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The Biden administration is hoping they’ll be a starting gun for the industry. The industry may or may not be fully satisfied.
In one of the Biden administration’s final acts to advance decarbonization, and after more than two years of deliberation and heated debate, the Treasury Department issued the final requirements governing eligibility for the clean hydrogen tax credit on Friday.
At up to $3 per kilogram of clean hydrogen produced, this was the most generous subsidy in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, and it came with significant risks if the Treasury did not get the rules right. Hydrogen could be an important tool to help decarbonize the economy. But without adequate guardrails, the tax credit could turn it into a shovel that digs the U.S. deeper into a warming hole by paying out billions of dollars to projects that increase emissions rather than reducing them.
In the final guidelines, the Biden administration recognized the severity of this risk. It maintained key safeguards from the rules proposed in 2023, while also making a number of changes, exceptions, and other “flexibilities” — in the preferred parlance of the Treasury Department — that sacrifice rigorous emissions accounting in favor of making the program easier to administer and take advantage of.
For example, it kept a set of requirements for hydrogen made from water and electricity known as the “three pillars.” Broadly, they compel producers to match every hour of their operation with simultaneous clean energy generation, buy this energy from newly built sources, and ensure those sources are in the same general region as the hydrogen plant. Hydrogen production is extremely energy-intensive, and the pillars were designed to ensure that it doesn’t end up causing coal and natural gas plants to run more. But the final rules are less strict than the proposal. For example, the hourly matching requirement doesn’t apply until 2030, and existing nuclear plants count as new zero-emissions energy if they are considered to be at risk of retirement.
Finding a balance between limiting emissions and ensuring that the tax credit unlocks development of this entirely new industry was a monumental challenge. The Treasury Department received more than 30,000 comments on the proposed rule, compared to about 2,000 for the clean electricity tax credit, and just 89 for the electric vehicle tax credit. Senior administration officials told me this may have been the most complicated of all of the provisions in the IRA. In October, the department assured me that the rules would be finished by the end of the year.
Energy experts, environmental groups, and industry are still digesting the rule, and I’ll be looking out for future analyses of the department’s attempt at compromise. But initial reactions have been cautiously optimistic.
On the environmental side, Dan Esposito from the research nonprofit Energy Innovation told me his first impression was that the final rule was “a clear win for the climate” and illustrated “overwhelming, irrefutable evidence” in favor of the three pillars approach, though he did have concerns about a few specific elements that I’ll get to in a moment. Likewise, Conrad Schneider, the U.S. senior director at the Clean Air Task Force, told me that with the exception of a few caveats, “we want to give this final rule a thumbs up.”
Princeton University researcher Jesse Jenkins, a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast and a vocal advocate for the three pillars approach, told me by email that, “Overall, Treasury’s final rules represent a reasonable compromise between competing priorities and will provide much-needed certainty and a solid foundation for the growth of a domestic clean hydrogen industry.”
On the industry side, the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association put out a somewhat cryptic statement. CEO Frank Wolak applauded the administration for making “significant improvements” but warned that the rules were “still extremely complex” and contain several open-ended parts that will be subject to interpretation by the incoming Trump-Vance administration.
“This issuance of Final Rules closes a long chapter, and now the industry can look forward to conversations with the new Congress and new Administration regarding how federal tax and energy policy can most effectively advance the development of hydrogen in the U.S.,” Wolak said.
Constellation Energy, the country’s biggest supplier of nuclear power, was among the most vocal critics of the proposed rule and had threatened to sue the government if it did not create a pathway for hydrogen plants that are powered by existing nuclear plants to claim the credit. In response to the final rule, CEO and President Joe Dominguez said he was “pleased” that the Treasury changed course on this and that the final rule was “an important step in the right direction.”
The California governor’s office, which had criticized the proposed rule, was also swayed. “The final rules create the certainty needed for developers to invest in and build clean, renewable hydrogen production projects in states like California,” Dee Dee Myers, the director of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, said in a statement. The state has plans to build a $12.6 billion hub for producing and using clean hydrogen.
