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New research shows that climate change is making urban fires more frequent.
New York City and Los Angeles — America’s two biggest cities — have both burned in the past four months.
Though the Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires were far more destructive, turning nearly 40,000 acres of homes, schools, parks, and businesses to ash, the New York fire was in many ways just as startling. A record dry fall in the Northeast led to 600 blazes across the East Coast in October and November, including one in Prospect Park in the heart of Brooklyn, the city’s most populous borough. The FDNY later reported that it fought more than 370 brush fires in the five boroughs in 2024 — a rate of more than one a day in a place not traditionally associated with wildfires.
According to new research by Long Shi and his colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China, published today in Nature Cities, these kinds of urban fires are becoming increasingly common due to climate change. “The impacts of climate change on vegetation fire have been well explored” by other researchers, Shi told me via email. Until now, however, the impact of anthropogenic warming on urban fires was “still unknown.”
Shi and his colleagues created a global fire incident database covering 2,847 cities across 20 countries. They found that for every 1 degree Celsius increase in air temperature (that’s just shy of 2 degrees Fahrenheit), the frequency of vehicle and outdoor fires increased by about 2.5% and 4.7%, respectively. That means that under a scenario with no new climate mitigation policies, under which greenhouse gas emissions roughly double from current levels by 2100, vehicle fires would increase by 11.6% and outdoor fires by as much as 22.2% by the end of the century.
Fire incidents typically fall into one of four categories: building, vehicle, and outdoor fires, which are usually urban, and vegetation fires, which include forest and grassland fires. Historically, fire research has tended to focus on vegetation fires, but the vast majority of the 50,000 fire-related deaths and 170,000 fire-related injuries sustained each year around the world are in urban fires. Part of that is because urban fires are much more difficult to study. “Some fire ignitions, such as inside buildings, cannot be directly detected by satellites,” Shi and his colleagues write in their report. There was also no preexisting global fire incident databases for Shi’s team to rely on, so they spent years just assembling the fire incident data before they could begin their analysis.
The final 2,847 cities considered for the report account for 20.6% of the global population — “the most comprehensive and biggest city-based fire incident database so far,” Shi said. The researchers then looked at the changes in the frequency of urban fire incidents between 2011 and 2020, focusing on building, vehicle, and outdoor fires, including garbage and landfill fires.
Perhaps surprisingly, Shi’s team found that building fires could decrease by 4.6% under a high greenhouse gas emission scenario. Their research showed that building fire frequency drops when the outdoor air temperature is “comfortable,” from 20 to 26 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit to about 79 degrees Fahrenheit). “This may be because people tend to stay indoors during uncomfortable weather, elevating the likelihood of accessing fire sources or devices that provide ignition sources for fires, such as fireplace heating and electrical cooling appliances,” the authors wrote. (Canada, Estonia, and Finland showed an opposite trend, which the authors hypothesized was because “people in northern countries spend more time outside in winter as they enjoy winter sports” — or just because of the relatively short period of available fire data.)
The increase in vehicle fires is a more interesting case, as the authors note. “Although we cannot separate human factors from vehicle fires, their tendencies differ from those of building fires,” they write, noting that approximately 81% of vehicle fires ensue “without human intervention.” Around two-thirds of those “befall as a result of equipment or heat source failure,” while collisions are responsible for just 5%. The rise reflected in the research may be due to “the increased failure rates of … vehicle components under rising air temperature,” though the authors also note that this finding could change as more people adopt electric vehicles, which catch fire at a lower rate than their gasoline-powered counterparts.
Though Shi is still seeking fire incident data from the countries not included in this study, the research published in Nature could have significant implications for urban planners today, Sara McTarnaghan, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute who was not involved in the study, told me.
“A lot of our capacity and infrastructure for planning around climate change in the United States really started out focused on sea-level rise and other flood-related risks,” McTarnaghan said. But fires are “a huge piece of that equation, and there’s certainly linkages with climate change that need to be better understood.”
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Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”
Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.
What are you referencing when you say, ‘the wind industry’s strategy is failing’?
