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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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Half of all Americans are sweating under one right now.
Like a bomb cyclone, a polar vortex, or an atmospheric river, a heat dome is a meteorological phenomenon that feels, well, a little made up. I hadn’t heard the term before I found myself bottled beneath one in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, where I saw leaves and needles brown on living trees. Ultimately, some 1,400 people died from the extreme heat in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon that summer weekend.
Since that disaster, there have been a number of other high-profile heat dome events in the United States, including this week, over the Midwest and now Eastern and Southeastern parts of the country. On Monday, roughly 150 million people — about half the nation’s population — faced extreme or major heat risks.
“I think the term ‘heat dome’ was used sparingly in the weather forecasting community from 10 to 30 years ago,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Brett Anderson told me, speaking with 36 years as a forecaster under his belt. “But over the past 10 years, with global warming becoming much more focused in the public eye, we are seeing ‘heat dome’ being used much more frequently,” he went on. “I think it is a catchy term, and it gets the public’s attention.”
Catching the public’s attention is critical. Heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the U.S., killing more people annually than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or extreme cold. “There is a misunderstanding of the risk,” Ashley Ward, the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University, told me. “A lot of people — particularly working age or younger people — don’t feel like they’re at risk when, in fact, they are.”
While it seems likely that the current heat dome won’t be as deadly as the one in 2021 — not least because the Midwest and Southeastern regions of the country have a much higher usage of air conditioning than the Pacific Northwest — the heat in the eastern half of the country is truly extraordinary. Tampa, Florida reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday for the first time in its recorded history. Parts of the Midwest last week, where the heat dome formed before gradually moving eastward, hit a heat index of 128 degrees.
Worst of all, though, have been the accompanying record-breaking overnight temperatures, which Ward told me were the most lethal characteristics of a heat dome. “When there are both high daytime temperatures and persistently high overnight temperatures, those are the most dangerous of circumstances,” Ward said.
Although the widespread usage of the term “heat dome” may be relatively new, the phenomenon itself is not. The phrase describes an area of “unusually strong” high pressure situated in the upper atmosphere, which pockets abnormally warm air over a particular region, Anderson, the forecaster, told me. “These heat domes can be very expansive and can linger for days, and even a full week or longer,” he said.
Anderson added that while he hasn’t seen evidence of an increase in the number of heat domes due to climate change, “we may be seeing more extreme and longer-lasting heat domes” due to the warmer atmosphere. A heat dome in Europe this summer, which closed the Eiffel Tower, tipped temperatures over 115 degrees in parts of Spain, and killed an estimated 2,300 people, has been linked to anthropogenic warming. And research has borne out that the temperatures and duration reached in the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”
The link between climate change and heat domes is now strong enough to form the basis for a major legal case. Multnomah County, the Oregon municipality that includes Portland, filed a lawsuit in 2023 against 24 named defendants, including oil and gas companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, seeking $50 million in damages and $1.5 billion in future damages for the defendants’ alleged role in the deaths from the 2021 heat dome.
“As we learned in this country when we took on Big Tobacco, this is not an easy step or one I take lightly, but I do believe it’s our best way to fight for our community and protect our future,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement at the time. The case is now in jeopardy following moves by the Trump administration to prevent states, counties, and cities from suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages. (The estate of a 65-year-old woman who died in the heat dome filed a similar wrongful death lawsuit in Seattle’s King County Superior Court against Big Oil.)
Given the likelihood of longer and hotter heat dome events, then, it becomes imperative to educate people about how to stay safe. As Ward mentioned, many people who are at risk of extreme heat might not even know it, such as those taking commonly prescribed medications for anxiety, depression, PTSD, diabetes, and high blood pressure, which interfere with the body’s ability to thermoregulate. “Let’s just say recently you started taking high blood pressure medicine,” Ward said. “Every summer prior, you never had a problem working in your garden or doing your lawn work. You might this year.”
Air conditioning, while life-saving, can also stop working for any number of reasons, from a worn out machine part to a widespread grid failure. Vulnerable community members may also face hurdles in accessing reliable AC. There’s a reason the majority of heat-related deaths happen indoors.
People who struggle to manage their energy costs should prioritize cooling a single space, such as a bedroom, and focus on maintaining a cool core temperature during overnight hours, when the body undergoes most of its recovery. Blotting yourself with a wet towel or washcloth and sitting in front of a fan can help during waking hours, as can visiting a traditional cooling center, or even a grocery store or movie theater.
Health providers also have a role to play, Ward stressed. “They know who has chronic underlying health conditions,” she said. “Normalize asking them about their situation with air conditioning. Normalize asking them, ‘Do you feel like you have a safe place to go that’s cool, that you can get out of this heat?’”
