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Sitting on a hillside between the mountains and the ocean in Lahaina, Hawaii, this new neighborhood of brightly-colored cottages did not exist a year ago. The housesmost of which were built in factories in Colorado and Idaho and delivered to Maui on a bargeare temporary homes for families who lost everything in the Lahaina wildfires in 2023. Theyre also a new type of housing for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Built to meet local and international building codes, theyre very different from the cheap, toxic trailers that FEMA deployed 20 years ago, when Hurricane Katrina displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Some of those trailers had formaldehyde levels that were 75 times greater than safe levels. They were poorly insulated and never meant for long-term housing, but some families were stuck in them for years. [Photo: Liv-Connected] The cottages in Hawaii, by contrast, use materials chosen to maintain healthy air quality. The homes are filled with light, with huge windows and high ceilings. They were built to be durable, with the potential to be turned into affordable long-term housing after their temporary use. They could be a model for future disaster response. But as the Trump administration pushes to dismantle FEMA, its not clear what will happen to the homes nowor what will happen during the next disaster. [Photo: Liv-Connected] Rethinking disaster housing Liv-Connected, the New York City-based modular home company that designed most of the new Hawaiian cottages, didnt originally plan to build disaster housing. But the startup, founded in 2019, got attention from the disaster relief world after it made some early prototypes. The companys first goal was to lower costs by making transportation easier for modular homes. The team saw the potential of building Lego-like homes efficiently in factories, but it also saw that other modular companies had failed in part because the homes were expensive to move, and building big factories in multiple locations was even more expensive. We just said, all right, our modular can be differentits going to fit on a flatbed truck, says Jordan Rogove, CEO and cofounder of Liv-Connected. We worked backward from there: How do we get a really great house that fits on a standard flatbed? [Photo: Liv-Connected] While shipping a fully constructed volumetric modular house might require a couple of oversize trucks and cost $16 to $18 a mile, a home that fits on a flatbed truck could cost $2 to $3 per mile instead. The companys basic design includes some fully built pieces, like the kitchen and the bathroom. But most of the house can be flat-packed and then quickly assembled on-site. The installation in Hawaii turned out to be different. Because the homes needed to travel more than 2,000 miles over the open ocean on a barge, it made sense to fully build each house and ship them in complete, watertight sealed units. (Future homes delivered to the continental U.S. could use the less expensive flat-packed version.) But there were other reasons that FEMA picked Liv-Connected to provide more than 100 homes for the site. [Photo: Liv-Connected] The houseswhich range from a 480-square-foot one-bedroom unit to a 980-square-foot three-bedroom homeare designed to help improve well-being, with high ceilings, wood-paneled walls, and outdoor views. “It’s just more generous and dignified,” Rogove says. “Our understanding of providing accommodations like that is that healing happens a lot faster.” Outside, the homes are painted in different colors, both as a nod to buildings that were lost in the fire and to help the development feel more like a neighborhood. “I think the issue with those FEMA trailers is that they’re all identical, and then it starts to have this quality of barracks,” he adds. “So there isn’t a sense of neighborhood or a community.” [Photo: Liv-Connected] The homes are also designed to last, with fire-resistant siding and tight insulation. They could stay in good condition for decades, versus months or a few years for an old FEMA trailer. “In our discussions with FEMA, you really need to do better for people,” Rogove says. “If you are willing to spend upward of 20% to 30% more than you would for a trailer, you can have a home that could be used for up to 30 years. So it could be deployed multiple times as opposed to a single deployment and then basically tossed into the garbage.” [Photo: Liv-Connected] Building the neighborhood After the wildfires in August 2023, FEMA invited developers to submit proposals for the homes the following March. In late June last year, Liv-Connected learned that it was selected to provide 109 homes in a first installment. (Two other companies provided a smaller number of houses, with 167 total in the development.) Then it worked with two manufacturing partners to begin building. One of FEMA’s requirements was that the homes would be delivered by November 2024. “We effectively had about two months to build 109 homes,” Rogove says. “And then another two months to have all of them installed.” At the same time, engineers were preparing the site. Hawaii offered state-owned land for FEMA’s temporary use at no cost. At a Colorado factory owned by Liv-Connected’s partner Fading West, a crew of workers spent 12-hour days on the project, building as many as 10 homes each week. Guerdon Modular Buildings, in Idaho, was contracted to build the final 25 homes, and it finished in two weeks. Then the houses were trucked to the Port of Seattle and spent three weeks on a barge to Maui. Just before Thanksgiving, families started moving in. The process was incredibly fast, although the factories say that it could be even faster if FEMA could preapprove particular designs. “If FEMA had a library of preapproved modular plans, we could start production within seven to 10 days of a natural disaster, Tommy Rakes, CEO of Guerdon, said in one case study of the project. These homes could be shipped anywhere in the continental U.S. in three to five days, installed, and occupied within a day. In under three weeks, displaced victims could have permanent homes. Having additional factories in some areas could also help. Fading West has talked to the Hawaiian government about the possibility of setting up a local modular housing factory to avoid long-distance