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There’s a lot about the fires in Pacific Palisades, Eaton Canyon, and Sylmar that’s unusual, but they were still entirely predictable.
January is one of the worst months of the year for wildfires — in southern Australia. Not in the metro area of Los Angeles, where it is, technically, supposed to be the rainy season.
But try telling a fire that it’s unseasonal.
At the time of this writing, three wildfires are burning in the Los Angeles area, mostly uncontained: the nearly 3,000-acre Palisades fire in the hills between Santa Monica and Malibu; the 500-acre Hurst fire in Sylmar, northwest of downtown L.A.; and the 2,300-acre Eaton fire outside of Pasadena. The fire has destroyed more than 1,000 buildings — including, apparently, the home of reality TV royals Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt — and at least two people have died. Emergency management officials told an additional 30,000 people to evacuate immediately, a number that is likely to climb as dry, windy conditions worsen throughout the day on the West Coast. Though it’s still early in the unfolding disaster, forecasters expect fire weather to continue through at least Thursday, and some experts are already saying the event may end up being the costliest wildfire on record.
It’s not the case, however, that this unusual storm has taken emergency management or the public by surprise. “We’ve been advertising this event for several days and talking about how serious it could be starting last week,” Kristen Allison, a fire management specialist with the Southern California Geographic Area Coordination Center, told me. Given the high Santa Ana winds —which, with their 100-mile-per-hour gusts, were strong enough to blow unimpeded over the San Gabriel mountains and hit typically sheltered areas like Pasadena — and the low humidity, forecasters saw all the classic warning signs of wildfire well in advance.
It’s not the wind or dry air that is so atypical for January, though. “We haven’t had significant rain since April, so we’ve been dry for eight or nine months,” Allison went on. “Our fuels are basically bone dry at this point.”
And there is a lot of fuel waiting to burn after the region’s wet spring — a dangerous situation created by the see-sawing between extremes that is typical of climate change. Earlier this year, the U.S. Drought Monitor classified many parts of the state as being in a “moderate” drought, a trend that also has strong links to climate change and will have dried out the vegetation in the hills.
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Making matters worse, the winter storms that usually hit the L.A. area this time of year have tracked north, soaking the Pacific Northwest and Northern California instead. L.A.’s fires, then, are “not so much a temperature story,” Max Moritz, a cooperative extension wildfire specialist at U.C. Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, told me. “This is really more of a precipitation and climate change story.” All the landscape was ever going to need, in other words, was a spark.
It might be a long time before we discover what this particular spark was. But it also doesn’t really matter. “Once fires like this start, there is not a whole lot firefighters can do,” Neil Lareau, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Nevada, Reno, told me. “The pre-positioning of resources — all of that was there. But you see the impossibility of the task at hand once the fires get going.”
Allison agreed that few who live in the fire-prone hills outside of Malibu or Pasadena are likely to have ignored the warnings just because they’ve otherwise been lucky lately. “People know that if we haven’t had rain in months and months and months, and we got the wind coming — they know this is fire weather,” Allison said. The lack of significant casualties so far might be attributed to the fact that as awful as the physical destruction is, this is also what southern California does, even if it’s an unusual time of year.
But Scott Capps, an atmospheric scientist and the head of Atmospheric Data Solutions, a forecasting firm, pointed out to me in an email that just because we expect fire weather, “we cannot predict where and when a wildfire ignition will happen.” As he explained, the terrain of southern California is complex and extraordinarily difficult to accurately model; in a fast-moving situation like the fires in L.A., the advantages of predicting fire weather quickly reach their limits. Especially when a wildfire starts burning between fuel-rich homes, entire neighborhoods can quickly go up in smoke.
The late author and urban theorist Mike Davis once argued that we should let Malibu burn. “After every major California blaze, homeowners and their representatives take shelter in the belief that if wildfire can’t be prevented, nonetheless, its destructiveness can be tamed,” he wrote, adding: “Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say … ‘still it burns.’”
Davis was writing in 1998, a time when he described fire season as “late August to early October.” Many would argue now that there isn’t such a thing as a fire “season” anymore. Allison warned me that the forecast looks favorable for fires through Friday, and that “additional winds are coming next week” and “we’re not going to see rain anytime soon.” At a certain point, Davis’ wry pessimism might not seem not so crass.
