyond emissions from the cars themselves. The car-dependent urban form that dominates America forces us to build things spread far apart — sprawl, in other words — which forces us to use more land. As of 2010, according to one estimate, the US devoted a land area about the size of New Jersey to parking spots alone.   Our cities and suburbs occupy less than one-tenth as much land as farming — about 3 percent of the US total — but they still matter for the environment, fragmenting the habitats on which wildlife and ecosystems depend. Plus, housing in the US is sprawling enough that some exurban communities stretch across outlying rural counties, occupying an unknown additional share of land that’s not included in the 3 percent figure.   Perhaps most damaging from an economic perspective, the sprawling development pattern that car dependence both enables and relies upon has driven the misallocation of valuable land toward low-density single-family homes, driving our national housing crisis. Cars are by no means the sole reason behind the housing shortage, but without mass car dependence, it would be vastly harder to lock so much of our land into inefficient uses. Meanwhile, Americans pay dearly for car dependence in the form of costly infrastructure and tens of thousands of traffic deaths each year. Urbanists sometimes like to say that the US prioritizes cars over people — that an alien arriving on Earth would probably think cars are our planet’s apex species. In some senses, that’s certainly true — the privileges that we’ve reserved for cars make it harder to meet the basic human need of housing, which makes us poorer and diminishes the agglomeration effects that make cities dynamic and productive. One widely cited paper estimated, astonishingly, that housing supply constraints, especially in the highest-productivity cities, cut US economic growth by 36 percent, relative to what it would have been otherwise, from 1964 to 2009. Imagine how much higher the GDP of Los Angeles would be if it doubled its housing stock and population and, with its freeways already maxed out, enabled millions more people to get around on foot, bike, and transit.  And, of course, since autos and animal products are both very high in negative externalities, the benefits of reducing our collective dependence on them go well beyond the strictly economic or environmental. Americans would spend less money managing chronic disease and die fewer premature deaths (in the case of meat and dairy, probably, and in the case of cars, undoubtedly). We would torture and kill fewer animals (and fewer people would have to spend their working lives doing the killing). We would help keep antibiotics working, and we might even prevent the next pandemic.  But will we do it? The growth that brought us industrial modernity is an awe-inspiring thing: It’s given us an abundance of choices, and it’s made obsolete brutal ways of life that not long ago were a shorthand for prosperity, like coal mining or the hunting of whales to make industrial products. Prosperity can be measured concretely in rising incomes and lengthening lifespans, but it’s also an evolving story we tell ourselves about what constitutes the good life, and what we’re willing to trade to get it.  With cars, at least, we might have the seeds of a different story. Dethroning the automobile in car-loving America remains a grueling, uphill battle, and I wouldn’t necessarily call myself optimistic, but transportation reform flows quite naturally from the changes we already know we need to make to solve our housing shortage.  The best way to reduce the number of miles we drive is to permit a greater density of homes anywhere where there’s demand for it, especially in the parts of cities that already have the affordances of car-free or car-light life (and it’s definitely not all or nothing — I own a car and can appreciate its conveniences, while driving maybe a quarter as much as the average American). The housing abundance movement is winning the intellectual argument necessary to change policy in that direction. And maybe most crucially, we know many Americans want to live in these places — some of the most in-demand homes in the country are in walkable neighborhoods. If we make it easy to build lots of housing in the centers of growing cities, people will move there.  But animal agriculture, barring a game-changing breakthrough in cell-cultivated meat, is a somewhat different story. It’s one thing to show that we’re not missing out on economic growth by forgoing meat, and quite another to persuade people that eating less of it isn’t a sacrifice — something the plant-based movement hasn’t yet figured out how to do. At bare minimum, we ought to be pouring public money into meat alternatives research. There’s no shortage of clever policy ideas to nudge consumer choices in the right direction — but for them to succeed rather than backfire terribly, people have to want it. And to that end, I’d encourage anyone to discover the abundance of a low- or no-meat diet, which is an easier choice to make in most of America than escaping car dependence.  Right now, our livestock and our automotive herd squander the resources that could be used to make industrial modernity sustainable for everyone. We grow less than we might because we waste so much on cars and meat. Reclaiming even a fraction of that capacity would make the math of decoupling less brutal, freeing us to build whatever else we can imagine. There’s no guarantee we’ll make that choice, or make it in time — but the choice is ours.  This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Energy
Agriculture
Climate

India’s Push for Battery Recycling Promises Jobs, Clean Energy and Mineral Security

Reusing, recycling and repurposing batteries can reduce dependence on hard to obtain critical minerals and create a $9 billion industry, according to energy analysts