transportation. The state also sees the potential for modular housing as a way to help it deal with the affordable housing crisis. [Photo: Liv-Connected] An uncertain future In FEMA’s original plan, families would have up to five years to live in the homes in Lahaina, paying a fair market rent that’s limited to 30% of a household’s gross income. But the development may now close as soon as next February. FEMA would have to grant an extension to the state to keep it open later and continue providing financial assistance. The agency says that the state’s request is currently under review, but it didn’t provide more details. It’s not clear what will happen next, or where the homes will end up when the project ends. Trump has called for eliminating FEMA and tried to cut billions in disaster funding. FEMA originally planned to build another 231 modular disaster relief homes in Lahaina, Rogove says, but that doesn’t appear to be moving forward. “It’s been absolute silence,” he adds. “So I think the likelihood of that happening seems to decrease day by day.” FEMA says that it isn’t planning another 231 homes. In future disasters, it’s not clear how FEMA will handle housing or what role modular homes will play, though the agency says that modular homes may be considered when they’re a fit for local requirements. It’s possible that states may push the solution forward faster. In Maui, the state of Hawaii partnered with a nonprofit developer on another modular neighborhood built near the FEMA site. Texas has explored the idea of building modular housing in advance and storing the units in warehouses in key citiesready to deploy in a disaster. In California, Liv-Connected and other modular housing manufacturers are offering options to residents trying to rebuild after the Los Angeles fires. “What we’ve seen so far is states stepping in to fill the gap, in the absence of the clear organizational order that was there before,” Rogove says. “I think that’s probably what it’s going to look like for the next several years. That fills me with hope for the states that have the capacity to do that. And I have a lot of reservations for states that don’t have those types of resources.” In Hawaii, the state government says that FEMA’s assistance has been critical over the last several years through hurricanes, flooding, fires, and volcanic activity. “While state, local, and private resources have supported recovery, they are limited in scale and speed,” Gov. Josh Green wrote in a recent letter about the agency. “Timely federal deployment remains crucial to meeting the needs of affected communities.”
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E-Commerce
When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, it was the largest climate bill in U.S. history, with major incentives for electric vehicle production and adoption. In its wake, investment in the U.S. electric vehicle industry accelerated. But in 2025, President Donald Trumps so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated most of the incentives, and U.S. investment collapsed. Hitting the brakes on electric vehicles will clearly mean less progress in reducing transportation emissions and less strategic U.S. leadership in a key technology of the future. But in a new study, my colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University and I find that fewer electric vehicles will also mean less investment to clean up the electricity sector. How we got here U.S. electric vehicle adoption lags behind the rest of the worldespecially China, which has invested heavily and strategically to dominate electric vehicle markets and supply chains and to leapfrog the historical dominance of American, European, and Japanese manufacturers of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Electric vehicles are much simpler to engineer, and this opened a window for China to bet big on EVs with investment, incentives, and experimentation. As battery prices dropped dramatically, electric cars became real competition for gasoline carsespecially for the massive Chinese market, where buyers dont have strong prior preferences for gasoline. China now dominates the supply chain for battery materials, such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese, as well as the rare earth minerals used in electric motors. In 2022, the U.S. took action to change this trend when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. The law encouraged EV adoption by lowering costs to manufacturers and consumers. But it also encouraged automakers to find ways to build EVs without Chinese materials by making the largest incentives conditional on avoiding China entirely. After the law passed, investment soared across hundreds of new battery manufacturing and material processing facilities in the U.S. But in 2025, Congress passed and Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which eliminated most of the incentives. U.S. investment in EV-related production has collapsed. Electric vehicles are cleaner As a scholar of electric vehicle technology, economics, environment, and policy, I have conducted numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies characterizing the benefits and costs of electric vehicles over their life cycle, from production through use and end of life. When charged with clean electricity, electric vehicles are one of the few technologies in existence that can provide transportation with near-zero emissions. With todays electricity grid, EV emissions can vary, depending on the mix of electricity generators used in the region where they are charged, driving conditions such as weather or traffic, the specific vehicles being compared, and even the timing of charging. But EVs are generally better for the climate over their life cycle today than most gasoline vehicles, even if the most efficient gas-electric hybrids are still cleaner in some locations. EVs become cleaner as the electricity grid becomes cleaner and, importantly, it turns out that EVs can even help make the electricity grid cleaner. This matters because transportation and electricity together make up the majority of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and the passenger cars and light trucks that we all drive produce the majority of our transportation emissions. In its efforts to prevent the government