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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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On Senate committees, a public lands selloff, and energy investment
Current conditions: Southern New England will experience its hottest day of the year so far today, with temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit • Record levels of Sargassum seaweed are overwhelming Caribbean resorts • Saharan dust has spread across most of Florida and will continue over the coastal Southeast through this weekend.
1. The Senate’s first pass at IRA repeal cuts huge climate programs ...
On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill. “At least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in her analysis of the contents — although there is one Environmental Protection Agency grant program, for reducing pollution at ports, that had been targeted in by the House bill and is absent from the Environment and Public Works Committee’s text. As in the House bill, the latest text eliminates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the Trump administration has sought to kill with accusations of fraud, though it has yet to produce any evidence of impropriety.
Elsewhere in the Senate, however, some Republicans appear more friendly toward preserving at least some IRA tax credits. “I would be in the camp that doesn’t think we need [to do] a full repeal and instead can live with a circumscribed, narrower version of the existing IRA credits,” Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a member of the Finance Committee, said, as reported by Axios. Senator John Curtis of Utah published an op-ed in Deseret News on Wednesday in which he argued that “the right policy solution must navigate tax credits and regulatory reform in what I believe is central to America’s economic future, the planet and our national security: energy.”
2. … and a public lands sell-off is back on the table
Senate Republicans are reviving a plan to sell off public lands to fund President Trump’s tax cuts after their colleagues in the House thwarted a similar proposal, Senator Mike Lee of Utah told reporters on Wednesday. According to the senator, a new version of the plan will be included in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’s pass at the bill, which will likely be made public on Monday, Bloomberg reports.
Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana helped lead the charge to kill the earlier version of the proposal in the House, although Lee added that his version would exempt Montana. Still — as I’ve reported — the plan would jeopardize as much as 500,000 acres of public land across Utah and Nevada alone. “These are the places people recreate with their families, they are places to hunt and fish, and they are held in trust for the American people to enjoy for generations to come,” Travis Hammill, the D.C. director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement.
3. 2025 will be a banner year for energy investment, despite economic turbulence: IEA
Despite tariffs, trade wars, and economic uncertainty, the International Energy Agency anticipates a record $3.3 trillion investment in global energy in 2025, per a new report released Thursday. That represents a 2% rise from 2024. “The fast-evolving economic and trade picture means that some investors are adopting a wait-and-see approach to new energy project approvals, but in most areas we have yet to see significant implications for existing projects,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement about the findings.
Around $2.2 trillion of the total global investment is “going collectively to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, twice as much as the $1.1 trillion going to oil, natural gas, and coal,” the report says. Solar specifically is booming, with a forecast of $450 billion in investment by 2025. The overall picture represents an enormous reversal from a decade ago, when fossil fuel investments were 30% higher than electricity generation, grids, and storage. That said, the research also found that investment in grids — at around $400 billion per year — is “failing to keep pace with spending on generation and electrification,” mainly because of “lengthy permitting procedures and tight supply chains for transformers and cables.” Read the full report here.
4. UK solar is having a record year due to unusually sunny spring
Carbon BriefSolar farms in the United Kingdom generated more electricity than ever before in the first five months of the year, according to a newly released accounting by Carbon Brief. The surge in solar energy was 42% higher than over the same period last year, growing from 5.4 terawatt-hours of electricity generated to a record 7.6 terawatt-hours. Carbon Brief credited the record output to the nation’s sunniest spring on record, although the publication notes it was also “aided by rising capacity, which reached 20.2GW in 2024, up by 2.3GW from 17.9GW a year earlier.” You can read the full report here.
5. ‘Atmospheric thirst’ is making droughts more severe: study
While extreme heat almost always has a climate change signal, the same cannot be said for droughts, which have different causes and feedback mechanisms that researchers are still working to understand. A new study published Wednesday in Nature has found that atmospheric evaporative demand — that is, the complex process of water evaporation into the atmosphere, also called “atmospheric thirst” — has increased drought severity by an average of 40%. Over the five years from 2018 to 2022, areas in drought have expanded 74% on average compared to the 1981 to 2017 period, with atmospheric evaporative demand “contributing to 58% of this increase,” the report further found. “We were very much shocked when we saw the results,” Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, told The New York Times.
“A large majority of new residential houses and buildings in Germany feature a heat pump as their main heating system,” according to government numbers reported by Clean Energy Wire. “The climate-friendly heating technology was installed in more than two-thirds (69.4%) of the 76,100 homes finished in 2024, a 5% increase compared to 2023.”
