You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
The fire was “fueled by drought and hurricane-force winds.” It “jumped from one home to the next,” the local news later reported, and “moved in unpredictable and unprecedented ways.” Camera phone videos showed shaky scenes of last-minute evacuations — a “dizzyingly chaotic display of improvisation and panic.” The fire had apparently ignited in dry invasive grasses outside of town, perhaps due to a downed power line, before blowing into an unstoppable “urban firestorm.” Airborne embers destroyed hundreds of structures, leaving behind ashen ruins that survivors said looked like a war zone.
It was December 30, 2021. The Marshall fire would become the most destructive in Colorado’s history, ultimately killing two people, causing 35,000 to flee, and destroying more than 1,000 homes and businesses outside of Boulder. But to an untrained eye, the landscape hardly looked like a place where a wildfire could break out; after all, there was no forest. “It was 200 yards from a Costco — why would I have to worry about fire?” one survivor recounted to The Washington Post afterward. “It’s, like, suburbia, you know?”
But grass fires are a growing danger in the United States, even if they lack the iconic imagery of the forest fires that tend to dominate the news this time of year. The 2018 Martin fire in Nevada, the largest in the state’s history, burned 435,000 acres of invasive cheatgrass and at one point stretched 54 miles long. The 2006 East Amarillo Complex fire in Texas blackened almost a million acres. And the wildfires in Maui this month were the deadliest in modern U.S. history, in part because they ignited in highly flammable non-native grasses, which burn hot, fast, and unpredictably.
“They’re too intense for firefighters to get next to with either ‘dozers or engines,” Brad Smith, the Predictive Services department head at Texas A&M Forest Service, told me of the wind-driven grass fires he sees across Texas. “They also move too fast, so it’s dangerous to put people out in front of these fires. It’s often the case we have to wait either for the weather to change or for the fire to move into a more favorable fuel type,” such as plowed agricultural land, before first responders can get it under control.
I had reached out to Smith after seeing him dispense grassland firefighting advice in a 2011 educational video for firefighters titled, “Oh, It’s Just a Grass Fire.” Produced by the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center — a grimly named government agency that exists to “share lessons and knowledge within the entire wildland fire community” — the video was apparently intended to head off dismissals of what it calls a “potentially underestimated fuel type.”
Such an underestimation in the industry comes from the fact that grass fires can actually have “a few advantages” for wildland firefighters, as authors Justin Angle and Nick Mott write in their forthcoming guideThis Is Wildfire. “There are a lot of fire-fighting strategies that are just more feasible in a grassy landscape that’s more open and has more fuel breaks like roads and bodies of water,” the authors go on to explain. “In addition, the fuel type is more homogenous (and therefore predictable) compared with a mountain ecosystem.”
But throw in high winds, and all of a sudden grassland fires can become a completely different beast. “People think [wildfires] just move in one direction, but winds generally quarter,” Smith said. “So let’s say you have a north wind; you think, Well, [the fire] is going south. But if you get a 45-degree change in direction, that fire can move left or right for short periods of time very quickly. That can catch people by surprise.” In the instructional video, this point is made with the cautionary tale of Destry Horton, a father of two who was killed fighting a grass fire in Oklahoma in 2006.
But if even firefighters need the occasional somber refresher to take grass fires seriously, then many of the rest of us have likely barely registered them as a threat. “I think a lot of people look at a grass fire and feel like, ‘Well, I could just go stomp it out,’” Barb Satink Wolfson, the University of California’s Cooperative Extension fire advisor for Monterey, San Benito, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz counties, told me.
Perhaps that’s partially because “forest fire” is often interchanged with “wildfire,” inadvertently evoking the conflagration out of Bambi: popping evergreen trees, flames reaching for the sky, adorable woodland animals running for cover. Reality looks a little different: Grassland pasture and range make up 60% of land use in the Mountain West and about 29% of land use in the Pacific Coast states, the most recent survey by the United States Department of Agriculture found (compared to 18% and 29% forest-use land, respectively).
