Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a news conference in Jerusalem, May 25, 2021.

For decades, the Democratic Party has stood by Israel in times of war and peace.

Today, that support no longer looks so solid. In the Democratic-controlled Congress, more lawmakers are calling out Israel for its actions in its latest conflict with Hamas that ended in a cease-fire last week. And this poses a dilemma for President Joe Biden, a staunch ally of Israel who has vowed to make human rights a priority, not an afterthought in his administration.  

On May 15, after the U.S. blocked United Nations efforts to seek a cease-fire in Gaza, where Israeli airstrikes had leveled residential buildings in retaliation for Hamas rockets, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, issued a caustic tweet. “If the Biden administration can’t stand up to an ally,” meaning Israel, “who can it stand up to? How can they credibly claim to stand for human rights?”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other Democratic critics say the United States looks hypocritical for standing unwaveringly by Israel even as it took actions in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Hamas-controlled Gaza that a mounting international chorus condemned as gross violations of Palestinian rights.

And it’s not just firebrands in Congress who are challenging Mr. Biden to steer away from a traditional “Israel first and unquestioned” approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and toward a more nuanced and balanced approach that puts human rights at the fore.

Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime staunch Israel supporter, issued a statement on the same day as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet. He called out Israel for “the death of innocent civilians” and for targeting a Gaza high-rise in which international media outlets had offices.

Taken together, this amounts to a wake-up call for the White House that the Democratic Party has now shifted on how it sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the U.S. role in addressing it.

“What we’ve seen over the past two weeks is a tectonic shift in the American approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and primarily from Congress, away from the standard ‘I stand with Israel’ response to a focus on the human rights and inalienable rights of the people suffering in this,” says Hadar Susskind, president of Americans for Peace Now, a Jewish organization supporting both Israel and an equitable settlement of the conflict.   

“No one is saying that standing with Israel is a bad thing,” he adds, “but rather that the same response people have given for 30 years in these situations is not a whole answer in terms of what we’re doing on the ground to make things better for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks to reporters in Washington, May 13, 2021. After the U.S. blocked United Nations efforts to seek a cease-fire in Gaza, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “If the Biden administration can’t stand up to an ally, who can it stand up to? How can they credibly claim to stand for human rights?”

Greater sympathy in Congress

The shift reflects a set of domestic factors, ranging from a more diverse class of Democratic members of Congress more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and young American Jews willing to be more critical of Israel, to a backlash to President Donald Trump’s “Israel yes, Palestinians no” approach.

For some, a year of U.S. and indeed global focus on issues of race and institutional discrimination following the death of George Floyd has also placed a new spotlight on the inequalities facing Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

But Mr. Biden’s own emphasis on human rights and values like freedom and self-governance has also played a role in encouraging the trend, some political analysts say.  

On Monday, more than 500 Biden campaign workers and Democratic staffers in Congress and elsewhere sent the president an open letter “imploring” him to “hold Israel accountable for its actions and lay the groundwork for justice and lasting peace.”

The signatories then added, “The very same values that motivated us to work countless hours to elect you demand that we speak out.” 

A rhetoric shift

At the same time, the shifting American outlook reflects a perspective gaining ground in Congress and elsewhere that unquestioned U.S. support, particularly under President Trump, has only emboldened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to steamroll Palestinian demands for greater rights and justice.

The question now, some analysts say, will be to what extent Mr. Biden will temper his support for Israel in order to incorporate the views of young progressives in his party. Last month, he promised to restore $235 million in aid to Palestinians that Mr. Trump had cut off. That was before the 11-day war erupted in Gaza after weeks of rising tensions in East Jerusalem over the eviction of Palestinian families.

Some already see evidence of a significant shift in Mr. Biden’s rhetoric. When he welcomed last week’s Israel-Hamas cease-fire, he used language that diplomats with long experience in Middle East affairs say carries weight in the region. “I believe the Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely and to enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and democracy,” Mr. Biden said on May 20.

That reference by a U.S. president to equal treatment of Israelis and Palestinians may end up being remembered as the hallmark of this crisis.

“For the first time we have a president of the United States talking about equal [rights] ... that Palestinians and Israelis should enjoy equal measures of freedom, security, dignity, and so on,” said Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and former assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, speaking Friday at a Council on Foreign Relations event.

