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So why isn’t it happening?
When I was in high school, I had to memorize the entire taxonomic hierarchy of the American moose. But I never learned about greenhouse gases.
This never struck me as odd until I read a recent op-ed in The Boston Globe by Anita Soracco, a professor of physics and environmental science at Massachusetts’ Quinsigamond Community College. “Over the past 13 years,” she wrote, “my students have consistently expressed disappointment and dismay that they hadn’t previously been taught about the climate crisis or the many environmental justice issues that plague their communities as a result.”
What’s perhaps even more dismaying is that most Americans want climate education in schools. A recent Heatmap News poll found that three-quarters of Americans (74%) believe that the government should encourage schools to incorporate climate change into their curriculum, including over half of Republicans (59%) and 75% of Independents. A full third of Americans (33%) said they strongly support such a proposal. In a separate question, 62% of Americans called it “important” for schools to incorporate climate change education, a number that is roughly on par with how many agree with the scientific consensus that climate change is a result of human activity (68%).
Patrick Belmonte, the co-founder of Change Is Simple — an organization that helps to bring hands-on environmental education programs to schools primarily in the Northeast — told me the poll results didn’t surprise him. “How could you not want to educate children who are going to inherit this planet to understand it?” he asked, adding: “I don’t even understand how you can be asked that question and say, ‘No, I don’t want them to know!’”
But when it comes to the state of climate education across the country, it can be — forgive the pun — all over the map. I asked Soracco, the author of the Boston Globe op-ed, what letter grade she’d give the nation for its climate education programs and she cringed and answered “probably a D.” While the Next Generation Science Standards — a framework adopted by 20 states so far and that covers a little over a third of all U.S. students — recommends teaching climate change in science classes beginning with grade five, “it’s not very specific,” Soracco went on. “And the standards are voluntary, and so even if we put them in the state standards, it can be very performative.”
Back in 2020, the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund looked at this problem more closely. According to their findings, “a bare majority — just 27 — of the 50 states and District of Columbia have standards that earned a B+ or better for how they address climate change” with “only six non-NGSS states [earning] a B+ or better for their science standards.”
While some of these results cut across partisan lines in a way that might be expected, that isn’t always the case. Wyoming, the country’s second-biggest oil and gas producer on federal lands, was the only state in the nation to earn an A grade in teaching climate change, leading the study’s authors to write that “education policymakers can do a reasonably good job of adopting science standards that reflect the scientific consensus” — even against politically or economically hostile backdrops.
Still, even the most motivated educators face an uphill battle, Belmonte said. “Not only do they have to teach to a designed curriculum and help their students achieve their goals, but they are also social workers and psychologists to all these kids in their classrooms. To ask them to figure out how to teach thoughtful and meaningful climate education, which is such a deep and profound existential thing that we’re all dealing with — it seems just far too much on their shoulders.”
Belmonte’s organization helps alleviate some of that pressure on teachers by traveling to classrooms to teach climate science programs to students. “But we can’t fulfill the needs that the schools have,” he confessed. “Schools all over the country are reaching out to us — and we have a scaling plan, but we’re still trying to get the funding.”
Critically, a K-12 climate education is about more than just preparing students for an Intro to Environmental Science course in college. According to a 2020 study by Eugene Cordero, college students who took a one-year course on global climate change at San Jose State University “reduced their individual carbon emissions by 2.86 tons of CO2 per year,” even five years after taking the class. As Soracco marvels in her op-ed, “Consider the impact if that education began in kindergarten instead.”
What’s more, kids love learning about the climate, Belmonte told me. “They can’t wait to help this planet. They can’t wait to help their home. They want to live healthy lives and help their communities.” And out of the 50,000 or so students his organization has helped to teach so far, “I’ve run into very few children who are resistant to this. I mean, we can count on two hands the kids that are like, ‘Meh, I don’t want to do this’ — and most of the time it has nothing to do with climate and has more to do with just their state of being, whatever they’re going through in their lives.”
There is, however, an obstacle that is perhaps even more worrying than climate denial or funding. When asked about the trustworthiness of various sources of information on climate change, just 21% of respondents told Heatmap they trust local teachers on the issue. By comparison, 45% said they trust climate scientists and 35% said they trust their friends and family for information.
Belmonte speculated the low response might be because of “a lack of confidence in the potential curriculum” in places like Florida, where climate curriculum has stirred up controversy, or Oklahoma and Ohio, where fossil fuel trade groups sponsor classroom teaching aids. When I looked at the crosstabs after our call, it was the Midwest that had the lowest confidence in teachers (15%) and, surprisingly, the South with the highest (24%).