Part of the reason the Treasury needed to find a Goldilocks compromise that pleased as many stakeholders as possible was to protect the rule from future lawsuits and lobbying. But not everyone got what they wanted. For example, the energy developer NextEra, pushed the administration to get rid of the hourly matching provision, which though delayed remained essentially untouched. NextEra did not respond to a request for comment.
Companies that fall on the wrong side of the final rules may still decide to challenge them in court. The next Congress could also make revisions to the underlying tax code, or the incoming Trump administration could change the rules to perhaps make them more favorable to hydrogen made from fossil fuels. But all of this would take time — a rule change, for example, would trigger a whole new notice and comment process. Though the one thing I’ve heard over and over is that the industry wants certainty, which the final rule provides, it’s not yet clear whether that will outweigh any remaining gripes.
In the meantime, it's off to the races for the nascent clean hydrogen industry. Between having clarity on the tax credit, the Department of Energy’s $7 billion hydrogen hubs grant program, and additional federal grants to drive down the cost of clean hydrogen, companies now have numerous incentives to start building the hydrogen economy that has received much hype but has yet to prove its viability. The biggest question now is whether producers will find any buyers for their clean hydrogen.
Below is a more extensive accounting of where the Treasury landed in the final rules.
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On “deliverability,” or the requirement to procure clean energy from the same region, the rules are largely unchanged, although they do allow for some flexibility on regional boundaries.
As I explained above, the Treasury Department also kept the hourly matching requirement, but delayed it by two years until 2030 to give the market more time to set up systems to achieve it — a change Schneider said was “really disappointing” due to the potential emissions consequences. Until then, companies only have to match their operations with clean energy on an annual basis, which is a common practice today. The new deadline is strict, and those that start operations before 2030 will not be grandfathered in — that is, they’ll have to switch to hourly matching once that extended clock runs out. In spite of that, the final rules also ensure that producers won’t be penalized if they are not able to procure clean energy for every single hour their plant operates, an update several groups applauded.
On the requirement to procure clean power from newly built sources, also known as “incrementality,” the department made much bigger changes. It kept an overarching definition that “incremental” generators are those built within three years of the hydrogen plant coming into service, but added three major exceptions:
1. If the hydrogen facility buys power from an existing nuclear plant that’s at risk of retirement.
2. If the hydrogen facility is in a state that has both a robust clean electricity standard and a broad, binding, greenhouse gas cap, such as a cap and trade system. Currently, only California and Washington pass this test.
3. If the hydrogen facility buys power from an existing natural gas or coal plant that has added new carbon capture and storage capacity within three years of the hydrogen project coming into service.
The hydrogen tax credit is so lucrative that environmental groups and energy analysts were concerned it would drive companies like Constellation to start selling all their nuclear power to hydrogen plants instead of to regular energy consumers, which could drive up prices and induce more fossil fuel emissions.
The final rules try to limit this possibility by only allowing existing reactors that are at risk of retirement to qualify. But the definition of “at risk of retirement” is loose. It includes “merchant” nuclear power plants — those that sell at least half their power on the wholesale electricity market rather than to regulated utilities — as well as plants that have just a single reactor, which the rules note have lower or more uncertain revenue and higher operational costs. Looking at the Nuclear Energy Institute’s list of plants, merchant plants make up roughly 40% of the total. All of Constellation Energy’s plants are merchant plants.
There are additional tests — the plant has to have had average annual gross receipts of less than 4.375 cents per kilowatt hour for at least two calendar years between 2017 and 2021. It also has to obtain a minimum 10-year power purchase agreement with the hydrogen company. Beyond that, the reactors that meet this definition are limited to selling no more than 200 megawatts to hydrogen companies, which is roughly 20% for the average reactor.