“That word ‘equal,’” he added, “is a sign for me that the argument about rights, rather than about a two-state solution, is what is emerging from this crisis.”      

A consistent Israel ally

Some critics of Israeli policy saw Mr. Biden’s reference to Palestinian freedom and democracy as an unusually strong swipe at its occupation of the West Bank. But others with close knowledge of Mr. Biden’s thinking caution against expecting any significant change in his outlook.

Evan Vucci/AP

President Joe Biden arrives to speak about a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, in the Cross Hall of the White House, May 20, 2021, in Washington.

“Having seen Biden in action ... and especially on these issues, he had a very clear sense of what was right and what wasn’t right, and he was pretty consistent in sticking by that,” says Dennis Ross, a longtime Middle East adviser to administrations of both major parties who served as special assistant on the region to President Barack Obama.

“So, I suspect of course the arguments of those on the progressive wing are going to be heard, but how much they’ll move him from what he thinks is the right way to proceed – I would have my doubts,” adds Mr. Ross, now a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Indeed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, meeting Tuesday in Jerusalem with Mr. Netanyahu on the first of three days in the region, underscored Mr. Biden’s overarching commitment to Israel’s security and right to defend itself: “For the president, as many of you know, this commitment is personal. It runs deep. He has been one of Israel’s most steadfast supporters for the last 50 years.”

But Mr. Blinken also echoed the language of Mr. Biden’s statement, saying Israelis and Palestinians “equally deserve to live safely and securely” and to “enjoy equal measures of freedom, opportunity, and democracy.”

This suggests that the Biden administration has settled on a new rhetorical formula for addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But how far the administration moves from rhetoric to policy is unclear – just as it remains uncertain whether those moves will be enough to satisfy Democrats clamoring for a new direction.

In the end, we cheated.

The assignment had been clear enough. One writer, one photographer, eight monuments, one day. Go. Take the pulse of late-pandemic Washington for a Memorial Day story about the prophesied return of summer travel. Will the district be back on vacation itineraries after its year of dread? Should it be? Take a day. See what it’s like.

But now it’s 5 a.m., the morning after our monumental day; 5 a.m., and the photographer and I are back on Washington’s streets in the black hush before dawn. We undock a pair of Capital Bikeshare cycles for two bucks a pop and are coasting again toward the Mall, toward daybreak, toward the Lincoln Memorial in spring air so soft the ride feels like floating. On 21st Street it’s all downhill, you don’t even pedal; at intersections we look for traffic but there isn’t any. We just keep gaining speed. We cross Constitution Avenue, curl up a slight rise under a canopy of elms, and all at once we see it – the 36 fluted columns, the radiant marble pavilion – the Lincoln Memorial, wide awake and white-lit against the black canvas of the sky. And we find exactly what we’re looking for. 

A Capitol defense

This isn’t how things started. Two days earlier the photographer and I had flown to Washington, on a plane that no longer blocked seats for distancing, into a Reagan National Airport that felt as busy as ever.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The ornate U.S. Capitol Rotunda, with a statue of George Washington standing sentry, is eerily quiet these days as visitors haven’t been allowed into the building since the rioting in January.

D.C., though, was not busy. That first afternoon, the day before our tour of the monuments, we visit the Capitol Building itself, curious to see the scene of the January crime. We bike there from Foggy Bottom (bikes are the perfect way around Washington), noting the scarcity of cars in a city where usually it’s hard to cross a street. We enter a Senate office building at the edge of the new security perimeter, pass through the first of innumerable guard posts with our press credentials, and make our way through underground tunnels to stairwells that will usher us into the main part of the Capitol. 

The building is astonishingly empty. It’s a Monday, Congress isn’t meeting, and the public remains locked out. We pass doors and windows still covered in plywood after having been breached on Jan. 6. But that’s not what you notice with the usual throngs missing. What you notice is how unexpectedly flamboyant the Capitol is, how filled with color and ornament. The floors explode with pattern. The ceilings look like Versailles. As you climb steps under billboard-sized paintings, your feet slip into hollows made by 200 years of people traversing them before you. People whose names you know.