Fire statistics seem to bear that out: In a study of burns in 11 western states between 1984 and 2020, only 35% were actually in forests, Denver’s 5280 magazine reports. In another cited study, local fire departments “responded to forest fires just 7% of the time, compared to 39% for grass fires.” Smith also told me that of the 30 largest fires in Texas since 2000, 28 had “occurred in our grass-dominant fuel-scape in West Texas.”
The tragic consequence of the public not taking grass fires seriously — or not knowing to take them seriously — is that many people who live in wildland-urban interface communities near or adjacent to natural, undeveloped lands might not have made the proper wildfire preparations or have an evacuation plan because the fire threat feels remote.
That can prove deadly. A quarter of Hawaii is covered in highly flammable non-native grasses and “virtually every community [in the state] is on a wildland-urban interface,” one fire manager recently told Wired. Yet the communities were unsuspecting and unprepared for the fire that swept through Lahaina and the surrounding landscape last week. Part of that is because fire is “not something that has been a part of ... society in Hawaii,” Satink Wolfson said, adding: “There isn’t a big history of people telling [residents]: ‘You need metal gutters, you need to make your home fire safe.’”
Though fire is not a historic part of the ecology of Hawaii, it is in North American grasslands, where Indigenous communities have practiced cultural burning for centuries upon centuries. But non-native grass species are likewise disrupting these natural cycles in the western United States, since invasive plants tend to grow thickly and contiguously, unlike native perennials that grow in more isolated clumps that help naturally break up fires. By one estimate, invasive grasses can more than triple a region’s susceptibility to wildfire.
Making matters worse, non-native grasses tend to quickly colonize and outcompete native plants after burns, in effect bridging fire further and further into landscapes where it doesn’t belong, such as deserts — or urban environments. “Those non-native herbaceous species are like the wick,” Max Moritz, a Cooperative Extension wildfire specialist and adjunct professor at U.C. Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, told me. “They’re the place that fire can get a foothold on the landscape, even if the landscape wasn’t supposed to burn very often from a fire ecology perspective.”
Increasingly, attention in the West has focused on allowing “good fires” to run their course — grass fires included. “I would love to see CalFire use natural ignitions to reduce fire hazard and to improve ecosystem health,” Satink Wolfson said. “I’ve already seen so many fires put out this year that could have had a positive impact.” Moritz’s focus is on better land-use planning, including rehabilitating abandoned farmlands into working buffer zones. Both Satink Wolfson and Moritz floated strategic grazing as another possibility. But everyone agrees: Something needs to be done.
“Grasslands — there’s a lot of area there to manage if you are hoping to reduce the ignition potential,” Moritz said, then ominously warned: “It’s almost all ignitable.”
Read more about grass fires:
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The company managed to put a positive spin on tariffs.
The residential solar company Sunrun is, like much of the rest of the clean energy business, getting hit by tariffs. The company told investors in its first quarter earnings report Tuesday that about half its supply of solar modules comes from overseas, and thus is subject to import taxes. It’s trying to secure more modules domestically “as availability increases,” Sunrun said, but “costs are higher and availability limited near-term.”
“We do not directly import any solar equipment from China, although producers in China are important for various upstream components used by our suppliers,” Sunrun chief executive Mary Powell said on the call, indicating that having an entirely-China-free supply chain is likely impossible in the renewable energy industry.
Hardware makes up about a third of the company’s costs, according to Powell. “This cost will increase from tariffs,” she said, although some advance purchasing done before the end of last year will help mitigate that. All told, tariffs could lower the company’s cash generation by $100 million to $200 million, chief financial officer Danny Abajian said.
But — and here’s where things get interesting — the company also offered a positive spin on tariffs.
In a slide presentation to investors, the company said that “sustained, severe tariffs may drive the country to a recession.” Sounds bad, right?
But no, not for Sunrun. A recession could mean “lower long term interest rates,” which, since the company relies heavily on securitizing solar leases and benefits from lower interest rates, could round in the company’s favor.
In its annual report released in February, the company mentioned that “higher rates increase our cost of capital and decrease the amount of capital available to us to finance the deployment of new solar energy systems.” On Wednesday, the company estimated that a 10% tariff, which is the baseline rate in the Trump “Liberation Day” tariffs, could be offset with a half percentage point decline in the company’s cost of capital, although it didn’t provide any further details behind the calculation.