Esposito, who has closely analyzed the potential emissions consequences of using existing nuclear plants to power hydrogen production, was not convinced by the safeguards. “I don't love the power price look back,” he told me, “because that's not especially indicative of the future — particularly this high load growth future that we're quickly approaching with data centers and everything. It’s very possible power prices could go up from that, and then all of a sudden, the nuclear plants would have been fine without hydrogen.”
As for the 200 megawatt cap, Esposito said it was better than nothing, but he feels “it's kind of an implicit admission that it's not really, truly clean” to produce hydrogen with the energy from these nuclear plants.
Schneider, on the other hand, said the safeguards for nuclear-powered hydrogen projects were adequate. While a lot of plants are theoretically eligible, not all of their electricity will be eligible, he said.
The rules assert that in states that meet the two criteria of a clean electricity standard and a binding cap on emissions, “any increased electricity load is highly unlikely to cause induced grid emissions.”
But in a paper published in February, Energy Innovation explored the potential consequences of this exemption in California. It found that hydrogen projects could have ripple effects on the cap and trade market, pushing up the state’s carbon price and triggering the release of extra carbon emission allowances. “In other words, the California program is more of a ‘soft’ cap than a binding one — the emissions budget ‘expands or contracts in response to price bounds set by the legislature and [California Air Resources Board],’” the report says.
Esposito thinks the exemption is a risk, but that it requires further analysis and he’s not sounding the alarm just yet. He said it could come down to other factors, including how economical hydrogen production in California ends up being.
Producers are also eligible for the tax credit if they make hydrogen the conventional way, by “reforming” natural gas, but capture the emissions released in the process. For this pathway, the Treasury had to clarify several accounting questions.
First, there’s the question of how producers should account for methane leaked into the atmosphere upstream of the hydrogen plant, such as from wells and pipelines. The proposal had suggested using a national average of 0.9%. But researchers found this would wildly underestimate the true warming impact of hydrogen produced from natural gas. It could also underestimate emissions from natural gas producers that have taken steps to reduce methane leakage. “We branded that as one size fits none,” Schneider told me.
The final rules create a path for producers to use more accurate, project-specific methane emissions rates in the future once the Department of Energy updates a lifecycle emissions tool that companies have to use called the “GREET” model. The Environmental Protection Agency recently passed new methane emissions laws that will enable it to collect better data on leakage, which will help the DOE update the model.
Schneider said that’s a step in the right direction, though it will depend on how quickly the GREET model is updated. His bigger concern is if the Trump administration weakens or eliminates the EPA’s methane emissions regulations.
The Treasury also opened up the potential for companies to produce hydrogen from alternative, cleaner sources of methane, like gas captured from wastewater, animal manure, and coal mines. (The original rule included a pathway for using gas captured from landfills.) In reality, hydrogen plants taking this approach are unlikely to use gas directly from these sources, but rather procure certificates that say they have “booked” this cleaner gas and can “claim” the environmental benefits.
Leading up to the final rule, some climate advocates were concerned that this system would give a boost to methane-based hydrogen production over electricity-based production, as it's cheaper to buy renewable natural gas certificates than it is to split water molecules. Existing markets for these credits also often overestimate their benefits — for example, California’s low carbon fuel system gives biogas captured from dairy farms a negative carbon intensity score, even though these projects don’t literally remove carbon from the atmosphere.
The Treasury tried to improve its emissions estimates for each of these alternative methane sources to make them more accurate, but negative carbon intensity scores are still possible.
The department did make one significant change here, however. It specified that companies can’t just buy a little bit of cleaner methane and then average it with regular fossil-based methane — each must be considered separately for determining tax credit eligibility. Jenkins, of Princeton, told me that without this rule, huge amounts of hydrogen made from regular natural gas could qualify.
Producers also won’t be able to take this “book and claim” approach until markets adapt to the Treasury’s reporting requirements, which isn’t expected until at least 2027.
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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
With the ongoing disaster approaching its second week, here’s where things stand.