In the Rotunda, there is no one – no politicians or staffers racing back and forth towing journalists, no tourists milling in the gallery to gawk. The photographer has never seen it like this, and becomes quickly lost in taking pictures of the dome and the statues and the reflections on the tiles. There are always people here, she says. Always.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A security fence surrounds the U.S. Capitol following the attack on Jan. 6, 2021.

Of course, our current times are not like “always.” In 2020, Washington’s hospitality industry was devastated; its Smithsonian museums are just now reopening, its restaurants just now being permitted higher occupancy. But summer is coming, the pandemic is shrinking in the United States, and some travel forecasts predict that tourism is about to surge.

Will that surge include D.C.? Washington is the seventh most popular destination in the country. How will it be affected by its strict pandemic closures and last summer’s protests and this January’s riot – not to mention the atmosphere of divisiveness that from afar can seem like the capital city’s main line of work? Will travelers come back? What’s it like to visit Washington now?

Outside the Capitol we meet Jackie Gillen and her husband, Ernie Beyard, who take us for a walk with their dog Barkley. The couple live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, which spreads east from its namesake building, and this walk is their routine: two blocks down the street, a slight jog around the Supreme Court, then across First Street to the Capitol’s parklike lawn. There people picnic or exercise or take selfies. There Barkley gambols and chases the surprisingly plentiful rats. (And no, this author will not be touching that metaphor.)

Except that none of those things can be done anymore, because the entire Capitol grounds – 58 acres designed by Frederick Law Olmsted – are now behind a fence. Erected in January, the fence is 7 feet high, made of black metal mesh, and is supposedly unscalable – its openings purposely too small for a toehold.

“At least the razor wire is gone,” Mr. Beyard says. In fact, he explains with relief, the security perimeter is now smaller than it was. Until February their whole neighborhood was blocked off, and residents had to pass through checkpoints like in a wartime green zone.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Ernie Beyard and Jackie Gillen walk their dog Barkley by the Supreme Court in their neighborhood. They used to take the dog to the Capitol Hill lawn, but they can’t now because of perimeter fencing.

Still, here we are on First Street, looking at militarized fencing that also now surrounds the White House and adjacent Lafayette Square. We contemplate what it means when a government has to protect itself from its own citizens. But through their scrim of dismay, Ms. Gillen and Mr. Beyard gaze at the Capitol with fondness they can’t suppress. Ms. Gillen first arrived here just out of college in 1975 for a job as a legislative aide, and she remembers passing the lighted dome each night and being “filled with awe.” Now she says, despite everything, “I still am.”

So, is now a good time to visit Washington? “Definitely,” says Mr. Beyard. After all, this summer “won’t be as crowded.” Plus, the museums are reopening. The restaurants are returning to normal. The performing arts are coming back.

During our trip those amenities remain mostly shuttered. But the memorials? Most never closed. 

It’s time to see them.

Brief moments, long history

We begin at the beginning, the Washington Monument. We pedal our bikes toward it over the pathways of the National Mall and then up the broad mound that lifts the enormous obelisk above the landscape, encircled by flags. The day is brilliant. The flags crack in the wind. From here you see everywhere, your eye skipping over the roofs of the low-built city. The sky above is like a bowl turned over.

On the monument’s plaza we meet Lowell Fry, a man so alive in his skin that he does little dance steps as he speaks; his hands flutter and swing. We ask, “Can you talk?” He replies, “Can you stop me?” and laughs through his face mask. Mr. Fry is an interpretive ranger for the National Park Service – each of D.C.’s memorials is an official national park – and he gives public talks while rotating daily among the sites as all the rangers do. He says the last year has been hard, of course, but he’s so sparkly that you’re not sure whether you believe him. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“Well, the questions they ask haven’t changed, but maybe the history in these places offers something. I try to tell them that we have good history and we have bad history, both.” – Lowell Fry, an interpretive ranger with the National Park Service

Visitor traffic is finally picking up – though you still can’t go inside the Washington Monument – and we ask if the tourists seem different. What do people seem to be seeking when they come to the monuments now, in the wake of Washington’s turbulent year, and the country’s? “Well, the questions they ask haven’t changed,” he says, “but maybe the history in these places offers something. I try to tell them that we have good history and we have bad history, both.” Maybe these places provide a kind of perspective, he says. Moments are brief. History is long.