Anyone in the climate space, in the clean energy space, the worst thing you can do is go silent and pretend that this is just going to go away. Even if it’s the president and the administration delivering the attacks, I think there’s an important strategy that’s been lacking in the wind and other sectors that I don’t think has been effective. There was a recent E&E News story that noted a couple of wind developers when asked for comment just say, “No comment.” This to me misses a really big opportunity to not get in a fight with people but talk about the benefits of wind.
Not taking advantage of milestones like ground breaking or construction starting is a missed opportunity to drive public opinion. If you lose support in public opinion, you’re going to lose support from public officials, because they largely follow public opinion.
And there’s no way that’s going to change if you don’t take the opportunities to talk about the benefits that wind can provide, in terms of good-paying local jobs or supplying more electrons to the grid. By almost any measure the strategy employed so far has not really worked.
Okay, but what is the wind industry strategy that isn’t working? What are they doing to rebut attacks on the technology, on property values, on the environment?
We’re not hearing them. We’re not hearing those arguments.
You can’t let criticisms go unanswered.It would better serve the industry and these companies to push back against criticisms. It’s not like you can’t anticipate what they are. And what do you have to lose? You’re in the worst position of any energy sector in this political moment. It would be nice to see some fight and sharp campaign skills and strategic effort in terms of communication. And there’s no strategic value from what I can tell in [being silent].
I understand not wanting to pick a fight with folks who hold your fate in their hands, but there’s a way to thread a needle that isn’t antagonizing anybody but also making sure the facts have been heard. And that’s been missing.
You’d specifically said the industry should stop ‘being paralyzed in fear and start going on offense.’ What does that look like to you?
Taking every opportunity to get your message out there. The lowest hanging fruit is when a reporter comes and asks you, What do you think about this criticism? You should definitely reply. It’s lifting up third-party voices that are benefiting from a specific project, talking about the economic impacts more broadly, talking about the benefits to the grid.
There’s a whole number of tools in the toolbox to put to use but the toolboxes remain shut thus far. Targeted paid media, elevating the different voices and communities that are going to resonate with different legislators, and certainly the facts are helpful. Also having materials prepared, like validators and frequently asked questions and answers.
You’re trying to win. You’re trying to get your project to be successful and deliver jobs and tax revenue. And I think it would be wise for companies to look at the playbooks of electoral campaigns, because there’s lots of tools that campaigns use.
How do renewable energy developers get around the problem of partisanship? How do you get outta that through a campaign approach?
These projects are decided locally. It’s deciding who the decision-makers are and not just letting opponents who are getting talking points through right-wing media show up and reiterate these talking points. Oftentimes, there’s no one on the pro side even showing up at all, and it makes it really easy for city councils to oppose projects. They’re losing by forfeit. We can’t keep doing that.
And more on this week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Chautauqua, New York – More rural New York towns are banning renewable energy.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project will learn its fate under the Trump administration by this fall, after a federal judge ruled that the Justice Department must come to a decision on how it’ll handle a court challenge against its permits by September.
3. Bedford County, Pennsylvania – Arena Renewables is trying to thread a needle through development in one of the riskiest Pennsylvania counties for development, with an agriculture-fueled opposition risk score of 89.
4. Knox County, Ohio – The Ohio Power Siting Board has given the green light to Open Road Renewables’ much-watched Frasier Solar project.
5. Clay County, Missouri – We’ll find out next week if rural Missouri can still take it easy on a large solar project.
6. Clark County, Nevada – President Trump’s Bureau of Land Management has pushed back the permitting process for EDF Renewables’ Bonanza solar project by at least two months and possibly longer .
7. Klickitat County, Washington – Washington State has now formally overridden local opposition to Cypress Creek’s Carriger solar project after teeing up the decision in May.
It’s governor versus secretary of state, with the fate of the local clean energy industry hanging in the balance.
I’m seeing signs that the fight over a hydrogen project in Wyoming is fracturing the state’s Republican political leadership over wind energy, threatening to trigger a war over the future of the sector in a historically friendly state for development.
