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An interview with Kaniela Ing, the national director of the Green New Deal Network and a seventh-generation Indigenous Hawaiian
Kaniela Ing was looking for his car.
The national director of the Green New Deal Network and a seventh-generation Indigenous Hawaiian who currently lives in Oahu, Ing had just touched down in Maui — and was navigating the rental car lot — when he took my call on Thursday afternoon. “It’ll be quiet,” he considerately assured me as he navigated the garage, moving upstream from the chaotic flow of tourists and evacuees trying to leave the island, and en route to see his family, friends, and the unthinkable wildfire devastation of Lahaina, a community he loves.
Our conversation touched on the dizzying speed of the destruction, outsider misconceptions about Maui, the colonialist mismanagement of the land, and the urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the loss of Lahaina, the physical town, and the resilience of Lahaina, the community. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me — I know you’re busy with media appearances today while also grieving the devastation of a place and a community you love. Have you heard from your family and friends? Are they okay?
My immediate family is. I texted a few of my friends from high school who are now firefighters. I haven’t heard back so, you know, they’re probably busy saving people and searching for loved ones and doing the heroic work.
Growing up in Maui, were wildfires ever something you worried about?
No. I mean, I vaguely remember once in a while there’d be a small fire up on the mountain. And then there was, like, a slightly bigger one. So it’s definitely a trajectory. But never anything remotely close to this. It’s not like we live in Canada. It’s … it’s really shocking.
I’ve been reading today about how Lahaina was a historic and cultural heart of the islands even before it became the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1802. What does the Indigenous Hawaiian community lose when there is a fire like this?
Lahaina has been characterized by many as a tourist destination and nothing much more, but it was and continues to be at the heart of a lot of our culture here in Hawaii. Even today, some of our best cultural practitioners and musicians live in Lahaina, sometimes on the same land and home that their families have been living on since the 1800s. Even before that.
So Front Street, yes, in some ways, it’s become like a Waikiki Time Square sort of area that locals avoid. On the other hand, the people that actually live on or adjacent to that street are some of the most rooted Native Hawaiians in the world.
Yeah, my next question was about the misconception of Maui as just a tourist spot. I saw you boosted a tweet about a large unhoused population that lives in the area impacted by the fires. Can you speak to the disproportionate impacts of climate change that we’re seeing?
The response has been mixed. It’s really heartening to see community come together and local businesses taking supply drop-offs and delivering it. If anything, emergency institutions are overwhelmed by the volume of volunteers that are reaching out to help. On the other hand, it appears that in some ways the tourists were prioritized in some of the response. Or at least this is some of the feedback I’m hearing on the ground, where their safeties seemed to come first when it came to the more institutional players like the hotels and government. But we are seeing a rapid deployment of government services and large nonprofits now directed at local residents.
It’s just — I mean, it’ll unfold this quickly. I think that’s what people don’t understand about climate change and sea level rise. For example, sea level rise, it just makes people think that the water is slowly going up and the same for global warming: the temperature is just going to get a little bit warmer every year. But no, sea level rise is punctuated by massive tsunamis and hurricanes. And the same for global temperatures; these hurricane-force winds are just going to become more and more common. The dry grass and the low humidity are going to make these disasters become the norm unless we take some really drastic action now for a clean-energy transition. And the people that are hit first tend to be Indigenous folks, Black folks, especially if you’re in a community that lacks certain infrastructure, like a low-income community — even more so for the unsheltered.
You’ve been speaking out strongly on social media about the political and business powers that are sitting by as climate change unfolds. So I wanted to ask if there was anyone or anything you would point a finger at when it comes to the fires in Maui?
There are multiple. It’s a confluence of factors. The official line by the National Weather Service is [that the fires were caused by a downed] powerline caused by hurricane-force winds, worsened by dry vegetation and low humidity. But what caused that is, of course, corporations that let loose a blanket of pollution that’s overheating our planet.
In addition, there’s real mismanagement of land and water, where corporations that stem from the original Big Five oligarchy in Hawaii — which is the first five missionary families who control our government, rich, white, right-wing families. They persist today in the form of various corporations. And throughout my life, some of these companies have put agriculture mono-crops on our islands, knowing that it’s not profitable or sustainable, to hold the land for speculative purposes. And once the business went under — the sugarcane biz went under — they didn’t have a plan for the workers and they pit the union against the community activists that didn’t like cane burning, right? So those are the people that have controlled our island for a long time.