“I like to tell the story about Zhou Enlai [then premier of China] and [President Richard] Nixon in the ’70s,” Mr. Fry says. “It’s when Nixon was visiting China, and at some point he says to Zhou, ‘Mr. Premier, what do you think has been the influence of the French Revolution?’ And Zhou answers, ‘Too early to say.’”

Mr. Fry looks at us, and nearly winks as he readjusts his ranger hat against the wind. “Could be apocryphal,” he stage-whispers.

The monument towers over us, uniquely geometric in a city of Doric columns and neoclassical fizz. That simplicity is its power, you realize. And you’re reminded that it wasn’t originally designed this way. The plan was for the obelisk to rise out of a classic Greek pavilion at its base; the sketches suggest a unicorn sunk in a wedding cake. Thankfully, money ran short, and people changed their minds.

From the Washington Monument, we head clockwise around the Tidal Basin, our bike tires crunching over exhausted cherry blossoms. We go to the Jefferson Memorial, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. We linger. We amble up to fellow visitors and ask where they’re from, what they think, why they’re here. We take our time.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Amy Cook and her children, Skylar (center) and River, take in the FDR memorial during their spring break visit from New Hampshire.

It’s quiet, but we meet people everywhere, and though they’re masked, none of them are focused on the pandemic anymore. We meet Valerie Arissol and Bryan Reifer from Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Ben Sherman from Virginia; Aisha Maundy from New Jersey with her son Christopher Maundy and Christopher’s daughter; and the Cook family from New Hampshire. We meet Washingtonian Jamar Moore and his little boy, Juelz – Juelz in his Wizards cap proudly posing with his dad in front of Dr. King emerging from his enormous “Stone of Hope.”

Why have they come? “I love history,” almost all of them say – even our history of wars, tragedies, injustices. It’s as though they’ve already heard one of Mr. Fry’s ranger talks. It reminds us of what matters, they say.

At the King monument, especially, it’s impossible not to be moved as person after person walks forward to lay hands on the colossal sculpture. Some touch their foreheads to it.

All day, impressions accumulate: There’s the way you enter the MLK memorial through a sliver of 30-foot granite like it’s a tight portal to something better – the memorial’s plaza then leading gently downhill to Dr. King’s likeness and its view over the cherry trees and across the glinting water to meet Jefferson and Washington and FDR.

There’s the FDR memorial’s unusual sylvan beauty, its sinuous procession of natural “rooms” defined only by groves of trees and blocks of nearly purple stones like the bricks of the pyramids. And always, there are the words – so many words, engraved to last, from so long ago and yet so prescient.

“In these days of difficulty, we Americans everywhere must and shall choose the path of social justice ... the path of faith, the path of hope, and the path of love toward our fellow man” (FDR, 1932).

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A couple take a selfie in front of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington on April 27, 2021.

“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective” (MLK, 1967).

And of course, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (FDR, 1933).

Slowly, we make our way to the National Mall’s hallowed western end, home to the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. At the Vietnam memorial, workers are repairing cobblestones beside the famous ebony wall, speaking Spanish, stretching caution tape for safety. We read messages people have left along the wall below the names, and we look at the little American flags stuck into inverted foam cups. Here and there are artifacts left like tributes. We see a carefully placed pair of boots – its uppers folded over, its polished leather creased from the feet of the man who had worn them. It’s quiet here.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A visitor laid the boots of Capt. Charles Varence Penn, who was killed in Vietnam on Nov. 29, 1969, as a tribute in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

At the Korean memorial, as dusk comes, low-angled floodlights throw shadows behind each of the 19 stainless steel statues on patrol among knee-high junipers. Their packs look heavy; they look cold. They are trudging uphill.

By the time we reach the Lincoln it is evening, but the site is still flooded with people. There are school groups that have stepped off buses. There are people of seemingly every nationality. There are families, couples, visitors from out of town. Several of them ask the photographer if she would use their phones to frame a picture of them in front of the statue. She does.

It gets late, but people don’t leave. Or if they do, others replace them. Some walk around the memorial’s columned plinth to sit on its western side overlooking the Potomac and the bridge to Arlington National Cemetery. In the distance you can see JFK’s eternal flame.

