There’s a terrific scene in the 2000 political drama The Contender when the president of the United States (played by Jeff Bridges) issues what is, for my money, the most exquisitely crafted backhanded compliment of all time. As he opts not to choose a popular governor to be his vice president, he says to the man he’s just rejected: “You’re the future of the Democratic Party. . . and you always will be.”

That’s basically how electric cars have been perceived for decades. You’re the future of personal transportation . . . and you always will be. We so greatly admire all that you’re doing and all that you stand for—which is why it’s such a shame that you’ll never live up to your full potential.

Fortunately, times have changed. Last week, electric cars finally got to enjoy a white-hot moment of cultural cachet, signifying their transformation from earnest-but-unsexy to undeniably cool. The moment came when Tesla Motors announced that it had received more than 325,000 online reservations, at $1,000 a pop, for the forthcoming Model 3 EV—over the course of just seven days. Assuming that all those reservations turn into actual purchases, they represent nearly $14 billion in future sales. The overwhelming customer response compelled Tesla to pronounce, only somewhat breathlessly, that the kickoff was “the single biggest one-week launch of any product ever.”

Frankly, the inherent un-sexiness of most electric vehicles (EVs) has been a part of their problem. Carmakers have long presented them to consumers as environmentally virtuous alternatives to gasoline-powered cars—and too often they’ve been designed to stand out accordingly, to the extent that many practically scream out: I’m far more concerned about the planet than I am about my own market share! In the late 1990s, especially, automakers apparently assumed that the typical EV buyer was someone who simply didn’t care if her car resembled a prop from a low-budget sci-fi movie or a loaf of bread on wheels.

Hyperbole aside, this is a big deal. It’s not for nothing that the blog post in which Tesla’s announcement appeared was headlined “The Week That Electric Vehicles Went Mainstream.” And while it’s too early to tell how many of those 325,000 reservations will pan out (the $1,000, it should be noted, is fully refundable), the mere fact that so many people didn’t hesitate to part with that much cash now just for the opportunity to pay Tesla another $41,000 a few years from now bespeaks a groundswell of excitement that’s genuinely unprecedented.

Genuinely unprecedented, perhaps, but easily explained. Spurred by the phenomenal success of gas-electric hybrids over the past decade, manufacturers seem to have come around to the idea that EVs deserve the same attention to styling, power, and performance as gas-powered vehicles do. Technology has changed along with the times. In addition to looking sleeker, the next generation of EVs will be able to go more than 200 miles between battery charges, which should help to assuage many drivers’ perfectly reasonable concern—sometimes referred to as “range anxiety”—about reliability and long-distance travel. These batteries are getting cheaper, too, promising to bring the total price of many EVs within reach of the average car customer.

The fundamental consumer and environmental logic behind EVs has never been in question; their delayed entry into the mass marketplace has always been a function of technological and economic limitations. Once the primary hurdle was cleared—the development of an affordable battery that could go hundreds of miles between recharges—all that remained was for someone to put that battery into a sexy, streamlined body . . . and to see how the marketplace responded.

We now have that response, and it’s not only heartening but thrilling. Anyone who doubted that the terms “electric car sale” and “consumer frenzy” would ever appear in the same sentence must now reconsider the possibility that EVs are poised to hit it big, and soon. According to Bloomberg News, 2022 is the year that electric cars will achieve commercial liftoff—the year their price comes down enough to make them actively competitive with gas-powered cars. By 2040, electric vehicles could account for more than a third of all vehicle sales, and given the trajectories of economic S-curves, that figure may actually be conservative. (An animated video accompanying the Bloomberg story helps put the issue in perspective.)

The Peak Oil Myth and the Rise of the Electric Car from Bran Dougherty-Johnson on Vimeo.

It’s fitting that the first vehicle to get hundreds of thousands of consumers demonstrably excited about EVs is made by Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley–based company run by Elon Musk, a larger-than-life futurist who has made no secret of his intent to change the world. Until now, Tesla’s electric cars have been prohibitively expensive for most; the Model 3 is the first of several EVs scheduled to roll off the lines in the next few years (including cars from Chevy and Nissan) that will combine affordability with style and extended battery life. In anticipation of increased demand, Musk is building new plants in order to ramp up production tenfold, from Tesla’s current 50,000 cars a year to 500,000 by 2020.

If Musk succeeds, he may turn out to be one of those rare billionaire industrialists who publicly promise to change the world—and then actually follow through. But regardless of who’s behind the wheel, the automobile world is definitely changing. We appear to have arrived at the moment when technology, design, and demand have fully merged into a verifiable phenomenon, auguring a cultural shift. And the effect of this shift on oil consumption and carbon emissions can’t be overstated.

The future is no longer the future, in other words. For electric cars, the future has arrived. And from the climate’s perspective, not a moment too soon.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Just a few miles east of the White House lies the Eighth Ward, one of the most impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. The community has long struggled with unemployment, which hit a whopping 25 percent during the Great Recession.

Cue the $2.7 million stimulus grant to the nonprofit Washington Parks and People, which was charged with getting folks back to work via green job training. The organization had two years to hire 150 people and plant thousands of trees in urban-blighted parks and streets throughout the city.

For people like Charles Holcomb, a new father, and Michael Samuels, an ex-con looking for a fresh start, the opportunity was life changing, but their new jobs also helped transform their neighborhood. “We just wanted to bring some sunshine to the community,” says a WPP employee who grew up in Ward 8. “I’m tired of having funerals for our young kids.”

