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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.”
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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?”
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U.S. EV sales have been way up — just not for the domestic champion, which sank to its worst-ever market share in August.
Americans are rushing to buy electric vehicles ahead of the expiration of the $7,500 consumer tax credit at the end of this month.
And fewer of those cars are Teslas.
Preliminary data from Cox Automotive for August, first shared with Reuters, shows that the month was the best for EVs in U.S. history, with just over 146,000 units sold, comprising almost 10% of total car sales that month. At the same time, Tesla’s share of the EV market hit its lowest recorded level, down to a (still sizable) 38%.
Cox’s data puts Tesla sales at 55,000 for the month, which is up a little more than 3% from July but down over 6% from a year prior, while the company’s total market share fell from just over 40% in July and 45% in the first half of the year. In 2020, by contrast, Tesla’s share of U.S. EV sales was about 80%. Overall, Cox estimated that Tesla sales in the U.S. are down about 9% so far this year.
“The U.S. EV market is in a far more dynamic place than a few years ago,” Corey Cantor, the research director at the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me in an email. “Most automakers now offer electric vehicle models in multiple segments. There are multiple electric vehicles available below the average price point of a new car at $48,000.”
Entering this new phase means that the EV market is getting less Tesla-centric, almost by definition. Morgan Stanley reported that electric vehicle sales were up 23% in August from a year ago, while overall car sales were up 7.5% — although even amidst this industry-wide growth, Tesla sales fell more than 3% year over year, while electric vehicle sales were up 42%.
Much of that EV market growth comes down to timing. “Early indications are that EV sales are in fact surging over the past two months, following the changes that will phase the credit out at the end of this month. We’ve seen record sales for EV models last month, such as the Honda Prologue,” Cantor said. This likely means some portion of these sales are being “pulled forward” from buyers trying to beat the deadline and these sales numbers will not persist through the rest of the year.
As Tesla’s stranglehold over the U.S. EV market may be weakening, so too is its hold on the international market. Thanks to CEO Elon Musk’s association with right wing politics in the U.S. and abroad, and to fierce competition from Chinese EV leader BYD, Tesla’s sales have fallen dramatically in Europe. Globally, BYD overtook Tesla in sales last year.
None of that seems to matter much to Tesla’s leadership, or to its shareholders. On Friday, the company’s board of directors put forward a new compensation plan for Musk that would boost his ownership of the company to around 25% and put him in line for a $1 trillion payday if he meets growth and performance targets over the next decade.
A Delaware court last year threw out an earlier Musk pay package, arguing that Musk was too close to the board of directors for them to objectively determine his pay in the interest of all the company’s shareholders. (He subsequently relocated Tesla’s official headquarters to Austin, Texas, explicitly to avoid Delaware jurisdiction.) Musk has said that he wants to own about 25% of the company, a significant upgrade from the roughly 15% he owns currently.
Tesla’s board said in a recent regulatory disclosure that Musk had “reiterated that, if he were to remain at Tesla, it was a critical consideration that he have at least a 25% voting interest in Tesla,” and that “Mr. Musk also raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence if he did not receive such assurances.”
The board’s disclosure also confirmed that Musk sees the future of Tesla as going far beyond selling cars to people. The filing said that “through its discussions with Mr. Musk,” the special committee in charge of coming up with his compensation had “identified four core product lines that would drive Tesla’s future transformation”: Tesla’s vehicle fleet, automation (i.e. Full Self-Driving) software, its robotaxi product, and humanoid robots. Tesla’s robotaxi service is available on a select basis in Austin, with no date yet indicated for a wider rollout, while its humanoid robots — which Musk has said will one day make up 80% of the company’s value — are due to reach “scale production” next year, Musk said on a recent earnings call.
Tesla stock actually rose on the news of the proposed compensation package, likely because Tesla shareholders viewed it as a way to retain Musk and keep his attention on the company.
Longtime Tesla bull Adam Jonas, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said in note to investors that the compensation deal now means that Musk “has an incentive to focus on Tesla more than ever.” Jonas also, like many Tesla bulls, sees its business of selling cars to people as just a small portion of its overall value — in his case, $76 a share, compared to his $410 a share price target or the roughly $346 a share price the stock was trading at on Monday afternoon.
Still, the company today is largely a pretty normal car company, at least according to its income statement. In the second quarter of its current fiscal year, some $16.6 billion of Tesla’s $22.5 billion in revenue came from cars, with $2.8 billion coming from its energy business and $3 billion coming from “services and other revenues.”
Declining market share in its biggest product line isn’t completely meaningless, even if many Tesla shareholders see a glorious future for the company beyond the automobile trade.