As we look out, airplanes skim past us over the river toward Reagan National, descending to land. And the photographer tells me a story.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The Lincoln Memorial is one of the top-visited sites in Washington.

As a student in the late 1970s, she went to the Soviet Union to study. Kiev, Moscow, Leningrad. She remembers a nation of unrelieved gray, so gray, and how people knew Americans by their well-made shoes and facial expressions – in the Soviet Union no one smiled.

She remembers coming back to the States on Pan Am. When the plane left the runway in Moscow the passengers applauded. And later when the captain announced that the flight had cleared Soviet airspace, they applauded again.

That flight – just like the ones we’re watching now from the Lincoln – returned to Washington, where the photographer lived. Like now, it was nighttime. And she remembers the feeling of floating down in the dark, the earth below growing nearer, the illuminated city growing brighter. Until suddenly there it was right beside her, just outside the cabin window: her city’s extravagant beauty – its monuments alive, the Lincoln and Jefferson close enough to touch, their reflections shining on the river. And she remembers thinking of what it all stood for, and feeling proud, and thinking vaguely that maybe there are things it’s hard to appreciate unless you’re away for a while. 

“Corny,” she says to me now. Still, she remembers tears running down her cheeks, and someone beside her saying, “Miss? Miss, are you OK?”

“Yes,” she remembers replying. “Yes, yes. Sorry. It’s just – I’m ... I’m home.” She remembers gesturing somehow, in that way you do when it’s impossible to encompass all that’s happening outside you, inside you. She remembers giving up trying to express it, and looking back out the airplane window. And saying again, “This is my home.”

As if to herself.

Whispers from the stone

We cheated, as previously confessed. We had had our day – our 12 hours to take in all the monuments – but now it’s the morning after and we’re back at the Lincoln Memorial in the dark before sunrise.

We dock our bikes and walk to the terrace at the memorial’s foot. We look up.

Later – 7 a.m., 7:30 – this place will teem. There will be runners in ones and twos and fours, passing cyclists with headlamps still on, pairs strolling with coffee, women doing yoga on rolled-out mats, and hobbyists with their cameras and tripods and gear bags waiting for the first peeking rays of horizontal sun. There will be a couple posing for what have to be engagement pictures, he in a dove-gray sport coat, she in a tailored white suit, in each shot crossing her ankles just so.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Bikers, tourists, and others take in the pastel splendor of the reflecting pool and Washington Monument at dawn.

Were it not for the face masks, you wouldn’t know there is a pandemic, or ever had been. You would have to work hard to remember that behind us has been a year with protests and mobs and new barriers erected by the state. Here, today, it could be any year. It could be every year.

But that teeming activity would come later. Now, on the lower terrace, it’s still night – and apart from a solitary tourist with his tripod, we’re alone. Gradually we hear birds. In front of us are 58 steps to the pavilion’s lofted floor. We climb.

At the top, inside, is Lincoln. For once, you are alone with him. It’s hard to capture how it feels. And it comes to you, in a realization that seems oddly novel but is obvious as dawn, that he is always here. He never rests, he is always waiting. Alone, he speaks to you – or maybe you to him. And you can’t help thinking: He must have doubted himself every day. Every day he must have lamented the choices he was offered, the things his country needed him to do.

You think: He is always here, looking out from his perch. For 100 years he has seen everything that happened in this park, on that Mall, at that Capitol. You imagine the history it amounts to, and think again of Dr. King’s words that you read just yesterday carved forever on a wall. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” You hope he was right. You think: Moments are brief, history is long. You wonder what Lincoln knows.

You think: His eyes never close. Here, in all weathers, through nights and mornings and winters and springs, he peers east down the steps, over the reflecting pool, past the Washington Monument, and beyond to the Capitol – the Capitol whose dome is obscured by Washington’s obelisk but whose wings in the afternoon will gleam in the westering sun, their colonnades and filigree stretching both north and south like great ancient arms flung open and wide.

He watches everything, you realize. Everything, that is, but the fence so recently installed. From where Lincoln sits, you realize, the fence is too small to see. 

“It blows my mind. I hope it’ll blow yours.”

So said Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, after leaping out of his company’s new offering onto a stage, greeted by adoring applause from a sea of fans, back in 2017. 