And in fact, we want to make sure that as we recover, once the direct relief efforts are done, the cameras have left — we understand that recovery will take years. And as that recovery unfolds, we want to make sure that the people, the communities, are actually empowered to rebuild themselves, that we don’t open the door for disaster capitalists. Unfortunately, the institutions best poised to distribute direct aid are also the most likely to enable disaster capitalists to exploit this tragedy. They’re actively raising millions and once the spotlight moves from our island, what’s to come of those monies and who’s really going to benefit? Those are questions that I think we need to be really proactive about answering on our own as community organizers.
And maybe in this opportunity — like, we all understand that we’re going to have to be lobbying for additional FEMA funds, federal funds, state and local funds. We want to make sure that the people, the forces that contributed to this problem in the first place, are pushed out of power for a more community, ground-up sort of infrastructure. So there’s a lot of mutual aid and power building that needs to happen immediately.
In the Western U.S., there’s been a push to incorporate Indigenous knowledge about wildfire management into state and federal stewardship practices. My understanding is that Hawaii’s natural ecosystem doesn’t have the same wildfire cycles as the continental U.S., but is there a better way forward here? What do you think needs to be done?
I think the Smokey the Bear narrative of just stopping fires unnaturally is something that we’re learning isn’t necessarily the right way to go. And that the light burns, planned sort of burns that native folks have initiated — First Nations in Canada — have been much more productive. And rather than building cities wherever we want and trying to keep nature out, we need to understand our role in the broader ecosystem if we want to survive. Like, this isn’t a matter of environmentalism. It’s for our own survival. This disaster is not natural. And I’m tired of people saying that it’s natural. It could have been prevented.
For example, Lahaina is known for its native practices. When I was the chair of Ocean and Marine Resources and Hawaiian Affairs in the state legislature, I would go to Lahaina committee members to check in every time, like, NOAA was trying to designate a coral as endangered. They’d be like, No, actually, that “endangered” coral is invasive in this one area so what we’ve been doing for 200 years is moving it into the area next to us — which is illegal under normal rules. But these kupuna, they knew much, much better than these federal regulators.
To me, when I think about Lahaina, it’s not gone, right? The town is gone. But Lahaina is these people and their way of being and the actual place, and that’s still strong.
What was the other part of the question?
Oh — what do you think we need to do now?
Yeah, yeah. I think the narrative right now needs to be controlled by members of the community and people who are rooted and understand the broader history of Hawaii. That’s why I love these calls and talking to people like you. But, like … whenever I stop texting and frantically calling, I start crying.
This is so heavy. At least 36 people died. And I do this shit for a living. I do this work for a living and you see the disaster and you help — but then to actually see it come in your own community. It's … I just … I just hope people actually envision that, like, your kid’s school, your church, the grocery store you shop at are just gone, tomorrow. Not 10 years down the line, 20 years down the line from climate change. But tomorrow. That’s where we’re at in terms of urgency. So what needs to happen moving forward is people need to recognize that urgency, and act accordingly. President Biden needs to declare a climate emergency. Congress needs to invest at least a trillion a year, multiple Inflation Reduction Acts, every year, and accelerate the clean energy transition, and do it in a way where the native people that actually are the keepers of his knowledge are leading the way.
If our readers walk away from this interview understanding one thing, what do you want that to be?
Lahaina used to be wetlands. It was known for the plethora of water around Mokuʻula, Mokuhinia. Boats would literally circulate Waiola Church years ago. So the fires were never … it’s bizarre that it’s even happening in this area. And it’s only a result of the theft: the water theft, the diversions, the irrigations that big business set up — golf courses, sugar cane, pineapple, hotels — they took away that natural protective essence of Lahaina.
These disasters are preventable. It’s not too late. We still have a small window. Right now, we’re still looking at 3% or 4% warming, which is catastrophic, and we might not hit the 1.5-degree goal that the Paris Accord and the UN says we need to do, but every fraction of a percent from now on will matter. It will mean fewer people dying. And we need to do everything we can, and that work isn’t always exciting. It can be phone-banking, door-knocking, writing op-eds. It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary — more necessary than whatever your day job is.
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A conversation with Jillian Blanchard of Lawyers for Good Government about the heightened cost of permitting delays
This week I chatted with Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice with Lawyers for Good Government, an organization that has been supporting beneficiaries of the Inflation Reduction Act navigate the uncertainties surrounding tax credits and grant programs under the Trump administration. The reason I wanted to chat with Jillian is simple: the IRA is under threat for the first time under a Republican Congress. I wanted to understand how solar and wind projects could be impacted by the House Republican reconciliation bill and putting IRA tax credits in doubt. I learned a lot.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay, Jillian, what’s the topline here? How would the GOP reconciliation bill impact individual projects’ development?