At issue is the Pronghorn Clean Energy hydrogen project, proposed in the small town of Glenrock in rural Converse County, which would receive power from one wind farm nearby and another in neighboring Niobrara County. If completed, Pronghorn is expected to produce “green” hydrogen that would be transported to airports for commercial use in jet fuel. It is backed by a consortium of U.S. and international companies including Acconia and Nordex.
One can guess why investors thought this rural Wyoming expanse would be an easier place to build: it’s an energy community situated in the middle of the Powder River Basin and the state’s Republican governor Mark Gordon has supported wind projects in the state publicly, not just with rhetoric but votes in favor of them on the State Board of Land Commissioners.
Wind is also often proposed on private land in Wyoming, which is supposed to make things easier. You may remember the Lucky Star and Twin Rivers wind farms, a pair of projects whose progress I’ve watched like a hawk because they’re tied to the future of wind permitting at the national level. As we first reported, the Trump administration is proceeding with potentially approving the transmission line for Lucky Star, a project that would be sited entirely on private land, and Twin Rivers received its final environmental review in the last days of the Biden administration, making it difficult for anti-wind advocates to curtail.
Unlike those projects, Pronghorn has created a fork in the road for wind in Wyoming. It’s because the people in its host community don’t seem to want it, the wind projects were on state land, and there’s politics at play.
Despite being considered an energy community, Converse and Niobrara are both areas with especially high opposition risk, according to Heatmap Pro, largely due to its low support for renewable energy, its demographics, and concerns about impacts to the local ranching economy. After Gordon and other members of the state land use board approved two wind facilities for the hydrogen project, a rancher living nearby sued the board with public support from the mayor of Glenrock and the area’s legislators in the statehouse. A member of the Converse County zoning board even published a “manifesto” against the project, detailing local concerns that are myriad and rooted in fears of overburden, ranging from water use and property value woes to a general resentment toward an overall rise in wind turbines across the county and state.
What’s probably most concerning to wind supporters is that this local fight is bubbling up into a statewide political fracture between Gordon and his secretary of state Chuck Gray, who is believed to be a future candidate for governor. Grey was the lone dissenting vote against the two wind projects for Pronghorn, saying he did not support the projects because they would be assisted by federal tax credits Trump is trying to gut. Gray then took to mocking the governor on social media for his stance on wind while posting photos of broken wind turbines. Gordon wound up responding to his secretary of state accusing him of being the “only member of the state land board to vote against individual property rights and Wyoming schools.”
“That is his prerogative to be sure, but it demonstrates his disregard for the duties of his office and a determination to impose his personal preferences on others, no matter the cost,” Gordon stated.
I’ve been reaching out to Pronghorn and its founder Paul Martin to try and chat about what’s happening in Wyoming. I haven’t heard back, and if I do I’ll gladly follow this story up, but there’s a sign here of an issue in Wyoming whether Pronghorn gets built or not – areas of Wyoming may be on the verge of a breaking point on wind energy.
I heard about the Pronghorn project in conversations this week with folks who work on wind permitting issues in Wyoming and learned that the Gordon-Gray feud is emblematic of how the wind industry’s growth in the state is making local officials more wary of greenlighting projects. Whether Gordon’s position on private property wins out over Gray taking up the mantle of the anti-wind conservative critic may be the touchstone for the future of local planning decisions, too.
At least, that’s the sense I got talking to Sue Jones, a commissioner in Carbon County, directly southwest of Converse County. Jones admits she personally doesn’t care for wind farms and that it’s “no secret with the county, or the developers.” But so far, she hasn’t voted that way as a commissioner.
“If they meet all our rules and regs, then I’ve voted to give them a permit,” she told me. “You can’t just say no to anything. It’s a good thing that we value private property rights.”
Jones said the problem in Carbon County and other areas of Wyoming is “saturation level.” Areas of the state where only a handful of landowners hold thousands of acres? That’s probably fine for wind projects because there’s a low likelihood of a neighbor or two having a genuine grievance. But as wind has grown into population-denser areas of the state the dissent is becoming more frequent.
My gut feeling is that, as we’ve seen in many other instances, this resentment will bubble up and manifest as sweeping reform – unless the wind industry is able to properly address these growing concerns head on.