from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, the Trump administration is now claiming that emissions from cars and trucks are not meaningful contributors to climate change. But in reality, a technology that cleans up both transportation and electricity at the same time is a big deal. Across most of the U.S., adding electricity demand, such as from increasing the use of electric vehicles, would spark development of clean-energy power plants to meet that rising need. [Image: Michalek et al.] An opportunity for cleaner electricity Our research has found that turning away from electric vehicles does more than miss a chance to curb transportation emissionsit also misses an opportunity to make the nations electricity supply cleaner. In our paper, my coauthors Lily Hanig, Corey Harper and Destenie Nock, and I looked at potential scenarios for electric vehicle adoption across the U.S. from now until 2050. We considere situations ranging from cases with no government policies supporting electric vehicles to cases with enough electric vehicle adoption to be on track with road maps targeting overall net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In each of these scenarios, we calculated how the nations power grid and electricity generators would respond to electric vehicle charging load. We found that when there are more electric vehicles charging, more power plants would need to be builtand because of cost competitiveness, most of those new power plants would be solar, wind, battery storage, and natural gas plants, depending on the region. Once wind and solar plants are built, they are cheaper to operate than fossil fuel plants, because utilities dont need to buy more fuel to burn to make more electricity. That cost advantage means wind and solar energy get used first, so they can displace fossil-fuel generation even when EVs arent charging. A virtuousor viciouscycle Our analysis reveals that whats good for climate in the transportation sectoreliminating emissions from vehicle tailpipesis also good for climate in the power sector, supporting more investment in clean power and displacing more fossil fuel-powered generation. As a result, encouraging electric vehicle adoption is even better for the climate than many people expected because EV charging can actually cause lower-emitting power plants to be built. Gasoline vehicles cant last forever. The cheap oil will eventually run out. And EV batteries have gotten so cheap, with ranges now comparable to gas cars, that the global transition is already well underway. Even in the U.S., consumers are adopting more EVs as the technology improves and offers consumers more for less. The U.S. government cant single-handedly stop this transitionit can only decide how much to lead, lag, or resist. Rolling back electric vehicle incentives now means higher emissions, less clean energy investment, and weaker U.S. competitiveness in a crucial industry of the future. Our findings show that slowing electric vehicle adoption doesnt just affect emissions from transportation. It also misses opportunities to help build a cleaner power sector, potentially locking the U.S. into higher emissions from its top two highest-emitting sectorspower generation and transportationwhile the window to avoid the worst effects of climate change is closing. Jeremy J. Michalek is a professor of engineering & public policy, professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
The aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah, has been a maelstrom of misinformation and hatred, revealing how polarized social media and the past decade of digital conflict have left us. One of the most unsettling signs that something fundamental has broken in our sense of reality comes from a seemingly trivial detail: Donald Trumps pinky finger. In a White House statement mourning Kirks death, many viewers focused less on the presidents words than on the video itself. The high-contrast footage was scrutinized for evidence that it had been manipulated by artificial intelligence, and some viewers claimed they found undeniable proof. At one point in the clip, Trumps left pinky finger appears to merge with the others as he clasps his hands on the desk. Conspiracy theorists have seized on this, arguing it showed the president as proof that Trump didnt make the statement at all, or that it was highly doctored. The reality is far more prosaic. A mix of the Trump White Houses preferred color tinting, combined with the low resolution and compression of digital video on social media, can cause frames to collapse or distort. Compression adds digital artifacts. Put it all together and you end up with something that makes a metaphorical mountain out of a molehill. Before rushing to dismiss those who are crying foul, it helps to consider the broader context. Such conspiratorial thinking is easier to understand in a world awash with generative AI. When AI image and video generation tools that are capable of producing something not dissimilar to the Trump video are just a Google search away, it becomes easy to question everything. Seeing is no longer believing. Early signs of this shift have already disrupted public discourse. When Catherine, the Princess of Wales, revealed her cancer diagnosis in a video shared on social media in March 2024, it was done so as a way to quell rumors that she had died. Even with video proof, many people insisted it was AI-generated. At that time, the technology was not advanced enough to make such a fabrication plausible. Since then, though, tools have improved dramatically. The release of Googles Gemini AI image generator (nicknamed Nano Banana during its development) made it possible to create images nearly indistinguishable from reality. Paired with new video-generation systems, it is now entirely feasible to replicate the look of Trumps official White House video. In fact, it could be done quickly and cheaply. These powerful tools have been a gift in many respects. Yet they are also unraveling our shared sense of reality. Add them to the toxicity of our modern discourse, and the cracks in public trust deepen into fractures. What counts as real is no longer obvious even to the most attentive observer. And that should alarm us all.
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E-Commerce
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