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Here’s a grim fact: The most destructive fires in recent American history swept over a state with the country’s strictest wildfire-specific building code, including in some of the neighborhoods that are now largely smoldering rubble.
California’s wildfire building code, Chapter 7A, went into effect in 2008, and it mandates fire-resistant siding, tempered glass, vegetation management, and vents for attics and crawlspaces designed to resist embers and flames. The code is the “most robust” in the nation, Lisa Dale, a lecturer at the Columbia Climate School and a former environmental policy advisor for the State of Colorado, told me. It applies to nearly any newly built structure in one of the zones mapped out by state and local officials as especially prone to fire hazard.
The adoption of 7A followed years of code development and mapping of hazardous areas, largely in response to devastating urban wildfires such as the Tunnel Fire, which claimed more than 3,000 structures and 25 lives in Oakland and Berkeley in 1991, and kicked off renewed efforts to harden Californian homes.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s report on the 1991 fire makes for familiar reading as the Palisades and Eaton fires still smolder. The wildland-urban interface, it says, was put at extreme risk by a combination of dry air, little rainfall, hot winds blowing east to west, built-up vegetation that was too close to homes, steep hills, and limited access to municipal water. The report also castigates the “unregulated use of wood shingles as roof and siding material.”
This was not the first time a destructive fire on the wildland-urban interface had been partially attributed to ignitable building materials. The 1961 Bel-Air fire, for instance, which claimed almost 200 homes, including that of Burt Lancaster, and the 1959 Laurel Canyon fire were both, FEMA said, evidence of “the wood roof and separation from natural fuels problems,” as were fires in 1970 and 1980 near where the Tunnel Fire eventually struck in 1970 and 1980.
But it was the sheer scale of the Tunnel Fire that prompted action by California lawmakers.
Throughout the 1990s, fire-resilient roofing requirements were ramped up, designating which materials were allowed in fire hazard areas and throughout the state. By all accounts, the building code works — but only when and where it’s in force. Dale told me that compliant homes were five times as likely to survive a wildfire. Research by economists Judson Boomhower and Patrick Baylis found that the code “reduced average structure loss risk during a wildfire by 16 percentage points, or about a 40% reduction.”
“The challenge from the perspective of wildfire vulnerability is that those codes are relatively recent, and the housing stock turns over really slowly, so we have this enormous stock of already built homes in dangerous places that are going to be out there for decades,” Boomhower told me.
The 7A building code applies only to new buildings, however. In long-settled areas of California like Pacific Palisades, which has little new housing construction or even existing home turnover due to high costs and permitting complications, especially in areas under the jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission, many houses are not just failing to comply with Chapter 7A, but also with any housing code at all.
Looking at which homes had survived past fires, Steve Quarles, who helped advise the California State Fire Marshal on developing 7A, told me, “What really mattered was if it was built under any building code.” Many homes destroyed by the fires in Los Angeles likely were not. In Pacific Palisades, fire management is a frequent topic of concern and discussion. But as late as 2018, local media in Pacific Palisades noted that the area still had some homes with wood shingle roofs.
While a complete inventory of homes lost in the Palisades and Eaton fires has yet to be taken, the neighborhoods were full of older homes. According to CalFire incident reports, of the almost 47,000 structures in the zone of the Palisades Fire, more than 8,000 were built before 1939, and 44,560 were built before 2009. For the Eaton Fire area, of the around 41,000 structures, almost 14,000 were built before 1939, and only around 1,000 were built since 2010.
A Pacific Palisades home designed by architect Greg Chasen and built in 2024, however, survived the fire and went viral on X after he posted a photo of it still standing after the flames had moved through. The home embodied some of the best practices for fire-safe building, according to Bloomberg, including keeping vegetation away from the building, a metal roof, tempered glass, and fire-resistant siding.
When Michael Wara, the director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, spoke with firefighters and insurance industry officials in the process of drafting a 2021 report for the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment on strategies for mitigating wildfire risk, they told him that, from their perspective, wildfires are often a matter of “home ignition,” meaning that while building near forested areas puts any home at risk, the risk of a home itself igniting varies based on how it’s built and the vegetation clearance around it. “Existing homes in high fire threat areas” built before the implementation of California’s wildfire building codes, Wara wrote, “are a massive problem.” At the time he published the paper, there were somewhere between 700,000 and 1.3 million pre-building code homes still standing in “high or very high threat areas.”
The flipside of focusing on “home ignition” and the building code is that the building code works better over time, as more and more homes comply with it thanks to normal turnover, people extensively renovating, or even tearing down old homes — or rebuilding after fires. Homes that are close to homes that don’t ignite in a fire are more likely to survive.
One study that looked at the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed more than 18,000 structures and claimed more than 80 lives in the Northern California town of Paradise, sampled homes built before 1997, between 1997 and 2018, and from 2018 onwards, and found that only 11.5% of pre-1997 homes survived, compared to 38.5% from 1997 and after. The researchers also found that building survivability had a kind of magnifying effect, with distance from the nearest destroyed structure and the number structures destroyed in the immediate area among “the strongest predictors of survival.”
“The more homes that comply, the less chance you get those structural ignitions and the less chance you get those huge disasters like this,” Doug Green, who manages Headwaters Economics’ Community Assistance for Wildfire Program, told me. “It takes people doing the right thing to their own home — dealing with vegetation, making sure roofs are clean, having right roofing. It’s really a community-wide strategy to stop fires that happen like this.”
But just as any home hardening — or just building to code — is more effective the more the homes around you do it as well, it’s just as true in reverse. “If your next door neighbors don’t do that work, the effectiveness of your efforts will be less,” Dale said. “Building codes ultimately work best when we get an entire landscape or neighborhood to adopt them.”
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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.