A week ago, forecasters in Southern California warned residents of Los Angeles that conditions would be dry, windy, and conducive to wildfires. How bad things have gotten, though, has taken everyone by surprise. As of Monday morning, almost 40,000 acres of Los Angeles County have burned in six separate fires, the biggest of which, Palisades and Eaton, have yet to be fully contained. The latest red flag warning, indicating fire weather, won’t expire until Wednesday.
Many have questions about how the second-biggest city in the country is facing such unbelievable devastation (some of these questions, perhaps, being more politically motivated than others). Below, we’ve tried to collect as many answers as possible — including a bit of good news about what lies ahead.
A second Santa Ana wind event is due to set in Monday afternoon. “We’re expecting moderate Santa Ana winds over the next few days, generally in the 20 to 30 [mile per hour] range, gusting to 50, across the mountains and through the canyons,” Eric Drewitz, a meteorologist with the Forest Service, told me on Sunday. Drewitz noted that the winds will be less severe than last week’s, when the fires flared up, but he also anticipates they’ll be “more easterly,” which could blow the fires into new areas. A new red flag warning has been issued through Wednesday, signaling increased fire potential due to low humidity and high winds for several days yet.
If firefighters can prevent new flare-ups and hold back the fires through that wind event, they might be in good shape. By Friday of this week, “it looks like we could have some moderate onshore flow,” Drewitz said, when wet ocean air blows inland, which would help “build back the marine layer” and increase the relative humidity in the region, decreasing the chances of more fires. Information about the Santa Anas at that time is still uncertain — the models have been changing, and the wind is tricky to predict the strength of so far out — but an increase in humidity will at least offer some relief for the battered Ventura and Orange Counties.
The Palisades Fire, the biggest in L.A., ripped through the hilly and affluent area between Santa Monica and Malibu, including the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the second-most expensive zip code in Los Angeles and home to many celebrities. Structures in Big Rock, a neighborhood in Malibu, have also burned. The fire has also encroached on the I-405 and the Getty Villa, and destroyed at least two homes in Mandeville Canyon, a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar homes. Students at nearby University of California, Los Angeles, were told on Friday to prepare for a possible evacuation.
The Eaton Fire, the second biggest blaze in the area, has killed 16 people in Altadena, a neighborhood near Pasadena, according to the Los Angeles Times, making it one of the deadliest fires in the modern history of California.
The 1,000-acre Kenneth fire is 100% contained but still burning near Calabasas and the gated community of Hidden Hills. The Hurst Fire has burned nearly 800 acres and is 89% contained and is still burning near Sylmar, the northernmost neighborhood in L.A. Though there are no evacuation notices for either the Kenneth or the Hurst fires, residents in the L.A. area should monitor the current conditions as the situation continues to be fluid and develop.
The 43-acre Sunset Fire, which triggered evacuations last week in Hollywood and Hollywood Hills, burned no homes and is 100% contained.
The Lidia Fire, which ignited in a remote area south of Acton, California, on Wednesday afternoon, burned 350 acres of brush and is 100% contained.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire, and investigations typically don’t begin until after the fire is under control and the area is safe to reenter, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo. He also noted, however, that urban fires are typically easier to pinpoint the cause of than wildland fires due to the availability of witnesses and surveillance footage.
The vast majority of wildfires, 85%, are caused by humans.So far, investigators have ruled out lightning — another common fire-starter — because there were no electrical storms in the area when the fires started. In the case of the Palisades Fire, there were no power lines in the area of the ignition, though investigators are now looking into an electrical transmission tower in Eaton Canyon as the possible cause of the deadly fire in Altadena. There have been rumors that arsonists started the fires, but investigators say that scenario is also pretty unlikely due to the spread of the fires and how remote the ignition areas are.
Officially, 24 people have died, but that tally is likely to rise. California Governor Gavin Newsom said Sunday that he expects “a lot more” deaths will be added to the total in the coming days as search efforts continue.
