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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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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.