Even in the absence of interest rate relief, a recession could still be okay for Sunrun.
“Historically, recessions have driven more demand for our products,” the company said in its presentation, arguing that because their solar systems offer savings compared to utility rates, they become more attractive when households get more money conscious.
Sunrun shares are up almost 10% today, as the company showed more growth than expected.
For what it’s worth, the much-ballyhooed decline in long-term interest rates as a result of Trump’s tariffs hasn’t actually happened, at least not yet. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday decided to keep the federal funds rate at 4.5%, the third time in a row the board of governors have chosen to maintain the status quo. The yield on 10-year treasuries, often used as a benchmark for interest rates, is up slightly since “Liberation Day” on April 2 and sits today at 4.34%, compared to 4.19% before Trump’s tariffs announcements.
On solar growth, Hornsea 4, and Rivian deliveries
Current conditions: The first cicada broods have begun to emerge in the Southeast as soil temperatures hit 64 degrees Fahrenheit• Hail and even snow are possible across parts of Spain today • Forecasters have identified a risk zone for tropical storm development in the Atlantic basin, with potential for the first named storm of the year to form by mid-May.
1. Global solar market expected to slow in 2025
The global solar market is expected to grow only 10% in 2025, down from 33% growth in 2024 and 87% growth in 2023, according to a new report by SolarPower Europe. The firm’s “most realistic scenario” accounts for the natural slowdown in development after a boom caused by high energy prices in 2022 and 2023, as well as the “uneven distribution of solar market growth” worldwide, with China accounting for 55% of the market share, lending to the dip in overall solar as it implements reforms this summer in how its renewables are priced and traded.
Speaking at the opening of the Intersolar 2025 conference in Munich on Wednesday, Abigail Ross Hopper, the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, echoed some of the uncertainty expressed in SolarPower Europe’s report. “I don’t think any of us could be in this business if we weren’t optimistic,” she said, adding, “I think we’re going to weather through this storm, but it is going to be a bit rocky for a few years.” SolarPower Europe’s report, meanwhile, anticipates “likely” growth from 2 terawatts of global installed solar capacity at the end of 2024 to 7.1 terawatts of total installed capacity by 2030, which would meet “nearly two-thirds of the 11 terawatt renewable energy target set at COP28.” Under ideal conditions, solar could even quadruple capacity to more than 8 terawatts by the decade’s end. Read the full report here.
2. Orsted cancels 2.4-gigawatt offshore wind project in the UK, citing rising costs
The Danish energy company Orsted announced this week that it is canceling its Hornsea 4 offshore wind project in the UK due to rising supply chain costs and other “adverse macroeconomic developments,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Hornsea 4 was expected to become one of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world, with a capacity of 2.4 gigawatts once it was completed. (Equinor’s recently paused Empire Wind I project, south of New York’s Long Island, would have had an 810-megawatt capacity by comparison.)
Orsted warned it would take a hit from the cancellation, with breakaway costs estimated to be between $533 million and $685 million. Nevertheless, “Orsted said the project no longer made economic sense, even with a contract to sell power at government-guaranteed prices for 15 years,” Bloomberg writes. Significantly, the canceled project will also hurt the UK’s efforts to add more renewables to its power grid.
3. ICYMI: Rivian lowered its delivery estimate by as much as 15% due to tariffs
Rivian beat Wall Street’s first quarter estimates, the automaker shared in its earnings letter to investors on Tuesday, but lowered its target for 2025 vehicle deliveries on account of tariffs, CNBC reports. Though the company builds all its electric vehicles in Illinois, “The current global economic landscape presents significant uncertainty, particularly regarding evolving trade regulation, policies, tariffs, and the overall impact these items may have on consumer sentiment and demand,” Rivian said by way of explanation. While it previously estimated it would deliver between 46,000 and 51,000 units in 2025, the revised outlook anticipates 40,000 to 46,000 deliveries. Last year, the company delivered just over 51,500 vehicles, Inside EVs notes.