Moritz, though, wanted to be clear in distinguishing between the inevitabilities. “We have built communities right up into and against flammable landscapes, so yes, it is inevitable that many of these neighborhoods are going to experience a fire,” he explained. But “is it inevitable that we would have this many home losses, or have to evacuate this many people, and who knows how many fatalities may end up emerging — is that part inevitable? No.”
Predicting fires is, of course, vitally important: Warnings and outlooks prevent deaths, promote home-hardening and resilience measures, and help encourage smooth evacuations that, in turn, keep first responders safe. But when you have an alignment of conditions like these, prediction will never equal prevention. Moritz argued that we need to move beyond “preventing” fires, anyway — it’s more important that we begin to think of land use and urban planning as public health measures. “We need to have urban design standards that explicitly address the need for more survivable communities” in southern California, he told me.
Because of the climate, because of bad luck, because of the folly of wanting to live somewhere with that perfect Pacific view — California was going to catch fire. “I think there are going to be some tragic outcomes that we hear about,” Moritz said, “and if there are any lessons that we can take away, it’s that we have to learn to coexist with this kind of inevitable natural hazard.”
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On the worsening transformer shortage, China’s patent boom, and New York’s nuclear embrace
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Erin is still intensifying as it approaches the Caribbean • Rare August rainstorms are deluging the Pacific Northwest with a month’s worth of precipitation in 24 hours, threatening floods • Hong Kong has issued its highest-level “black” rainstorm warning multiple times this month as Tropical Storm Podul lashes southern China.
President Donald Trump’s order to keep large fossil-fueled power stations scheduled to retire between now and 2028 operating indefinitely will cost ratepayers across the United States $3.1 billion per year, according to new research from the consultancy Grid Strategies on behalf of four large environmental groups. If the Department of Energy expands the order to cover all 54 fossil fuel plants slated for closure in the next three years, the price tag for Americans whose rates fund the subsidies to keep the stations running would rise to $6 billion per year.
The problem may only grow. The agency’s existing mandates “perversely incentivize plant owners to claim they plan to retire so they can receive a ratepayer subsidy to remain open,” the report points out.
With electricity consumption hitting new records in the U.S., demand for transformers is surging. The years-long supply shortage for power and distribution transformers is now set to hit a deficit below demand of 30% and 10%, respectively, in 2025, according to a new report from the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Complicating matters further for manufacturers scrambling to ramp up supply, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is throwing clean-energy projects into jeopardy and sending mixed signals to factories on what kinds of transformers to produce. At the same time, tariffs are raising the price of materials needed to make more transformers.
“The U.S. transformer market stands at a critical juncture, with supply constraints threatening to undermine the nation's energy transition and grid reliability goals,” Ben Boucher, a senior supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “The convergence of accelerating electricity demand, aging infrastructure and supply chain vulnerabilities has created constraints that will persist well into the 2030s.”
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A worker in a Chinese electric vehicle factory. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
For years, China was known for ripping off the West’s technology and patenting cheaper but more easily manufactured copies. Not anymore. China applied for twice as many high-quality clean energy patents as the U.S. in 2022, according to a New York Times analysis of the most recently available public data. The European Patent Office, which supplied data to the Times, defines a “high quality” patent as one that has been filed in two or more countries, indicating that the company or individual involved has a strong competitive interest in protecting its idea.
The growth in China’s intellectual property ambitions is a sign that Beijing’s strategic push to ramp up academic research and industrial innovation is maturing. “It is the opposite of an accident,” said Jenny Wong Leung, an analyst and data scientist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which created a database of global research on technologies that are critical to nations’ economic and military security, including clean energy.
In June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul directed the New York Power Authority, the nation’s second-largest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, to support the construction of the state’s first new nuclear plant since the 1980s. Albany has plenty to sort out between now and the 15-year deadline for completing the project, including selecting a site, picking from one of the many new reactor designs, and finding a private partner. But one thing isn’t a problem, at least for now: Public support.