Incoming President Donald Trump slammed the response to the L.A. fires in a Truth Social post on Sunday morning: “This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country,” he wrote. “They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?”
Though there is much blame going around — not all of it founded in reality — the challenges facing firefighters are immense. Last week, because of strong Santa Ana winds, fire crews could not drop suppressants like water or chemical retardant on the initial blazes. (In strong winds, water and retardant will blow away before they reach the flames on the ground.)
Fighting a fire in an urban or suburban area is also different from fighting one in a remote, wild area. In a true wildfire, crews don’t use much water; firefighters typically contain the blazes by creating breaks — areas cleared of vegetation that starve a fire of fuel and keep it from spreading. In an urban or suburban event, however, firefighters can’t simply hack through a neighborhood, and typically have to use water to fight structure fires. Their priority also shifts from stopping the fire to evacuating and saving people, which means putting out the fire itself has to wait.
What’s more, the L.A. area faced dangerous fire weather going into last week — with wind gusts up to 100 miles per hour and dry air — and the persistence of the Santa Ana winds during firefighting operations through the weekend made it extremely difficult for emergency managers to gain a foothold.
Trump and others have criticized Los Angeles for being unprepared for the fires, given reports that some fire hydrants ran dry or had low pressure during operations in Pacific Palisades. According to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, about 20% of hydrants were affected, mostly at higher elevations.
The problem isn’t a lack of preparation, however. It’s that the L.A. wildfires are so large and widespread, the county’s preparations were quickly overwhelmed. “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quiñones said in a news conference last week. When houses burn down, water mains can break open. Civilians also put a strain on the system when they use hoses or sprinkler systems to try to protect their homes.
On Sunday, Judy Chu, the Democratic lawmaker representing Altadena, confirmed that fire officials had told her there was enough water to continue the battle in the days ahead. “I believe that we're in a good place right now,” she told reporters. Newsom, meanwhile, has responded to criticism over the water failure by ordering an investigation into the weak or dry hydrants.
So-called “super soaker” planes have had no problem with water access; they’re scooping directly from the ocean.
Yes. Although aerial support was grounded in the early stages of the wildfires due to severe Santa Ana winds, flights resumed during lulls in the storms last week.
There is a misconception, though, that water and retardant drops “put out” fires; they don’t. Instead, aerial support suppresses a fire so crews can get in close and use traditional methods, like cutting a fire break or spraying water. “All that up in the air, all that’s doing is allowing the firefighters [on the ground] a chance to get in,” Bobbie Scopa, a veteran firefighter and author of the memoir Both Sides of the Fire Line, told me last week.
With winds expected to pick up early this week, aerial firefighting operations may be grounded again. “If you have erratic, unpredictable winds to where you’ve got a gust spread of like 20 to 30 knots,” i.e. 23 to 35 miles per hour, “that becomes dangerous,” Dan Reese, a veteran firefighter and the founder and president of the International Wildfire Consulting Group, told me on Friday.
Because of the direction of the Santa Ana winds, wildfire smoke should mostly blow out to sea. But as winds shift, unhealthy air can blow into populated areas, affecting the health of residents.
Wildfire smoke is unhealthy, period, but urban and suburban smoke like that from the L.A. fires can be particularly detrimental. It’s not just trees and brush immolating in an urban fire, it’s also cars, and batteries, and gas tanks, and plastics, and insulation, and other nasty, chemical-filled things catching fire and sending fumes into the air. PM2.5, the inhalable particulates from wildfire smoke, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the U.S.
You can read Heatmap’s guide to staying safe during extreme smoke events here.
“The bad news is, I’m not seeing any rain chances,” Drewitz, the Forest Service meteorologist, told me on Sunday. Though the marine layer will bring wetter air to the Los Angeles area on Friday, his models showed it’ll be unlikely to form precipitation.