The Environment and Public Works Committee largely preserved the cuts made by the House, with one odd exception.
The Senate GOP began working through Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill this week, and at least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House.
Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of the bill on Wednesday evening, and it retains many of the policy repeals and funding rescissions that were in the House version.
To be clear, it does not touch the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, the most controversial climate-related parts of the package. Their fate will be up to the Senate Finance Committee, which is not expected to release text for its section of the bill until at least next week. There has been no indication that Republicans in the upper chamber intend to fight for any of the myriad grant programs the IRA created.
Still, I’m looking closely to see if some of it might yet be saved. For example, there is, oddly, one Environmental Protection Agency grant program targeted by the House bill that is absent from this first text from the Environment and Public Works Committee: $3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports.
Here’s what is in the text.
The text published Wednesday would repeal and rescind funding for more than two dozen programs, most of which are administered by the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the General Services Administration. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the now-infamous lending program for clean energy projects targeted by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as a wasteful, fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Biden administration, is still on the out list. Same goes for funding for oil and gas producers to reduce their methane emissions, plus a related fee that would be levied on operators who did not reduce methane leakage below a certain threshold.
The full list of cuts:
The text would also rescind two new pots of money that were not touched by the House bill — funding for Endangered Species Act recovery plans, strategies developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help threatened species thrive again, and general funding for the White House Council on Environmental Quality to train staff, do environmental reviews, and improve stakeholder and community engagement.
Like the House bill, the Senate committee’s text includes instructions to repeal the latest update to the nation’s tailpipe emissions standards for cars. The regulations are required under the Clean Air Act and were strengthened under the Biden administration for model years 2027 through 2032, requiring automakers to sell an increasing proportion of electric vehicles over time.
It would not, however, repeal the latest Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (also known as the CAFE standards), which regulate how far a vehicle must be able to travel on a gallon of fuel and were targeted by the House bill.
This provision is one I’ll be watching closely, as Democrats are likely to challenge its inclusion. If Republicans want to pass the budget bill with a simple majority, they can only include policies that affect the federal budget, and as the Environmental Defense Fund told me, these standards are “regulations, not budgetary provisions.”
The text proposes the same pay-to-play permitting scheme that was in the House bill and would allow energy infrastructure developers to pay for expedited permitting. Like the House bill, it also asserts that environmental assessments made under this program “shall not be subject to judicial review.”
Coming up, we’ll be on the lookout for a text from the Energy and Natural Resources committee, which will reveal whether Senate Republicans have any interest in saving the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, administered by the Loan Programs Office, which provides essential support for the nuclear industry.
Meta’s deal with Constellation is a full circle moment for an Illinois nuclear plant.
America’s nuclear fleet remains its largest source of emissions-free power. America’s biggest technology companies are its largest voluntary buyers of emissions-free power. Only in the past few years have these two facts managed to mingle with each other.
The latest tech nuclear deal is in Central Illinois; Meta on Tuesday unveiled a 20-year power purchase agreement for the electricity produced by the Clinton Clean Energy Center, an 1,100-megawatt nuclear plant run by Constellation Energy. The deal will “guarantee that Clinton will continue to run for another two decades,” Constellation said in its announcement. The deal allows the company to look at extending its existing early site permit for a new plant, the announcement said — or apply for a new one to “pursue development of an advanced nuclear reactor or small modular reactor,” although it made no specific development commitments.
While neither Meta nor Constellation disclosed the value of the deal, Mark Nelson, founder of Radiant Energy Group, estimated that it would cost around $17 billion, of which between $7 billion to $9 billion would be profit for Constellation, enough to fund the building of a new plant. Either way, the announcement represents the “first time a nuclear customer is proposing another nuclear reactor in the state,” Nelson told me.
These types of deals are not exactly novel anymore (Microsoft struck a deal with Constellation last year to resurrect Three Mile Island), but they demonstrate a shift in mindset among tech companies, which are finally showing some respect for the emissions benefits of nuclear energy — albeit about a decade late.
The 2010s were a dark time for the nuclear industry. Cheap natural gas threatened the economic viability of aging plants, while the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan combined with rising enthusiasm for renewable power had left the industry politically isolated. Between 2012 and 2022, 12 nuclear reactors closed in the U.S. Those 12 plants represented over 9,000 megawatts of capacity, about a 10th of the total capacity of the American nuclear fleet.