New Siena polling I covered in my Substack newsletter yesterday shows that 49% of registered voters in New York support the effort, with just 26% opposed. Both sides of the political spectrum are largely in lockstep, with Republican support outpacing that of Democrats by a margin of 55% to 49%. That’s lucky for Hochul, who will need support from the more politically conservative upper reaches of the state where the facility is likely to be built. For more on the technical and political considerations in play, here’s Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the plan.
It seems like everyone is abandoning their net zero goals. But not insurer Aviva. The company’s chief executive, Amanda Blanc, said the British giant remained committed to its carbon-cutting goals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, The Guardian reported. With rising profits propelling shares in the company to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, Blanc said, “extreme weather conditions, climate change, and the impact that that has on our insurance business that actually insures properties” meant Aviva needed to “remain committed to our ambition.”
The British government’s decision in May to hand back sovereignty over the Chagos Island to Mauritius more than two centuries after seizing the Indian Ocean archipelago and forcing out its residents to make way for a military base created a political uproar in the United Kingdom earlier this year. But British rule over the island chain yielded at least one major benefit beyond military defense. A new study found that the supersized Marine Protected Area the U.K. established in 2010 protected large ocean animals throughout much of their lifecycle. Scientists tracked sea turtles, manta rays and seabirds in the nearly 250,000-square-mile sanctuary. In total, 95% of tracking locations showed the area “is large enough to protect these wandering animals” which travel far to forage, breed and migrate. By contrast, the study from Exeter and Heriot-Watt universities found that seabirds in marine areas with smaller than 40,000 square miles “would be less well protected.”
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio – The red shirts are beating the greens out in Ohio, and it isn’t looking pretty.
4. Allen County, Indiana – Sometimes a setback can really set someone back.
5. Adams County, Illinois – Hope you like boomerangs because this county has approved a solar project it previously denied.
6. Solano County, California – Yet another battery storage fight is breaking out in California. This time, it’s north of San Francisco.
A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So why are you so fixated on NEPA?
Personally and institutionally, [Breakthrough is] curious about all regulatory policy – land use, environmental regulatory policy – and we see NEPA as the thing that connects them all. If we understand how that’s functioning at a high level, we can start to pull at the strings of other players. So, we wanted to understand the barrier that touches the most projects.
What aspects of zero-carbon energy generation are most affected by NEPA?
Anything with a federal nexus that doesn’t include tax credits. Solar and wind that is on federal land is subject to a NEPA review, and anything that is linear infrastructure – transmission often has to go through multiple NEPA reviews. We don’t see a ton of transmission being litigated over on our end, but we think that is a sign NEPA is such a known obstacle that no one even wants to touch a transmission line that’ll go through 14 years of review, so there’s this unknown graveyard of transmission that wasn’t even planned.
In your report, you noted there was a relatively small number of zero-carbon energy projects in your database of NEPA cases. Is solar and wind just being developed more frequently on private land, so there’s less of these sorts of conflicts?
Precisely. The states that are the most powered by wind or create the most wind energy are Texas and Iowa, and those are bypassing the national federal environmental review process [with private land], in addition to not having their own state requirements, so it’s easier to build projects.
What would you tell a solar or wind developer about your research?
This is confirming a lot of things they may have already instinctually known or believed to be true, which is that NEPA and filling out an environmental impact statement takes a really long time and is likely to be litigated over. If you’re a developer who can’t avoid putting your energy project on federal land, you may just want to avoid moving forward with it – the cost may outweigh whatever revenue you could get from that project because you can’t know how much money you’ll have to pour into it.
Huh. Sounds like everything is working well. I do think your work identifies a clear risk in developing on federal lands, which is baked into the marketplace now given the pause on permits for renewables on federal lands.
Yeah. And if you think about where the best places would be to put these technologies? It is on federal lands. The West is way more federal land than anywhere else in the county. Nevada is a great place to put solar — there’s a lot of sun. But we’re not going to put anything there if we can’t put anything there.
What’s the remedy?
We propose a set of policy suggestions. We think the judicial review process could be sped along or not be as burdensome. Our research most obviously points to shortening the statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedures Act from six years to six months, because a great deal of the projects we reviewed made it in that time, so you’d see more cases in good faith as opposed to someone waiting six years waiting to challenge it.
We also think engaging stakeholders much earlier in the process would help.