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:
They can be an effective wildfire prevention tool — but not always.
Once the fires stop burning in Los Angeles and the city picks itself up from the rubble, the chorus of voices asking how such a disaster could have been prevented will rise. In California, the answer to that desperate query is so often “better forestry management practices,” and in particular “more controlled burns.” But that’s not always the full story, and in the case of the historically destructive L.A. fires, many experts doubt that prescribed burns and better vegetation management would have mattered much at all.
Controlled burns are intentionally set and supervised by land managers to clear out excess fuels such as shrubs, trees, and logs to reduce wildfire risk. Many habitats also require fire to thrive, and so ensuring they burn in a controlled manner is a win-win for natural ecosystems and the man-made environment. But controlled burns also pose a series of challenges. For one, complex permitting processes and restrictions around when and where burns are allowed can deter agencies from attempting them. Community backlash is also an issue, as residents are often concerned about air quality as well as the possibility of the prescribed fires spiraling out of control. Land management agencies also worry about the liability risks of a controlled burn getting out of hand.
Many of the state’s largest and most destructive fires — including the Camp Fire in 2018, lightning complex fires in 2020, and Dixie Fire in 2021 — started in forests, and would therefore have likely been severely curtailed had the state done more controlled burns. According to ProPublica, anywhere between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres used to burn annually in prehistoric California. By 2017, overzealous fire suppression efforts driven by regulatory barriers and short-term risk aversion had caused that number to drop to 13,000 acres. While the state has increased the amount of prescribed fire in recent years, the backlog of fuel is enormous.
But the L.A. fires didn’t start or spread in a forest. The largest blaze, in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, ignited in a chaparral environment full of shrubs that have been growing for about 50 years. Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that’s not enough time for this particular environment to build up an “unnatural accumulation of fuels.”
“That’s well within the historical fire frequency for that landscape,” Keeley told my colleague, Emily Pontecorvo, for her reporting on what started the fires. Generally, he said, these chaparral environments should burn every 30 to 130 years, with coastal areas like Pacific Palisades falling on the longer end of that spectrum. “Fuels are not really the issue in these big fires — it’s the extreme winds. You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.”
Get the best of Heatmap in your inbox daily.
We still don’t know what ignited the L.A. fires, and thus whether a human, utility, or other mysterious source is to blame. But the combination of factors that led to the blazes — wet periods that allowed for abundant vegetation growth followed by drought and intensely powerful winds — are simply a perilously bad combination. Firebreaks, strips of land where vegetation is reduced or removed, can often prove helpful, and they do exist in the L.A. hillsides. But as Matthew Hurteau, a professor at the University of New Mexico and director of the Center for Fire Resilient Ecosystems and Society, told me bluntly, “When you have 100-mile-an-hour winds pushing fire, there’s not a hell of a lot that’s going to stop it.”
Hurteau told me that he thinks of the primary drivers of destructive fires as a triangle, with fuels, climate, and the built environment representing the three points. “We’re definitely on the built environment, climate side of that triangle for these particular fires around Los Angeles,” Hurteau explained, meaning that the wildland-urban interface combined with drought and winds are the primary culprits. But in more heavily forested, mountainous areas of Northern California, “you get the climate and fuels side of the triangle,” Hurteau said.
Embers can travel impressive distances in the wind, as evidenced by footage of past fires jumping expansive freeways in Southern California. So, as Hurteau put it, “short of mowing whole hillsides down to nothing and keeping them that way,” there’s little vegetation management work to be done at the wildland-urban interface, where houses bump up against undeveloped lands.
Not everyone agrees, though. When I spoke to Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist and research scientist at the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, she told me that while prescribed burns close to suburban areas can be contentious and challenging, citizens can do a lot on their own to manage fuel risk. “Neighborhoods can come together and do the appropriate fuel reduction in and around their homes, and that makes a huge difference in wildfires,” she told me. “Landscaping in and around homes matters, even if you have 100-mile-an-hour winds with a lot of embers.”
Prichard recommends residents work with their neighbors to remove burnable vegetation and organic waste, and to get rid of so-called “ember traps” such as double fencing that can route fires straight to homes. Prichard pointed to research by Crystal Kolden, a “pyrogeographer” and associate professor at the University of California Merced, whose work focuses on understanding wildfire intersections with the human environment. Kolden has argued that proper vegetation management could have greatly lessened the impact of the L.A. fires. As she recently wrote on Bluesky, “These places will see fire again. I have no doubt. But I also know that you can rebuild and manage the land so that next time the houses won’t burn down. I’ve seen it work.”
Keeley pointed to the 2017 Thomas Fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, however, as an example of the futility of firebreaks and prescribed burns in extreme situations. That fire also ignited outside of what’s normally considered fire season, in December. “There were thousands of acres that had been prescribed burned near the eastern edge of that fire perimeter in the decade prior to ignition,” Keeley explained to Emily. “Once that fire was ignited, the winds were so powerful it just blew the embers right across the prescribed burn area and resulted in one of the largest wildfires that we’ve had in Southern California.”