There are big chunks of the reconciliation bill that will have dramatic impacts on project development, including language that would repeal or phase out bipartisan and popular tax credits in a way that would make it very, very difficult to invest in projects. I can get into the weeds next.
But it’s worth saying first – the group of programs aside from tax credits that [House Republicans] would repeal represents every single part of America. Hundreds of projects that will not go forward if these programs are not going well. And they have several legally obligated grants that EPA has already mucked up in a litany of ways. But what they’re proposing to do is to pull the rug out from under those programs. On top of that they want to pull any unobligated funding out.
I think it’s extremely misrepresentative to say these are not big cuts. They’re significant cuts to clean air and clean water across the board.
Help me get into the weeds about how phasing out the credits will make it harder to invest in a project.
Right now, a bank might want to invest a certain amount of money in a clean energy project because they know on the back end they can get 30% or 40% back on their investment. A return through tax credits. They can bank on that, because tax credits are a guarantee.
Was that an intentional pun? “Bank”?
Yeah, it is. I love a good pun. You opened the floodgates, that was a mistake.
But anyway, the program itself was supposed to be around until at least 2032 and the bank could bank on those tax credits. That’s a big runway, because projects could get delayed and you could lock in the credit as soon as you started construction.
Now they’re doing a phase-out approach where if your project is not placed into service before a certain date, you don’t avoid the phase out. You don’t get any protections if you’re starting your project now or next year. It has to be placed in service before 2028 or else your project may not be eligible. You are constructing it, you are financing it, but then through no fault of your own – a storm or whatever – then suddenly that project is no longer entitled to get 30% or 40% back.
That’s a big risk. And banks don’t like risk.
Opposition on the ground also delays projects the way a storm does. Would this empower those opponents?
Oh, totally. Totally. If anyone wants to fight a project, a bank might be even less likely to invest in it. The NIMBYs for that particular project become a risk.
What would you tell a developer at this moment who is wondering about the uncertainty around the IRA?
I would tell them that now is the time to speak up. If they want to stay in this business and make sure their energy stays as low-cost as it already is, they need to speak up right now, no matter what their political party affiliation is. Make it clear solar isn’t going away, wind isn’t going away, storage isn’t going away. These are markets America needs to be competitive with the rest of the world.
Investors are only just now starting to digest what the proposed cuts will mean, especially for energy storage.
Is Wall Street too sanguine about the House of Representatives’ proposal to gut the Inflation Reduction Act? When the House Ways and Means Committee unveiled its language on the law on Monday — phasing out tax credits, implementing strict restrictions on business relationships with Chinese companies, and altering when projects are eligible for credits — some investors responded to the cutbacks by driving up the prices of some clean energy stocks.
The residential solar company Sunrun traded up on Tuesday by 8.6%, and the American solar manufacturer First Solar was up over 22%. (Stock movements on Monday were largely in response to the pause of the U.S.-China trade war, also announced that morning.)
“The early drafts of a Republican tax and spending bill weren’t as bad for renewables as feared,” wrote Barron’s. Morgan Stanley analysts used the same language — “not as bad as feared” — in a note to clients on the text. “Industry was bracing for way worse,” Don Schneider, the deputy head of public policy for Piper Sandler and a former Republican staffer on the Ways and Means Committee, wrote on X.
While many analysts — and, to be honest, journalists at Heatmap — have issued dire warnings about how the various provisions of the Ways and Means language could together make much of the IRA essentially impossible to use, even before the tax credits phase out, investors on Wall Street and in Washington seem to have shrugged them off. Some level of cutting was all but inevitable, and “not as bad as it could have been” is reason enough to celebrate — plus there’s also “it’ll probably change, anyway.”
There’s something to this. A group ofmoderate Republicans criticized the language on Wednesday as too restrictive, specifically citing changes to three overarching features of the tax credits: when projects would be eligible for tax credits, where companies are able to source components and materials, and whether companies are allowed to freely buy and sell tax credits generated by their projects. (Wouldn’t you know it, these complaints largely echo what Heatmap has written in the past few days.)
In the Senate, meanwhile, Republican Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, said that the text as written would be too damaging to advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal generation. The phase-out timelines in the Ways and Means language are “too short for truly new technologies,” Cramer told Politico.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me that he expects the bill to evolve in a way to meet the concerns of Senate Republicans like Cramer.