The company also said it expects to take on “a couple thousand dollars” in additional expenses per vehicle due to the trade policies, though founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe said it’s not planning to increase the $45,000 starting price of the R2 as a result. Despite the continued uncertainty, Rivian said it still expects to achieve a “modest positive gross profit” in 2025.
4. Republicans sneak sale of public lands into reconciliation bill
Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources added an eleventh-hour amendment to their portion of the budget package late Wednesday night, calling for the sale of thousands of acres of public lands in Nevada and Utah. Introduced by Representatives Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah, the provision capitalized on longtime aspirations by Republicans to privatize Bureau of Land Management acreage in the West.
As I wrote on Wednesday, the Republicans’ maneuver, “which came at nearly midnight, left many Democrats and environmental groups deeply frustrated by the lack of transparency,” and critics had little time to comb through the extent of the proposal. While early reviews of the bill estimated the sell-off of about 11,000 acres of land, much of it apparently near cities — in keeping with Republican Senator Mike Lee’s aspirations to use BLM land for suburban sprawl — the Wilderness Society informed me last night that the accounting may end up as high as 500,000 acres or more. That’s consequential not just for public land advocates, but also because “turning over public lands to states — or to private owners — could ease the way for expansive oil and gas development, especially in Utah, where there are ambitions to quadruple exports of fossil fuels from the state’s northeastern corner,” I note in my piece. Moreover, “Reducing BLM land could also limit opportunities for solar, wind, and geothermal development.”
5. Thinning forests to reduce wildfire danger could also mitigate droughts: study
Thinning forests is a favorite idea of Republicans, who’ve rebuked blue states over forestry practices they claim exacerbate the dangers of wildfires. Now, a new study from researchers at the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources at the University of Nevada, Reno looking at the hydrology of the Sierra Nevadas has found that the practice — along with prescribed fires — could also have potential upsides during drought years, including generating more mountain runoff.
According to the findings published in the journal Water Resources Research, water yields in forests thinned to densities closer to those of a century ago can be increased by 8% to 14% during drought years. That water would be “particularly valuable … to farmers and cities in central California and northern Nevada who rely on Sierra [Nevada] snowpack for much of their water supply,” according to a press release about the research. Significant flooding risks did not appear to increase with the water yields. As earlier researchers have found, however, the results of forest thinning treatments also depend on how, where, and to what extent the treatments are applied. Not all landscapes would necessarily benefit from such regimes. For example, while President Trump blamed the January fires in Los Angeles on poor forest management in California, the blazes were in chaparral, not in forests where thinning could be applied.
Riverside Clean Air Carshare
University of California, Riverside announced Wednesday that it is launching the nation’s only hydrogen-powered carshare program in a partnership with city and state agencies. Participants can rent Toyota Mirai sedans through a smartphone app and pay hourly rates competitive with Uber and Lyft fees.
Republicans Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced the measure late Tuesday night.
Late last week, the House Committee on Natural Resources released the draft text of its portion of the Republicans’ budget package. While the bill included mandates to open oil and gas leasing in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, increase logging by 25% over 2024’s harvest, and allow for mining activities upstream of Minnesota’s popular Boundary Waters recreation area, there was also a conspicuous absence in its 96 pages: an explicit plan to sell off public lands.
To many of the environmental groups that have been sounding the alarm about Republicans’ ambitions to privatize federal lands — which make up about 47% of the American West — the particular exclusion seemed almost too good to be true. And as it turned out in the bill’s markup on Tuesday, it was. In a late-night amendment, Republican Representatives Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced a provision to sell off thousands of acres in their states.
The maneuver, which came at nearly midnight, left many Democrats and environmental groups deeply frustrated by the lack of transparency. “The rushed and last-minute nature of this amendment introduction means little to no information is available,” the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said in a statement Wednesday.
While early reports had suggested the proposed sell-off would consist of around 11,000 acres of land in total between the two states, that number was arrived at in part due to the delayed release of maps, as well as an apparent malfunction with Amodei’s mic as he was discussing the parcels in Nevada, a communications adviser working with public land groups to analyze the amendment told me Thursday. It now looks as if the amendment offers up approximately 11,500 acres of land in Utah alone, based on acreage numbers included in the text.