For the current heat dome, at least, the end is in sight: Incoming cool air from Canada will drop temperatures by 10 to 20 degrees in cities like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with lows potentially in the 30s by midweek in parts of New York. And while there are still hot days ahead for Florida and the rest of the Southeast, the cold front will reach the region by the end of the week.
But even if this ends up being the last heat dome of the summer, it certainly won’t be in our lifetimes. The heat dome has become inescapable.
On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: New York City is once again choking on Canadian wildfire smoke • Torrential rain is flooding southeastern Slovenia and northern Croatia • Central Asia is bracing for the hottest days of the year, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent all week.
In May, the Trump administration signaled its plans to gut Energy Star, the energy efficiency certification program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star is extremely popular — its brand is recognized by nearly 90% of Americans — and at a cost to the federal government of just $32 million per year, saves American households upward of $40 billion in energy costs per year as of 2024, for a total of more than $500 billion saved since its launch in 1992, by the EPA’s own estimate. Not only that, as one of Energy Star’s architects told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange back in May, more energy efficient appliances and buildings help reduce strain on the grid. “Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier told Jeva. “We need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it.”
That value has clearly resonated with lawmakers on the Hill. Legislators tasked with negotiating appropriations in both the Senate and the House of Representatives last week proposed fully funding Energy Star at $32 million for the next fiscal year. It’s unclear how the House’s decision to go into recess until September will affect the vote, but Ben Evans, the federal legislative director at the U.S. Green Building Council, said the bill is “a major step in the right direction demonstrating that ENERGY STAR has strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.”
A worker connects panels on floating solar farm project in Huainan, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The United States installed just under 11 gigawatts of solar panels in the first three months of this year, industry data show. In June alone, China installed nearly 15 gigawatts, PV Tech reported. And, in a detail that demonstrates just how many panels the People’s Republic has been deploying at home in recent years, that represented an 85% drop from the previous month and close to a 40% decline compared to June of last year.
The photovoltaic installation plunge followed Beijing’s rollout of two new policies that changed the renewables business in China. The first, called the 531 policy, undid guaranteed feed-in tariffs and required renewable projects to sell electricity on the spot market. That took effect on June 1. The other, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and mandated that new distributed solar farms consume their own power first before allowing the sale of surplus electricity to the grid. As a result of the stalled installations, a top panel manufacturer warned the trade publication Opis that companies may need to raise prices by as much as 10%.
For years now, Fortescue, the world’s fourth-biggest producer of iron ore, has directed much of the earnings from its mines in northwest Australia and steel mills in China toward building out a global green hydrogen business. But changes to U.S. policy have taken a toll. Last week, Fortescue told investors it was canceling its green hydrogen project in Arizona, which had been set to come online next year. It’s also abandoning its plans for a green hydrogen plant on Australia’s northeastern coast, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“A shift in policy priorities away from green energy has changed the situation in the U.S.,” Gus Pichot, Fortescue’s chief executive of growth and energy, told analysts on a call. “The lack of certainty and a step back in green ambition has stopped the emerging green-energy markets, making it hard for previously feasible projects to proceed.” But green hydrogen isn’t dead everywhere. Just last week, the industrial gas firm Air Liquide made a final decision to invest in a 200-megawatt green hydrogen plant in the Netherlands.
The Trump administration put two high-ranking officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on administrative leave, CNN reported. The reasoning behind the move wasn’t clear, but both officials — Steve Volz, who leads NOAA’s satellites division, and Jeff Dillen, NOAA’s deputy general counsel — headed up the investigation into whether President Donald Trump violated NOAA’s scientific integrity policies during his so-called Sharpiegate scandal.
The incident from September 2019, during Trump’s first term, started when the president incorrectly listed Alabama among the states facing a threat from Hurricane Dorian. Throughout the following week, Trump defended the remark, insisting he had been right, and ultimately showed journalists a weather map that had been altered with a black Sharpie market to show the path of the storm striking Alabama. NOAA’s investigation into the incident concluded that Neil Jacobs, the former agency official who backed Trump at the time and is now nominated to serve as chief, succumbed to political pressure and violated scientific integrity rules.
In March, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill to repeal the state’s climate law and scrap the 2030 deadline by which the monopoly utility Duke Energy had to slash its planet-heating emissions by 70% compared to 2005 levels. Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation. But on Tuesday, the GOP majorities in both chambers of the legislature plan to vote to override the veto.
Doing so and enacting the bill could cost North Carolina more than 50,000 jobs annually and cause tens of billions of dollars in lost investments, Canary Media’s Elizabeth Ouzts reported. That’s according to a new study from a consultancy commissioned by clean-energy advocates in the state. The analysis is based on data from the state-sanctioned consumer advocate, Public Staff.