“Given considerations both political and procedural, like the more flexible reconciliation instructions Senate Finance is afforded relative to House Ways and Means and the disproportionate impact current text entails for technologies Republicans traditionally favor, like nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower, I think it’s fair to say that this text will change over the coming weeks,” he said.
Finally, days after the Ways and Means committee made its thinking public, Wall Street seems to be catching on to the implications. The new foreign entities of concern rules pose a particularly huge danger to the renewable energy sector, according to Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith, and especially to energy storage, which would be the key provider of reliability on a renewable-heavy grid. Energy storage looks to account for almost 30% of new generator additions this year, according to the Energy Information Administration.
“We think the market got it wrong for storage,” Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients. The market has yet to “digest and fully interpret the implications of proposed tariff and tax policy, which as currently written do not bode well for storage,” he said. The foreign sourcing language “is more restrictive than initially thought, with some industry stakeholders calling the proposal a near repeal on IRA.”
The storage supply chain is intensely entangled with China. Many companies, including Tesla,have been forced to disclose to investors just how reliant they are on China for their storage businesses.
China alone accounted for 70% of battery imports in 2024, according to industry analysts at BloombergNEF, over $14 billion worth. About a quarter of the metals used in battery manufacturing — especially graphite — came from China, BNEF figures show. For specific battery chemistry like lithium iron phosphate, which is popular for stationary storage products, the supply chain is essentially 100% Chinese.
Wall Street revenue and profit estimates “do not adequately capture the extent of risks” facing the U.S. storage industry, Dumoulin-Smith wrote. The storage company Fluence’s stock fell around 1.5% today, and is down over 5.5% since close of trading on Monday, as the market began to digest the House language.
It is possible that the foreign sourcing rules will be loosened and phase-outs for tax credits and transferability lengthened, Venkatakrishnan told me, but not in a way that would endanger the overall structure of the bill. Cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act are a key source of revenue for the Republican bill-writers to ensure as many of the tax cuts they want can fit within the budgetary scope they’ve given themselves.
“Any adjustments will be made with an eye toward ensuring budgetary offsets are sufficient to enable success of the broader enterprise,” Venkatakrishnan said. In other words, as much as some lawmakers may want to see these tax credits preserved, ultimately, they’ve got to pass a bill to ensure Trump’s tax cuts stick around.
And more of the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. St. Lawrence County, New York – It’s hard out here for a 2-megawatt solar project in upstate New York.
2. McKean County, Pennsylvania – Swift Current Energy is now dealing with an insurgent opposition campaign against its Black Cherry wind project.
3. Blair County, Pennsylvania – Good news is elsewhere in Pennsylvania though as this county has given the go-ahead for a new utility-scale Ampliform solar project, the BL Hileman Hollow Solar project.
4. Allen County, Ohio – The mayor of Lima, a small city in this county, is publicly calling on Ohio senators to make sure that the pending reconciliation bill in Congress ensures Inflation Reduction Act tax credits can still apply to municipalities.
5. Vanderburgh County, Indiana – Orion Energy’s Blue Grass Creek solar project is now facing opposition too, with Orion representatives telling local press they actually expected some locals to be against the project.
6. Otsego County, Michigan – That state forest-felling solar farm that Fox News loved to hate? That idea is no more.
7. Adams County, Illinois – The Green Key solar project we’ve been following in the town of Ursa has received its special use permit from the county after vociferous local opposition.
8. Dane County, Wisconsin – We’re getting a taste of local worry about how the GOP’s efforts to change the IRA could affect municipal energy planning, thanks to the village of Waukanee.
9. Olmsted County, Minnesota – The fight over Ranger Power’s Lemon Hill solar project is evolving into a nascent bid to give localities more control over permitting renewables projects.
10. Cherry County, Nebraska – This county is seeking an investigation into whether Sandhills Energy’s BSH Kilgore wind farm is violating zoning standards after receiving requests from residents who are against the project.
11. Albany County, Wyoming – Bird conservation activists fighting wind projects in Wyoming claim the Interior Department is providing them incomplete information under the Freedom of Information Act about wind turbines and eagle deaths.
12. Santa Fe County, New Mexico – Renowned climate activist Bill McKibben is publicly going on the attack against opponents of an individual solar project, the AES Rancho Viejo solar farm near Santa Fe.
13. Apache County, Arizona – Opponents of the Repsol Lava Run wind project are now rallying around trying to stop transmission for the project.
14. Klickitat County, Washington – The Cypress Creek Renewables solar project we told you last week got fast-tracked by the state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council? Turns out the county had a moratorium on new solar and anticipated a chance to formally file public comments before that would happen.