The vehicle in question – while electric, of course – was a heavy truck, and Mr. Musk extolled it as supposedly superior to the diesel-powered 18-wheelers currently crisscrossing our continents. Today the first Tesla Semis are close to rolling off the production line. Competitors from firms including Volvo and Scania are already on the roads.

Given the loads of freight they pull and the distances they cover, you might think semitrailer trucks would be a far-off milestone in a global transition toward electrified transport. Yet advancing technology is fast putting the idea of decarbonizing overland freight traffic within reach. And the environmental benefits are compelling.

Road freight transport accounts for 7% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, double that of the aviation sector, as well as some 20% of the world’s oil demand. With that in view, governments are increasingly setting targets for shifting commercial trucking – from buses and small delivery trucks up to 18-wheelers – away from fossil fuels. A band of green-minded U.S. states, for example, is aiming for 30% of commercial-truck sales be for zero-emissions vehicles by 2030. 

The big challenge ahead is that an electric revolution in freight hauling will require some big investments in vehicle-charging stations – infrastructure that is now in its infancy, transportation experts say.

“It absolutely will require upgrades” to electric-utility systems, says Jessie Lund, a senior associate in the carbon-free mobility program at RMI, a nonprofit that promotes a clean-energy economy. But “we’re not talking about every truck in the continent electrifying tomorrow, so I have a little faith that [U.S.] utilities will be able to plan for it and make the necessary upgrades.”

What’s clear, though, is that this next wave of electric transportation is different from the tide of passenger electric vehicles (EVs) currently being brought to market.

“The narrative that’s been growing in the past couple of years to deal with climate change is basically to electrify everything, which I think is great,” says Olle Olsson, senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, and co-author of a recent study on the feasibility of heavy battery-electric trucks. “But it also puts massive demands on the power infrastructure, and there are still some challenges there as to how to build it.”

Are power grids ready?

The heaviest weigh upwards of 15 tons, compared with one or two tons for a typical car. This means the batteries are far more power-hungry, which, in turn, means the chargers either have to be plugged in for many more hours – or they need to provide higher levels of electricity.

For a good many commercial vehicles, one overnight charge may be enough for the next day’s work. But power grids are already facing new demands in transitioning to renewable energy, as well as the burgeoning fleet of passenger EVs. Some experts worry that grids may require substantial redevelopment to cope. Others don’t see the hurdles as daunting.

“I think it’s fewer upgrades than a lot of people think. I think even [the utility companies] have been surprised at how a lot of it is capable of supporting these vehicles today,” says Ms. Lund, who specializes in emissions reductions from heavy-duty transport.

Alexandria Sage/Reuters/File

Tesla's new Semi is unveiled during a presentation in Hawthorne, California, Nov. 16, 2017. Now the first of these electric trucks is close to rolling off the production line.

Indeed, the shift to electric trucks is still in its nascent stages. Volvo Trucks, for instance, has delivered just a single specimen of its FL Electric to date in the whole of the United Kingdom, and expects to sell a total of around 10 this year in the U.K./Ireland market, a company spokesman says by email. 

Yet confidence in an electric future abounds, with truck-makers such as Volvo, DAF, Scania, Daimler, and Kenworth all rolling out EV models. Volvo has even announced a target of 50% of its European truck sales being EV editions by 2030.

A road paved by technology

This confidence has to do, in part, with the technological advances of recent years. Ms. Lund says lithium-ion batteries – the dominant kind in EVs – have fallen in cost by around 90% in the past decade. 

In lockstep with falling costs, the energy density achievable in these batteries has gone in the opposite direction, seeing constant improvements. For trucks, this is vital, as higher energy density means smaller batteries – and that means less weight and more space for goods.

Then there is the charging side. Fast chargers for passenger EVs generally range from 50-150 kilowatts, or even as high as 350kW. These levels can be just fine to charge heavy trucks if they’re able to sit still for many hours. When long-haul trucks need to power up mid-journey, far more powerful chargers are going to be needed.

“First of all, it’s technically possible,” says Mark Duvall, director of electrification and customer solutions at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI.) “Very high-powered charging does present a series of challenges, and they’ll be overcome.”