For years, a mystery has puzzled scientists: Why did Neanderthal remains show levels of a nitrogen isotope only seen among carnivores like hyenas and wolves that eat more meat than a hominid could safely consume? New research finally points to an answer: Neanderthals were eating putrefying meat garnished with maggots, said Melanie Beasley, an anthropologist at Purdue University. “When you get the lean meat and the fatty maggot, you have a more complete nutrient that you’re consuming.”
Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.
What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.
By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.
At the same time, the Cram Fire can also be read as a precursor. It was routine, maybe, but also large enough to require the deployment of nearly 900 fire personnel at a time when the National Wildland Fire Preparedness Level is set to 4, meaning national firefighting resources were already heavily committed when it broke out. (The preparedness scale, which describes how strapped federal resources are, goes up to 5.) Most ominous of all, though, is the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for “Dirty August” and “Snaptember,” historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires.
National Interagency Coordination Center
“Right now, we’re in a little bit of a lull,” Jessica Neujahr, a public affairs officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, acknowledged to me. “What comes with that is knowing that August and September will be difficult, so we’re now doing our best to make sure that our firefighters are taking advantage of having time to rest and get rejuvenated before the next big wave of fire comes through.”
That next big wave could happen any day. The National Interagency Fire Center’s fire potential outlook, last issued on July 1, describes “significant fire potential” for the Northwest that is “expected to remain above average areawide through September.” The reasons given include the fact that “nearly all areas” of Washington and Oregon are “abnormally dry or in drought status,” combined with a 40% to 60% probability of above-average temperatures through the start of the fall in both states. Moisture from the North American Monsoon, meanwhile, looks to be tracking “largely east of the Northwest.” At the same time, “live fuels in Oregon are green at mid to upper elevations but are drying rapidly across Washington.”
In other words, the components for a bad fire season are all there — the landscape just needs a spark. Lightning, in particular, has been top of mind for Oregon forecasters, given the tinderbox on the ground. A single storm system, such as one that rolled over southeast and east-central Oregon in June, can produce as many as 10,000 lightning strikes; over the course of just one night earlier this month, thunderstorms ignited 72 fires in two southwest Oregon counties. And the “kicker with lightning is that the fires don’t always pop up right away,” Neujahr explained. Instead, lightning strike fires can simmer for up to a week after a storm, evading the detection of firefighting crews until it’s too late. “When you have thousands of strikes in a concentrated area, it’s bound to stretch the local resources as far as they can go,” Neujahr said.
National Interagency Coordination Center
The National Interagency Fire Center has “low confidence … regarding the number of lightning ignitions” for the end of summer in the Northwest, in large part due to the incredible difficulty of forecasting convective storms. Additionally, the current neutral phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation means there is a “wide range of potential lightning activity” that adds extra uncertainty to any predictions. The NIFC’s higher confidence in its temperature and precipitation outlooks, in turn, “leads to a belief that the ratio of human to natural ignitions will remain high and at or above 2024 levels.” (An exploding transformer appears to have been the ignition source for the Cram Fire; approximately 88% of wildfires in the United States have human-caused origins, including arson.)
Periodic wildfires are a naturally occurring part of the Western ecosystem, and not all are attributable to climate change. But before 1995, the U.S. averaged fewer than one megafire per year; between 2005 and 2014, that average jumped to 9.8 such fires per year. Before 1970, there had been no documented megafires at all.
Above-average temperatures and drought conditions, which can make fires larger and burn hotter, are strongly associated with a warming atmosphere, however. Larger and hotter fires are also more dangerous. “Our biggest goal is always to put the fires out as fast as possible,” Neujahr told me. “There is a correlation: As fires get bigger, the cost of the fire grows, but so do the risks to the firefighters.”
In Oregon, anyway, the Cram Fire’s warning has registered. Shortly after the fire broke out, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a statewide emergency with an eye toward the months ahead. “The summer is only getting hotter, drier, and more dangerous — we have to be prepared for worsening conditions,” she said in a statement at the time.
It’s improbable that there won’t be a megafire this season; the last time the U.S. had a year without a fire of 100,000 acres or more was in 2001. And if or when the megafire — or megafires — break out, all signs point to the “where” being Oregon or Washington, concentrating the area of potential destruction, exhausting local personnel, and straining federal resources. “When you have two states directly next to each other dealing with the same thing, it just makes it more difficult to get resources because of the conflicting timelines,” Neujahr said.
By October, at least, there should be relief: The national fire outlook describes “an increasing frequency of weather systems and precipitation” that should “signal an end of fire season” for the Northwest once fall arrives. But there are still a long 68 days left to go before then.