Nuclear plants suffered most in “restructured” electricity markets like Illinois’, where utilities generally purchase power from independent power producers. In these markets, power that’s cheap on an hourly basis, i.e. renewables and natural gas, sets the price for the whole system, which can disadvantage nuclear power.
At the same time, big technology companies were ramping up purchases of low-carbon power — typically wind and solar — with Google doing its first power purchase agreement in 2010. Many state and federal programs to support alternative energy usage were aimed at wind and solar, i.e. were no help to struggling nuclear generators. Environmental groups were largely either indifferent or outright opposed to nuclear power.
Eventually states had to do what the market couldn’t and big tech wouldn’t and step in and keep plants alive. A broader Illinois clean energy law from 2016 included a program to support nuclear power plants by paying for what the market had historically ignored: the fact that their electricity is generated without carbon dioxide emissions. The zero emission credits were part of a larger climate law that provided 10 years of support for downstate nuclear plants. The Illinois bill followed on similar efforts in New York to keep upstate plants open.
(The push and pull between the economic and environmental concerns on both sides of the nuclear argument also led to some bizarre political inversions: At the same time New York was working to keep the upstate plants open, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo joined with Riverkeeper, the environmental group long associated with Cuomo’s ex-brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to close the Indian Point nuclear plant closer to New York City.)
Environmental groups supported the New York and Illinois clean energy programs, but they were at best cool to the nuclear provisions, illustrating the political hole nuclear power plants had fallen into. Touting the pollution benefits of the Illinois law, the Natural Resources Defense Council claimed that “nuclear energy does not represent a clean energy resource.” In New York, the NRDC filed a brief supporting the state’s legal authority to set up a zero emission credit system — “not because it supports the nuclear support program,” but rather because it supported the broader principle of paying for zero-emissions attributes.
The Environmental Defense Fund likewise supported the Illinois law, but with assurances that the nuclear credits “only represents a small fraction of the more-than-500-page bill.” The Union for Concerned Scientists hailed the bill but also made clear that it was “much more than a nuclear subsidy.”
The balance changed in earnest with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included generous subsidies for new and existing nuclear power, reflecting both its lack of emissions and the industry’s longstanding sway in Washington. Then tech companies’ demand for energy started to climb with the advent of large language models and the immense power needed to train and operate them.
Energy policy experts at the big tech companies were also rethinking how best to decarbonize their operations. They had “run out of baseload,” Nelson told me, referring to always-on power sources as opposed to intermittent sources like wind and solar, and so would need to start supporting options like nuclear in order to truly decarbonize. With the arrival of a new breed of artificial intelligence, Nelson said, these companies realized that they were, in fact, industrial electricity purchasers and would have to act like it.
The past year has seen a flurry of big tech and nuclear tie-ups.
Amazon acquired a data center adjacent to a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in March, 2024, although the company’s subsequent efforts to use it as a “behind the meter” power source soon faced regulatory opposition. Google, along with Microsoft and Nucor, announced a plan to work together to buy and advance the development of non-carbon-emitting power, including nuclear. Microsoft announced its Three Mile Island deal later last year, while Amazon started investing in small modular reactors and Google said it would buy power from plants built by the advanced nuclear company Kairos. And in December, Meta released a request for proposals for nuclear energy developers to deliver at least 1 gigawatt and up to 4 gigawatts of clean power by “the early 2030s,” which the company said today it was “still advancing.”
Meta’s deal for the Clinton nuclear plant will essentially replace the Illinois emissions credit program, which runs out in 2027. The announcement of the deal also reflects the volatile and confusing politics of clean power in 2025. While Republicans in Congress are looking to slash the Inflation Reduction Act and its support for clean power investment and production, the House budget reconciliation bill included carve-outs for advanced nuclear power. The Trump administration has also signed a fleet of executive orders looking to streamline nuclear power regulations and encourage new nuclear development, reflecting the high esteem the industry has with the Republican Party despite its lack of interest (at best) in climate change policies, per se.
When Constellation announced the Three Mile Island project less than a year ago, it included a quote from a Biden Energy Department official, as well as a line about how “renewed interest in nuclear energy has spread globally as nations seek to electrify their economies to support the digital economy and address the climate crisis.” This time, Constellation included quotes from Clinton, Illinois’s mayor, as well as three legislators who represent the area, all Republicans, and a local union official. It also mentions climate change zero times, although it does describe the electricity generated by the plant as “emissions free.” (Meta’s release also doesn’t mention climate change specifically.)