Though some forecasters have signaled potential rain at the end of next week, the general consensus is that the odds for that are low, and that any rain there may be will be too light or short-lived to contribute meaningfully to extinguishing the fires.
The chaparral shrublands around Los Angeles are supposed to burn every 30 to 130 years. “There are high concentrations of terpenes — very flammable oils — in that vegetation; it’s made to burn,” Scopa, the veteran firefighter, told me.
What isn’t normal, though, is the amount of rain Los Angeles got ahead of this past spring — 52.46 inches in the preceding two years, the wettest period in the city’s history since the late 1800s — which was followed by a blisteringly hot summer and a delayed start to this year’s rainy season. Since October, parts of Southern California have received just 10% of their normal rainfall
This “weather whiplash” is caused by a warmer atmosphere, which means that plants will grow explosively due to the influx of rain and then dry out when the drought returns, leaving lots of dry fuels ready and waiting for a spark. “This is really, I would argue, a signature of climate change that is going to be experienced almost everywhere people actually live on Earth,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who authored a new study on the pattern, told The Washington Post.
We know less about how climate change may affect the Santa Anas, though experts have some theories.
At least 12,000 structures have burned so far in the fires, which is already exacerbating the strain on the Los Angeles housing market — one of the country’s tightest even before the fires — as thousands of displaced people look for new places to live. “Dozens and dozens of people are going after the same properties,” one real estate agent told the Los Angeles Times. The city has reminded businesses that price gouging — including raising rental prices more than 10% — during an emergency is against the law.
Los Angeles had a shortage of about 370,000 homes before the fires, and between 2021 and 2023, the county added fewer than 30,000 new units per year. Recovery grants and federal aid can lag, and it often takes more than two years for even the first Housing and Urban Development Disaster Recovery Grants’ expenditures to go out.
My colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote for Heatmap that the economic impact of the Los Angeles fire is already much higher than that of other fires, such as the 2018 Camp fire, partly because of the value of the Pacific Palisades real estate.
The wildfires may “deal a devastating blow to [California’s] fragile home insurance market,” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last week. In recent years, home insurers have left California or declined to write new policies, at least partially due to the increased risk of wildfires in the state.
Depending on the extent of the damage from the fires, the coffers of California’s FAIR Plan — which insures homeowners who can’t get insurance otherwise, including many in Pacific Palisades and Altadena — could empty, causing it to seek money from insurers, according to the state’s regulations. As Zeitlin writes, “This would mean that Californians who were able to buy private insurance — because they don’t live in a region of the state that insurers have abandoned — could be on the hook for massive wildfire losses.”
First and foremost, sign up for all relevant emergency alerts. Make sure to turn on the sound on your phone and keep it near you in case of a change in conditions. Pack a “go bag” with essentials and consider filling your gas tank now so that you can evacuate at a moment’s notice if needed. Read our guide on what to do if you get a pre-evacuation or an evacuation notice ahead of time so that you’re not scrambling for information if you get an alert.
The free Watch Duty app has become a go-to resource for people affected by the fires, including friends and family of Angelenos who may themselves be thousands of miles away. The app provides information on fire perimeters, evacuation notices, and power outages. Its employees pull information directly from emergency responders’ radio broadcasts and sometimes beat official sources to disseminating it. If you need an endorsement: Emergency responders rely on the app, too.
There are many scams in the wake of disasters as crooks look to take advantage of desperate people — and those who want to help them. To play it safe, you can use a hub like the one established by GoFundMe, which is actively vetting campaigns related to the L.A. fires. If you’re looking to volunteer your time, make a donation of clothing or food, or if you’re able to foster animals the fire has displaced, you can use this handy database from the Mutual Aid Network L.A. There are also many national organizations, such as the Red Cross, that you can connect with if you want to help.
The City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Fire Department have asked that do-gooders not bring donations directly to fire stations or shelters; such actions can interfere with emergency operations. Their website provides more information about how you can help — productively — on their website.