Work like this, however, is seldom simple. The new documentary City of Trees showcases some of the obstacles local green projects face—from community distrust to the struggle for government funding. But when neighbors can come together in green spaces that they’re proud of, roots of change can take hold.

City of Trees aired on World Channel as part of the nationally broadcast series America ReFramed. It is also available online here.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

And so concludes Moby-Dick. Perhaps when he wrote those lines more than a century and a half ago, Herman Melville was implying that the sea would remain the same despite mankind’s hubris in attempting to conquer it.

If only that were true. Whether by overfishing, pollution, melting sea ice, or acidification, humans have changed the ocean more than we ever thought possible during Melville’s time. Luckily, humans can change, too.

Let me introduce you to John Morrison, a New Englander on a mission to save whales in the Arctic. For the past 15 years as a conservation planner for the World Wildlife Fund, he’s been studying how climate change is affecting some of the planet’s northernmost seas and the species that rely on them. But recently, a genealogy side project of his has unearthed an interesting, if troubling, tidbit from his family tree: Morrison’s great-great-great-grandfather, Lewis Herendeen, and Lewis’s brothers, Ned and Alonzo, were prominent Arctic whalers. What’s more, these men captained ships in the Beaufort, Chukchi, and Bering Seas—the very same waters their descendant now works to protect.

Morrison finds the coincidence fascinating. “The fact that here they were decimating bowhead whales, hunting seals and walrus, really laying those populations low without giving it a second thought…” he says, trailing off. “Now I’m working in the same area trying to reverse some of that damage.”

As Morrison has been digging into his family’s past, climate change has been coaxing the ocean to cough up its own secrets. Last fall, thanks to warmer weather and reduced sea ice cover, archaeologists were able to discover the remains of two 19th-century whaling ships. The scientists believe the vessels were abandoned during the Whaling Disaster of 1871, when a sudden surge of sea ice in August entombed 33 ships. The captain of one of those ill-fated whalers, the Mary, was Morrison’s great-times-three Uncle Ned.

While all of the seamen involved in the disaster escaped with their lives, the convoy had to jettison its haul of whale oil and baleen and return home empty-handed. In today’s money, that would be like throwing $33 million overboard. Some argue that this was the beginning of the end of the commercial whaling industry in America, which had already been struggling to compete with a newfangled energy source: petroleum. (If you’re interested in the economics of whaling, I can’t recommend this United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries report enough. Literature bonus: It’s written by a guy named Starbuck.)

Now, almost 150 years later, oil is replacing harpoons as one of the biggest threats to Arctic whales. And if you look at where the 1871 disaster took place on a present-day map, you’ll notice that oil and gas leases now pockmark that very same stretch of sea. While companies such as Shell have recently signaled a retreat from the Arctic, the Obama administration recently announced plans to open up big, new leases in 2022.

“If there were a big spill here or some sort of an accident, the consequences for migrating whales would be just catastrophic,” says Morrison. Bowhead whales, which can grow to 60 feet in length, use these waters as a migratory corridor—which is, of course, why his ancestors were drawn there in the first place.

Now let’s get back to that other huge consequence of the oil industry: climate change. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and that temperature shift could alter the flow of nutrients from the deep ocean to the surface. But will this damage Arctic habitats or just reshape them?

To find out, Morrison and WWF have been using a spatial analysis tool called RACER (short for Rapid Assessment of Circum-Arctic Ecosystem Resilience). RACER identifies potential high-biodiversity areas and then quantifies the factors that may play into their ecological success. These could be anything from underwater topography and temperature to water currents, ice cover, and proximity to the mouths of rivers. Morrison and company then look at how climate change might affect each of those variables and try to predict what a certain biodiversity hot spot might look like in the next 50 to 100 years.

So far the researchers have some good news and some not-so-good news (especially for landlubbing species). First, according to RACER data, it doesn’t seem that climate change will cause any kind of colossal ecosystem collapse in areas of high biodiversity—and some of these places may actually get a bio-boost. As sea ice recedes earlier and faster each year, the ocean’s surface will become more exposed to winds that churn up the water below, creating more intense upwellings of nutrients. While that would be welcome news for whales and other creatures below the waves, the loss of sea ice will be terrible for polar bears, seals, walrus, and other animals that depend on it for survival.

If we can understand just how the sea will react to a changing climate, says Morrison, we can adapt our conservation plans to that new normal. For instance, if RACER points toward a certain area as being really crucial for biodiversity in the next century—say, Barrow Canyon, just north of Alaska—then ramping up conservation efforts there now may help make the best out of a bad situation. Doing so could mean banning new oil and gas leases or closing the area to another potential whale killer, ship traffic, which experts say will increase as the sea ice shrinks.

* * *

After a group of Native Alaskans—who were legally subsistence hunting—killed a bowhead off the coast in 2007, they found an antique harpoon head embedded in the animal’s body. Experts say the harpoon was likely manufactured in New Bedford, Massachusetts, home to Morrison’s ancestors, the Herendeens of the High Seas. But even more interesting is that the patent on this harpoon (which was designed to explode on contact) dates back to 1879 and the technology was only used over the following decade or so, putting the whale at between 115 and 130 years of age. Other bowheads, scientists have estimated, reached 135, 172, and 211 years before meeting their fate at the end of a harpoon. This would make them the oldest living mammals on earth.

If bowhead whales can live past the two-century mark, there’s a chance that some of the very same animals the Herendeens chased across the Arctic are still plumbing the depths that their great-great-great-grandson and nephew has dedicated his life to protecting. In the whale’s lifetime, the seas did change. But so did people—and so, again, can their fuel source. 

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.