Looking ahead, Cantor said to expect the EV market to get even more diverse.
“Moving forward, we will continue to see automakers innovate in the EV space. Timelines may change and models will vary by automaker, but high-profile launches expected over the next year include the Rivian R2, a new version of the Chevrolet Bolt EV, as well as more affordable models by Lucid and Kia,” Cantor said in his email.
“While the 30D [consumer electric vehicle tax] credit’s phase out will have a real impact on sales the next quarter or two here in the U.S.,” he added, “the long-term trend of excitement and innovation continues to be in the launch of new electric vehicles.”
On PJM pressure, Orsted’s approval, and a carbon storage well milestone
Current conditions: Hurricane Kiko, now a Category 3 storm, is expected to bring heavy rainfall to Hawaii this week as wind speeds roar up to 125 miles per hour • Dry air in the Caribbean is stymying any tropical storm from gaining wind intensity • Tropical Storm Tapah strengthened to a typhoon over China on Monday morning.
U.S. immigration authorities arrested hundreds of South Korean workers at a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, in a move already prompting geopolitical blowback that could threaten efforts to reestablish manufacturing in the United States. After U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers conducted their biggest workplace raid since President Donald Trump took office again on Thursday, the South Korean government chartered planes to ferry detained workers back home. At an emergency meeting in Seoul, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said his government was “deeply concerned,” and that he would consider flying to the U.S. to meet with the Trump administration. Most of the 475 people arrested at the electric vehicle battery plant — a joint venture between automaker Hyundai and the battery company LG Energy Solution – were South Korean nationals. Videos of the arrests showed the workers’ wrists and ankles wrapped in chains as they were led away.
“You are already poorer because of this idiocy, you just don’t know it yet,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote in a post on X, in response to a video of ICE agents chaining workers at the wrists and ankles. “This will crush American manufacturing know-how.”
Under a solar panel in Pennsylvania. Drew Hallowell/Getty Images for NASCAR
Political pressure is mounting on the nation’s largest grid operator to make hooking up new power sources easier amid surging demand. In remarks made as part of a public process for overhauling the grid’s rules, the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Illinois called on the PJM Interconnection to streamline the process to connect new resources to the grid, citing ERCOT, the independent power system in Texas, as an example of a successful model. “We must open all feasible pathways to bring additional electrons to our grid,” the governors said in a public comment highlighted on X by energy researcher Tyler Norris.
The push comes as PJM is fending off criticism from big tech companies and data centers over a proposal that would allow the grid to encourage big power users to pare back consumption when demand is particularly high. The backlash isn’t surprising to Abraham Silverman, a former lawyer for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities and an assistant research scholar at Johns Hopkins. As he explained to Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin: “The existing rules are financially very favorable to the data centers.” The focus on adding new generation rather than curtailing new load is consistent with that more traditional approach.
Trump once called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act former President Joe Biden signed in 2021, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, “a loser for the U.S.A.” that “patriots will never forget.” Now he’s taking credit for the projects it’s funding. In recent months, signs have gone up around the U.S. bearing the president’s name on bridge projects in Connecticut and Maryland, rail-yard improvements in Seattle, Boston, and Philadelphia, and the replacement tunnel on an Amtrak route between Baltimore and Washington, according to The New York Times. “PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP” a sign by the road in southern Connecticut reads. “REBUILDING AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE.”
Republicans had previously balked at similar signs bearing Biden’s name. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, “Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lodged a grievance with the Office of Special Counsel alleging Biden had violated the Hatch Act by using taxpayer dollars to pay for ‘nothing more than campaign yard signs.’” Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa (who recently announced her intention not to seek reelection after becoming a target of Trump supporters) gave the signs one of her monthly “squeal awards” last year, demanding to know how much they cost.
Orsted’s shareholders on Friday backed the company’s plans to shore up its finances by raising $9.4 billion on the stock market to fend off attacks from the Trump administration. The approval came even as the world’s largest offshore wind developer cut its profit guidance for the year as lower-than-expected wind speeds dinged the company’s planned power output for the year. At an investor meeting in Copenhagen that the Financial Times described as “extraordinary,” at least 98.5% of shareholders voted in favor of authorizing the issuance of new shares.
The Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub completed drilling for the nation’s deepest carbon storage well in Wyoming. The project, a collaboration between the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources and the company Frontier Infrastructure holdings, reached a vertical depth of 18,437 feet. Preliminary data from the well “is highly encouraging,” according to the nonprofit newsroom Oil City News. “This deeper well gives us a more complete picture of the subsurface, reinforcing our commitment to building scalable, practical carbon solutions for Wyoming’s key industries,” said Robby Rockey, president and co-CEO of Frontier.