Britta Pedersen/dpa/AP

A prototype shows Daimler Truck’s future electric technology strategy during a news conference in Berlin on Sept. 20, 2020. Daimler Truck AG envisions the freight-truck market shifting toward hydrogen and battery trucks amid a global focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

With chargers in development capable of delivering as much as 3 megawatts (3,000 kW) there are groups already busy at work seeking to surmount some of the associated difficulties. CharIN, a Berlin-based association of more than 200 organizations across the globe involved in e-mobility, set up its Megawatt Charging System initiative in 2018, seeking standards for charging heavy-duty vehicles.

Meanwhile in the U.S., a West Coast Clean Transit Corridor Initiative among electric utilities is envisioning how these chargers could be distributed at 50-mile intervals along routes in California, Oregon, and Washington state. California is home to additional similar initiatives.

California’s ambitious goal

California is a hotbed of activity because of its stringent regulations: Last year the California Air Resources Board implemented a directive requiring more than 55% of truck sales to be of zero-emissions models by 2035, rising to 100% a decade after that.

“Policies have been big drivers for everything we’ve accomplished to date,” says Mr. Duvall of EPRI, who has been working on EVs for almost three decades. “Given that most new technologies don’t start off being cost-competitive, or cost-superior to the incumbent technology, it’s those policy incentives that accelerate the existing market.”

A whole other option for zero-emissions freight hauling – power from hydrogen fuel cells – has gotten a boost from both Toyota and the startup Nikola. Toyota rolled out its prototype heavy-duty truck in December to haul cargo around the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Mr. Duvall says he’s always supported exploring various technologies rather than eliminating options early in the game. But, with hydrogen requiring its own infrastructure, he adds that “it’s very hard to dethrone an existing technology … . So, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, before EVs were commercialized, before hydrogen vehicles were commercialized, you could argue that neither technology had that advantage; now, they’re in very different places.”

Editor's note: A sentence in this article was updated after publication so that one group is mentioned by its preferred name, RMI.

Reuters

Roman Protasevich, a journalist who ran a news blog on Telegram, sits at a court hearing in Minsk, Belarus, in 2017.

Four months ago, Pavel Latushka, a dissident fighting a dictatorship in Belarus, made a prediction: “Those who avoid transparency and responsibility inside the country are likely to act in a way that may threaten international peace and security,” he told an informal meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

On May 23, his warning came true. The repressive government of Alexander Lukashenko used a fighter jet to force an Irish airliner flying over Belarus to land in order to arrest Roman Protasevich, a journalist in exile who operated a news site about Belarus. More than 160 innocent people on the flight were put in danger, and an international norm for civil aviation was violated.

The incident has led to increased foreign sanctions on the regime. It also has highlighted a critical role for many of Belarus’ truth-tellers, especially the few journalists who have not been arrested or forced into exile since protests erupted after a fraudulent election last year. The persecution of media outlets has only put a spotlight on the regime’s growing unpopularity and its fear of revelations about harsh tactics it uses against pro-democracy activists.

An estimated two-thirds of Belarusians relied on tut.by, the main independent news in the country – until it was shut down May 18. At universities, hundreds of students have been detained for speaking out against the regime. Many other people, even those who simply displayed the white-red-white flag of the opposition, have suffered. “Society still insists on its agenda. Belorussian society has shown that it can surprise,” stated political analyst Andrey Yahoraw.

People in Belarus are doing what the late Czech dissident Vaclav Havel advised during the days of the Soviet Union – “live in truth.”

“Every day we show to the whole world that we are still here, that we are fighting,” exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told the U.S. Congress in March. “We will achieve truth and freedom,” she said, thanks to “all honest journalists, doctors, human rights defenders, volunteers and all brave Belorussians.”

The big street protests of last year have ended, a result of mass arrests and the pandemic. But now the regime’s brazen act of forcing down a commercial airliner to arrest one journalist has revealed its isolation and paranoia. “There is no need for mass protests,” wrote blogger Syarhey Satsuk. “One drop after another will do the job more successfully than a big wave of turbulent water.”

Truth works like that, eroding the lies of an authoritarian regime and forcing it to lash out in strange ways, such as intercepting an airliner. Those on the side of truth can easily predict such events.