Kolden, however, reads the Thomas Fire as a more optimistic story. As she wrote in a case report on the fire published in 2019, “Despite the extreme wind conditions and interviewee estimates of potentially hundreds of homes being consumed, only seven primary residences were destroyed by the Thomas Fire, and firefighters indicated that pre-fire mitigation activities played a clear, central role in the outcomes observed.” While the paper didn’t focus on controlled burns, mitigation activities discussed include reducing vegetation around homes and roads, as well as common-sense actions such as increasing community planning and preparedness, public education around fire safety, and arguably most importantly, adopting and enforcing fire-resistant building codes.
So while blaming decades of forestry mismanagement for major fires is frequently accurate, in Southern California the villains in this narrative can be trickier to pin down. Is it the fault of the winds? The droughts? The humans who want to live in beautiful but acutely fire-prone areas? The planning agencies that allow people to fulfill those risky dreams?
Prichard still maintains that counties and the state government can be doing a whole lot more to encourage fuel reduction. “That might not be prescribed burning, that might actually be ongoing mastication of some of the really big chaparral, so that it’s not possible for really tall, developed, even senescent vegetation — meaning having a lot of dead material in it — to burn that big right next to homes.”
From Hurteau’s perspective though, far and away the most effective solution would be simply building structures to be much more fire-resilient than they are today. “Society has chosen to build into a very flammable environment,” Hurteau put it. California’s population has increased over 160% since the 1950’s, far outpacing the country overall and pushing development further and further out into areas that border forests, chaparral, and grasslands. “As people rebuild after what’s going to be great tragedy, how do you re-envision the built environment so that this becomes less likely to occur in the future?”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Collective put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”
On the budget debate, MethaneSAT’s untimely demise, and Nvidia
Current conditions: The northwestern U.S. faces “above average significant wildfire potential” for July • A month’s worth of rain fell over just 12 hours in China’s Hubei province, forcing evacuations • The top floor of the Eiffel Tower is closed today due to extreme heat.
The Senate finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday. The excise tax on renewables that had been stuffed into the bill over the weekend was removed after Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote. In her piece examining exactly what’s in the bill, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains that even without the excise tax, the bill would “gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules.” Debate on the legislation begins on the House floor today. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he doesn’t like the legislation, and a handful of other Republicans have already signaled they won’t vote for it.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week sent the White House a proposal that is expected to severely weaken the federal government’s ability to rein in planet-warming pollution. Details of the proposal, titled “Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Reconsideration,” aren’t clear yet, but EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly been urging the Trump administration to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which explicitly identified greenhouse gases as a public health threat and gave the EPA the authority to regulate them. Striking down that finding would “free EPA from the legal obligation to regulate climate pollution from most sources, including power plants, cars and trucks, and virtually any other source,” wrote Alex Guillén at Politico. The title of the proposal suggests it aims to roll back EPA tailpipe emissions standards, as well.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
So long, MethaneSAT, we hardly knew ye. The Environmental Defense Fund said Tuesday that it had lost contact with its $88 million methane-detecting satellite, and that the spacecraft was “likely not recoverable.” The team is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. MethaneSAT launched into orbit last March and was collecting data about methane pollution from global fossil fuel infrastructure. “Thanks to MethaneSAT, we have gained critical insight about the distribution and volume of methane being released from oil and gas production areas,” EDF said. “We have also developed an unprecedented capability to interpret the measurements from space and translate them into volumes of methane released. This capacity will be valuable to other missions.“ The good news is that MethaneSAT was far from the only methane-tracking satellite in orbit.
Nvidia is backing a D.C.-based startup called Emerald AI that “enables AI data centers to flexibly adjust their power consumption from the electricity grid on demand.” Its goal is to make the grid more reliable while still meeting the growing energy demands of AI computing. The startup emerged from stealth this week with a $24.5 million seed round led by Radical Ventures and including funding from Nvidia. Emerald AI’s platform “acts as a smart mediator between the grid and a data center,” Nvidia explains. A field test of the software during a grid stress event in Phoenix, Arizona, demonstrated a 25% reduction in the energy consumption of AI workloads over three hours. “Renewable energy, which is intermittent and variable, is easier to add to a grid if that grid has lots of shock absorbers that can shift with changes in power supply,” said Ayse Coskun, Emerald AI’s chief scientist and a professor at Boston University. “Data centers can become some of those shock absorbers.”
In case you missed it: California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday rolled back the state’s landmark Environmental Quality Act. The law, which had been in place since 1970, required environmental reviews for construction projects and had become a target for those looking to alleviate the state’s housing crisis. The change “means most urban developers will no longer have to study, predict, and mitigate the ways that new housing might affect local traffic, air pollution, flora and fauna, noise levels, groundwater quality, and objects of historic or archeological significance,” explained Cal Matters. On the other hand, it could also mean that much-needed housing projects get approved more quickly.
Tesla is expected to report its Q2 deliveries today, and analysts are projecting a year-over-year drop somewhere from 11% to 13%.