Still, as I reported in this newsletter last week, the new research from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Imperial College London found “a prudent global limit” of around 1.46 trillion tons of CO2 that can be safely stored in geologic formations. That’s “almost 10 times smaller than estimates proposed by industry that have not considered risks to people and the environment.”
A long-term study spanning more than 50 years found that beavers that have returned to the Evo region in southern Finland increased habitat biodiversity as a result of how they engineer the ecosystem with dams. “While the positive effects of the changes brought about by beavers in the boreal region are significant, their long-term effects on biodiversity dynamics remain partly unknown. This is why long time series are needed to understand the far-reaching ecological effects of these changes,” Petri Nummi, a senior lecturer at the University of Helsinki and an author of the paper, said in a press release.
Using more electricity when it’s cheap can pay dividends later.
One of the best arguments for electric vehicles is the promise of lower costs for the owner. Yes, EVs cost more upfront than comparable gas-powered cars, but electric cars are cheaper to fuel and should require less routine maintenance, too. (Say goodbye to the 3,000-mile oil change.)
What about the societal scale, though? As the number of EVs on the road continues to rise, more analysts are putting forth the argument that EV ownership could lead to lower energy bills for everyone, even the people who don’t buy them.
The idea may be counterintuitive, given the prevailing narrative about voracious appetite for electricity. EVs do require a lot of energy. Electricity demand for EVs in the U.S. jumped 50% from 2023 to 2024 alone as more Americans bought electric, and the research group Ev.energy says demand could triple by 2030. Studies suggest that replacing every internal combustion vehicle in the country with an EV would eat up as much as 29% of American electricity.
Meanwhile, the grid is struggling to keep up — it is, after all, much more difficult to add more megawatts to the capacity of our power system than it is to put a few more EVs on the road. The obvious inference would then seem to be that a battery-powered car fleet could cause an energy crunch and spike in prices.
A new report from Ev.energy, however, argues that if we got smarter about how and when we charge our cars, their presence could actually cut costs for the average American by 10%. The gains could be even better if EVs reach their true potential as a way to give the grid a unique kind of flexibility and resilience.
Compare an electric car to a data center, the other application painted as a ticking time bomb for electricity prices. Worries about the energy-gobbling habits of AI-powering servers are well-founded, given their 24/7 appetite. An EV, however, needs to charge only once in a while. In fact, most people don’t need to charge every day, given the range of modern EVs and the driving habits of the typical American.
As we've covered before, it’s when you charge that matters. Optimizing EV charging can be a helpful way to ease pressure on the power grid and align EV charging with the availability of clean energy.
Here in California, which has far and away the most EVs in America, TV commercials remind us to use less energy between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., when the state is dealing with rising residential energy use just as solar power is tapering off for the day. It would cause a grid crisis if every EV owner charged as soon as they got home from work. Having EV owners charge their cars overnight, a period of low demand, helps ease the pressure. So does charging during midday, when California sometimes has more solar energy than it knows what to do with.
When EVs charge in this mindful manner, using energy during times of day when it’s cheap for utilities to provide it, data suggests they can effectively push down electricity prices for everyone. Says one recent report from Synapse Energy: “In California, EVs have increased utility revenues more than they have increased utility costs, leading to downward pressure on electric rates for EV-owners and non-EV owners alike.” As the NRDC points out, California has revenue decoupling in place for its utilities, so “any additional revenue in excess of what was anticipated is returned to all utility customers — not just EV drivers — in the form of lower rates.”
Those rosy figures depend upon drivers following this model and charging during off-peak hours, of course. But with time-of-use rates giving them the financial motivation to charge overnight rather than in the early evening, it’s not an outrageous presumption.
And there’s something else that differentiates EVs from other applications that consume lots of electricity: Thanks to their ability to store a large number of kilowatt-hours over a lengthy period of time, electric vehicles can give back. EVs can be a cornerstone of the virtual power plant model because the cars — those equipped with bidirectional charging capabilities, at least — could feed the energy in their batteries back onto the grid to prevent blackouts, for example. In Australia, the Electric Vehicle Council recently crunched the numbers to argue in favor of incentivizing residents to install vehicle-to-grid infrastructure. Their math indicates Australia would reap more than the government invests because these connected EV would cut everyone’s electricity price.
It’s getting more expensive for the individual to own an EV — the federal tax credit for buying one disappears at month’s end, and punitive yearly fees for EV ownership are coming. Yet it seems that driving electric might be doing your neighbors a favor, and not just by clearing the air.