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What Angelenos can learn from the Maui Wildfire Exposure health survey.
After a week and a half of unimaginable destruction, Los Angeles is at last beginning to look toward its recovery from the Palisades and Eaton fires. Traversing that stage will take years, not only because of the significant economic and political implications of the fires, but also because of what they will mean for the health and well-being of the thousands of residents who live in or near the burn zones.
Los Angeles isn’t navigating the crisis alone, though. In the wake of the deadly 2023 Maui wildfire, researchers at the University of Hawaii launched the Maui Wildfire Exposure Study, a multi-year effort to track the disaster’s physical and mental health impacts on residents. Though the demographics of West Maui differ greatly from those of Pacific Palisades or Altadena — two of the most affluent zip codes in the country — California public officials, medical professionals, and wildfire survivors can still learn from the ongoing work of the MauiWES.
To that end, I spoke yesterday with Ruben Juarez, one of the study’s lead researchers. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What is the Maui Wildfire Exposure Study?
The Maui Wildfire Exposure Study follows a comprehensive cohort of people affected by the 2023 fires. We collected data six months after the fire, and typically, we’re looking for the long-term effects. For 60% of the individuals who came to the study, it was their first health check since the fires.
It is a pretty interesting population: They’re underserved and typically lack access to health care. We found three main trends: The first was mental and physical health issues. Access to care was a big issue in Hawaii, and I’m hoping that’s not going to be the case in California, but it definitely was here. Housing, job, and food insecurity were other big issues, as were the social impacts.
What have you learned about the mental and physical health of people exposed to the Maui wildfires?
Pre-wildfire we knew that the rate of depression symptoms in the Maui population was about 30%. Post-wildfire, we’re seeing more like 52%, so more than one in two participants in the study were showing depression symptoms. Low self-esteem was another issue. Something that was really worrisome was suicidal ideation: Pre-wildfire, it was less than 1%; post-wildfire, at least for the people in the cohort, it was about 4% of the population. That’s more than a four-time increase.
The second issue is physical health: Nearly half of the participants reported worse health since the fires. We saw respiratory issues, such as coughing, wheezing, difficulty breathing, and also skin and eye irritation, fatigue, and weakness. We’re seeing that about 74% of the participants are facing a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease. We also performed a lung check using spirometry and oscillometry breathing. Based on the spirometry measure, 60% of participants may have poor lung health, and 40% may have mild to severe lung obstruction. We believe this is associated with the exposure to ash and the personal protective equipment individuals wore when they returned to the fire site.
We’ve written a lot about the dangers of wildfire smoke at Heatmap, but I think people are less aware of the risks of wildfire ash. Could you say more?
It’s really toxic. People need to take care of themselves. There are the harmful substances you’d expect in ash: lead, arsenic, asbestos — those are poisons.
Why was our population in Lahaina affected by this? Because they went back to the burned homes and did not wear any PPE. To me, that was crazy. The county said that wearing PPE was a voluntary decision, and that was a mistake. And PPE is not just a mask: you really need eye protection, gloves, footwear, and long clothing, because the ash is really toxic.
Even in small amounts, the poisons in ash can harm the lungs and the heart, and there are long-term effects, including cancer, which is one of the things we’re trying to prevent. In the case of Hawaii, for the initial batch of 767 individuals in the study, we did a heavy metal analysis — a comprehensive panel of 32 of the most expected heavy metals. We already knew that five of the most common heavy metals were found in ash present in Hawaii: arsenic, lead, antimony, copper, and cobalt. We learned that 20% of participants affected by the fires in our cohort were showing an elevated level of at least one of these heavy metals, which is not something that you would expect. We don’t want these things in our bodies at any level. People must know that these things are harmful and they need to take care of their health.
And that’s all just from people returning to their homes and sifting through the ash? Or can ash blow into an area that didn’t burn and affect people that way, as well?
Many participants were uneducated about the harmful effects ash has, especially when it has contact with your skin. But you should also avoid breathing or swallowing soot and ash at any cost. The effects were seen in individuals who had direct contact at a site or were indirectly exposed through smoke or blowing winds — but the majority was direct contact.
That’s so scary.
Not everything was bad news. We found some exciting ways to potentially address some of these issues. For instance, resiliency was at the top of the minds of many participants in the study: “How can I be resilient? How can I survive this catastrophe?”
We also found that lower-income individuals trust and use community organizations more than government services, like federal, state, and county agencies. This information could potentially help us intervene, especially when considering underserved populations like immigrant populations. They just don’t trust the government. Addressing issues through community organizations on the ground was extremely helpful because it allowed people to access the services they needed.
Another thing that we noticed that was super helpful was that people who maintain strong relationships with family and friends experience better health outcomes. Social isolation after a wildfire was really bad, especially for mental health problems. Individuals who are more connected with their friends, family, or are doing something in their community volunteering tend to have better health outcomes, particularly in terms of depression.
How close do you need to have been to a wildfire to experience these effects?