I asked Soracco the same question and she circled back to the fact that teachers often feel underprepared to teach about climate change “because they haven’t had adequate training.” But any ignorance in our school systems is a luxury that comes from not being on the very front lines of this crisis, she stressed.
Students, however, are smart. Even if climate change isn’t in their classrooms yet, it’s certainly in the world they’re living in. They “look around now and they see it,” she told me. “They’re like, ‘Man, we don’t really have winter anymore.’”
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group via online panels from Nov. 6 to 13, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. You can read about our results here.
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Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “super soaker” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the super soaker collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the super soaker collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the super soaker, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At more than 40,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
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Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.
On tough questioning from the Senate, LA’s fires, and EV leases
Current conditions: Odd weather has caused broccoli and cauliflower plants to come up far too early in the UK • Another blast of Arctic air is headed for the Midwest • An air quality alert has been issued in Los Angeles due to windblown dust and ash.
Firefighters in Los Angeles are scrambling to make progress against the ongoing wildfires there before dangerous winds return. The Palisades and Eaton fires have now been burning for almost a week, charring nearly 40,000 acres, damaging more than 12,000 structures, and leaving at least 24 people dead. They are 13% and 27% contained, respectively. Residents who lost their homes are desperately trying to find new properties to rent or buy in a tight market, with reports of intense bidding wars as landlords hike rents. The economic toll of this disaster is estimated to be between $135 billion and $150 billion. Red flag warnings are in effect today, with critical fire conditions and extreme wind gusts forecast through Wednesday.
Red fire retardant on pool furniture. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
A few updates on the incoming administration: President-elect Donald Trump tapped Ed Russo to run an advisory environmental task force. Trump said Russo will oversee “initiatives to create great jobs and protect our natural resources, by following my policy of CLEAN AIR and CLEAN WATER. Together, we will achieve American Energy DOMINANCE, rebuild our Economy, and DRILL, BABY, DRILL.” Russo is a longtime Trump loyalist who served as an environmental consultant to the Trump Organization and wrote a book titled “Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero”.
Trump also announced his deputies for some key environmental and energy Cabinet positions over the weekend, including:
More than a dozen of Trump’s Cabinet nominees face Senate confirmation hearings this week. Doug Burgum, who is up for interior secretary, has a hearing before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources tomorrow. Energy secretary nominee Chris Wright has one on Wednesday. EPA nominee Lee Zeldin has one with the Environment and Public Works Committee on Thursday.
Affordable EV leases are “the car market’s hottest deal,” according toThe Wall Street Journal. Car companies are changing the way they pitch EVs to buyers, offering short-term leases with low monthly payments. These deals are attractive to first-time EV shoppers who are still a little bit hesitant to commit, as well as people on a tighter budget. Roughly 45% of EV transactions at the end of 2024 were leases, much higher than the auto industry as a whole. And a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act means leased cars can more easily qualify for the government’s $7,500 EV tax credit. “The proliferation of lease deals has made EVs more accessible to buyers who couldn’t afford their higher sticker prices,” the Journal said. “For the automakers, it is helping get more EVs into customers’ hands after a choppy start for their electric-car operations.”
Wind power could overtake coal in Europe for electricity generation for the first time this year, according to the energy think tank Ember. At the end of 2024, wind power was closing in on coal, coming in at just 4% below the fossil fuel in power generation as the continent’s coal plants close. “That output gap could easily be made up over the course of 2025 by an increase in regional wind generation capacity or by higher average wind speeds at turbine level, or by some combination of both,” Reutersreported. Last year wind power accounted for 20% of electricity consumed in the EU, and the goal is to get that up to 50% by 2050. But as Electreknoted, the same problems plaguing projects in the U.S. – permitting delays and connection bottlenecks – are slowing things down. The EU accounts for 4.6% of global power sector emissions.
The World Health Organization’s European Centre for Environment and Health has issued a callout for “examples of interventions to protect and promote mental health in the face of climate change.” The group wants to take stock of these interventions so that it can identify gaps in mental health care and share some best practices. The callout is aimed at Europe only, but it is indicative of a growing awareness of how the worsening climate crisis is taking a toll on mental health worldwide.
“There’s a lot of finger-pointing going around, and I would just try to emphasize that this is a really complex problem. We have lots of different responsible parties. To me, what has happened requires more of a rethink than a blame game.” –Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, speaking to Heatmap about the spread of misinformation around the LA fires