Nevada’s parcels don’t include firm numbers, and public land groups are basing their estimates on eyeballing the maps prepared at the request of Amodei, as well as “other bits of information.” Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto has estimated, for example, that the amendment proposes selling up to 200,000 acres of public land in Nevada’s Clark County, though some groups believe the acreage in the state could be much higher — totaling 500,000 acres across Utah and Nevada, or potentially even more.
House lawmakers appeared still to be at odds during a Wednesday morning press conference to announce the creation of a Bipartisan Public Lands Caucus. Rather than putting on the united front suggested by the working group’s name, former Secretary of the Interior and Montana Republican Ryan Zinke argued seemingly in defense of the amendment, saying, “A lot of communities are drying up because they’re looking to public land next door and they can’t use it.” Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell then took the mic to say, “I would urge all of us that the hearings — it’s not done in the dead of night, and that we have good, bipartisan discussions with everybody impacted at the table.” (Zinke later said that he told Republican leadership “I strongly don’t believe [land sales] should be in the reconciliation bill,” and that the amendment represents his red line: “It’s a no now. It will be a no later. It will be a no forever.”)
Despite the cloak-and-dagger way Republicans introduced the amendment, there are several clues as to what exactly Amodei and Maloy are up to. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah has aggressively pushed for the sell-off of public lands, including introducing the Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter (HOUSES) Act, which would “make small tracts of [Bureau of Land Management] land available to communities to address housing shortages or affordability.” Critics of the bill have called it the “McMansion Subsidy Act” and have argued — as the Center for Western Priorities’ Kate Groetzinger, does — that it would “do little to address housing issues in major metros like Salt Lake City and the fact that the current housing shortage is due largely to a lack of home construction, not land.” The Center for Western Priorities also contends that it “contains very few restrictions on what can be built on federal public lands that are sold off under the program.” Notably, Lee and Maloy have worked closely together in the past on transferring federal land in Utah to private ownership.
The land singled out in the Tuesday amendment includes BLM and Forest Service parcels in six counties in Utah and Nevada that “had already been identified for disposal by the counties,” Outdoor Life notes. While some land would be sold with “the express purpose of alleviating housing affordability,” the publication notes that “other parcels, including those in southern Utah, don’t have a designated purpose.”
One communications director at a regional environmental group pointed out to me that the amendment proposes no parcels on the Wasatch Front in and around Salt Lake City, where around 82% of the state’s population lives and where such a high-density housing case could be made. Instead, many of the parcels are located a four- to five-hour drive away in the more remote Washington County. Conspicuously, a number of the parcels abut roads, potentially teeing up highway expansions. One parcel is even adjacent to Zion National Park — a prime location for an expensive development or resort. As Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director for the Wilderness Society, warned E&E News, it’s in this way that the bill appears to set “dangerous precedent that is intended to pave the way for a much larger scale transfer of public lands.”
While many Republicans contend that states can better manage public lands in the West than the federal government can (in addition, of course, to helping raise the $15 billion of the desired $2 trillion in deficit reductions across the government to offset Trump’s tax cuts), such a move could also have significant consequences for the environment. Turning over public lands to states — or to private owners — could also ease the way for expansive oil and gas development, especially in Utah, where there are ambitions to quadruple exports of fossil fuels from the state’s northeastern corner.
Reducing BLM land could also limit opportunities for solar, wind, and geothermal development; in Utah, the agency has identified some 5 million acres of public land, in addition to 11.8 million acres in Nevada, for solar development. While there are admittedly questions about how much renewable permitting will make it through the Trump BLM, it’s also true that solar development wouldn’t necessarily be the preference of private landowners if the land were transferred.
Tuesday’s markup ultimately saw the introduction of more than 120 amendments, including a Democratic provision that would have prohibited revenue from this bill from being used to sell off public lands, but was easily struck down by Republicans. In the end, Amodei and Maloy’s amendment was the only one the committee adopted. Shortly afterward, the lawmakers voted 26-17 to advance the legislation.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect new estimates of the amount of land to be sold off.