BENGALURU, India (AP) — Across India, battery recycling faces a mixture of challenges and opportunity as it plays an important role in the country's shift to clean power.A fledgling system has taken off in the past decade for recovering materials from the batteries used in electric vehicles, smartphones and other consumer electronics. The valuable minerals these companies recover — such as lithium, cobalt and nickel — are then reused in India’s growing fleet of electric vehicles and solar power installations. Recycling and repurposing batteries is a key to reducing dependence on imports for hard-to-obtain metals. “More than 40% of the country's copper and aluminum needs are met by recycling scrap and we want to aspire for the same when it comes to lithium, cobalt and nickel,” said Rajat Verma, founder and CEO of Lohum Cleantech, a 7-year-old battery manufacturing and recycling company based in Noida near India's capital New Delhi.A formalized system can potentially create 100,000 green jobs and meet nearly 40% of the country’s demand for key minerals, according to a November study by the renewable energy think tank RMI. The report found that an industry around recycling and reusing batteries could be worth $9 billion as India's battery demand skyrockets, mostly due to EVs.“What’s exciting about these materials is it’s not like plastics. You can recycle them for perpetuity and they can still have material strength and the quality you need once you refine them,” said Marie McNamara, a manager with RMI’s India program who was one of the authors of the report.But the system faces challenges. India currently has 60,000 tons of battery recycling capacity, but not all of it is used because supply chains are still being developed to supply the recovered materials to factories. One reason for this is that most of India's waste recycling is done by informal workers — estimated to be as many as four million, who deal with a variety of scrap materials beyond batteries and work without any formal contracts. Gaps between policy and implementation India is among the highest emitters of planet-heating gases as the world’s most populous nation provides power for billions of people. At the same time, its clean energy sector has grown rapidly, led by adoption of solar power and electric vehicles. India's government passed battery waste management rules in 2022 that mandate environmentally safe disposal and management of battery waste. But given the largely informal nature of scrap recycling in India, experts and recycling companies said the rule has been poorly implemented so far. Recycling in an environmentally friendly way is another challenge.The rules mandate producers meet specific collection and recycling targets for various battery types. The rules include heavy fines for violators. However, there are no specific outlets for discarded batteries and each company has to set up their own systems for recycling. Experts said a lack of a well-structured recycling industry makes it difficult for companies to implement the rule. Jaideep Saraswat, an energy expert with New Delhi-based Vasudha Foundation, said India has moved “surprisingly fast from a policy perspective,” but the right battery recycling supply chain is still missing. How battery recycling works A typical electric car battery is about 1.5 meters (5 feet) long, weighs up to 400 kilograms (882 pounds) and is usually designed to last for at least 160,000 kilometers (99,400 miles) which is usually reached after 8 to 12 years of use. Up to 90% of an EV battery's contents can be extracted after use if recycled properly.Recycling processes vary, but two common means are “shredding” battery modules into fine powder using machines or smelting them in industrial furnaces. The products of these processes are often then processed using acids or other chemicals to recover specific metals.Alternatively, discarded batteries can be repurposed to store excess solar and wind energy for homes and small shops. Repurposing involves testing the battery for defects and cleaning its components before it is sold for reuse. Toxic contaminants are at times dumped illegally by recyclers, which can cause environmental pollution, said Nishchay Chadha, CEO of U.S.-based ACE Green recycling, which has operations in India. If not done properly, recycling lithium batteries can emit carbon monoxide and other hazardous gases. The recycling process also usually produces wastewater containing heavy metals that can contaminate soil and water if improperly disposed. “We’ve not expanded much in India because we don’t see much appreciation for clean operations, whether it’s lead or lithium,” he said.RMI’s McNamara urged India to set up training programs to help scrap workers transition to more formal jobs. She said the government at the federal and state level should also provide support to the businesses who can hire these workers. “Formalization will really help drive safety and accountability, especially considering that batteries are both defined by their toxicity as well as their potential,” she said. Reducing dependence on imported minerals Globally, critical minerals such as lithium, nickel and cobalt are essential for products ranging from smartphones to electric cars. However, China controls much of the critical mineral supply chain through mining, refining and processing, according to the International Energy Agency.India doesn’t yet have any operational mines for lithium and some other key minerals, and like most of the world is dependent on its Asian neighbor. Energy experts said that effectively recovering minerals from used products can meet an important need.However, India should take baby steps first, said Chadha of ACE Green Recycling. Chadha said China takes recycling seriously because it's an important part of the supply chain, even though it’s often unprofitable by itself. “They also actually lose money on recycling, but they look at it as part of the whole puzzle where recycling is a critical part and they’re looking at making money across the whole value chain,” he said.Others in the battery sector are optimistic. “If the momentum that is there in India today continues, in my opinion, we can probably create five multibillion dollar giants in this industry,” said Verma of Lohum Cleantech.The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – December 2025

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