Individuals whose homes were on the perimeter of the burn area experienced more physical symptoms, worse quality of life, and worse mental health. But that doesn’t mean that if your house doesn’t burn, you will not experience any of the symptoms. Even if you didn’t go to a contaminated site, there was all the smoke over the city, and you’re exposed to that. Individuals who are not directly affected can be indirectly affected — at a lower rate, of course, as you’d expect.
Many of the mental health impacts you described were related to things like housing, job, or food insecurity, as well as the lack of access to healthcare resources following a fire. Would you expect mental health impacts to not be as bad in L.A., since it was a more affluent area that burned?
Yes. In fact, coincidentally, one of our scientific advisory board members is a resident of L.A., and he’s been saying that he doesn’t expect the health effects to be as bad in L.A. as they were in Maui because the shortage of doctors is not as big. Also, the type of demographic that is being affected is more affluent.
Having said that, in Hawaii, we had the advantage of winds that blew smoke and soot away. I was reading reports that in L.A., there were no winds, and the smoke was just staying there. In that case, the effects in terms of pulmonary health won’t just be the people directly affected, but the whole city.
What would you want emergency managers and medical professionals in Los Angeles to know about your study as they address the impacts of these fires?
First, we must emphasize to people that this is not a forest fire; houses are burning, full of toxic substances. People need to know that if they return to the burn zone, they need to take care of their health and ensure they are wearing PPE. We need to conduct many communication campaigns around this.
The second thing is, don’t underestimate the power of community and community organizations, especially in L.A., where there are many immigrant populations. Community organizations should be used to provide information because people don’t trust the government or FEMA officials.
The third thing I would emphasize is that after a disaster, when people struggle with housing, job, and food insecurity, their health becomes a lower priority. This is understandable, but unfortunately, neglecting your health at this time can worsen the long-term effects. It’s really important that we emphasize to individuals that even if you don’t have a house or a job right now, you need to take care of your health.
An example of this is in the aftermath of 9/11; years later, more lives have been lost due to exposure to environmental hazards than the disaster itself. If we don’t intervene early on, things can get really bad. That’s what we are trying to do: prevent those long-term effects from happening.
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Unlike just about every other car sales event, this one has a real — congressionally mandated — end date.
Car salespeople, like all salespeople, love to project a sense of urgency. You know the familiar seasonal rhythm of the TV commercial: Toyotathon is on now — but hurry in, because these deals won’t last. The end of the discount is, of course, an arbitrary deadline invented to juice that month’s sales figures; there’ll be another sale soon.
But in the electric vehicle market there’s about to be a fire sale, and this time it really is a race against the clock.
Federal incentives for EVs and EV equipment were critically endangered the moment Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now, with the passage of the omnibus budget reconciliation bill on the Fourth of July, they have a hard expiration date. Most importantly, the $7,500 federal tax credit for an EV purchase is dead after September 30. Drivers who might want to go electric and dealerships and car companies eager to unload EVs are suddenly in a furor to get deals done before the calendar turns to October.
The impending end of the tax credit has already become a sales pitch. Tesla, faced with sagging sales numbers thanks in part to Elon Musk’s misadventures in the Trump administration, has been sending a steady slog of emails trying to convince me to replace my just-paid-off Model 3 with another one. The brand didn’t take long to turn the impending EV gloom into a short-term sales opportunity. “Order soon to get your $7,500,” declared an email blast sent just days after Trump signed the bill.
On Reddit, the general manager of a Mississippi dealership posted to the community devoted to the Ioniq 9, Hyundai’s new three-row all-electric SUV, to appeal to anyone who might be interested in one of the three models that just appeared on their lot. It’s an unusual strategy, a local dealer seeking out a nationwide group of enthusiasts just to move a trio of vehicles. But it’s not hard to see the economic writing on the wall.
The Ioniq 9 is a cool and capable vehicle, but one that starts at $59,000 in its most basic form and quickly rises into the $60,000s and $70,000s with fancier versions. Even with the discount, the Ioniq 9 costs far more than many of the more affordable gas-powered three-row crossovers. And now the vehicle has come down with a serious case of unlucky timing, with deliveries beginning this summer just ahead of the incentive’s disappearance. As of October 1, the EV could become an albatross that nobody in suburban Memphis wants to drive off the lot.
Over the past year, Ford has offered the Ford Power Promise, an excellent deal that throws in a free home charger plus the cost of installation to anyone who buys a new EV. That deal was supposed to expire this summer. But the Detroit giant has extended its offer until — surprise — Sept. 30, in the hopes of enticing a wave of buyers while the getting is good.
This isn’t the first time EV-makers have been through such a deadline crunch. When the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases first started in 2010, the law was written so that the benefit phased out over time once a car company passed a particular sales threshold. By the time I bought my EV in the spring of 2019, for example, Tesla had already sold so many vehicles that its tax credit was halved from $7,500 to $3,750. We had to rush to take delivery in the last few days of June as the benefit was slated to fall again, to $1,875, on July 1, before it disappeared completely in 2020.
The Inflation Reduction Act passed under President Biden not only reinstated the $7,500 credit but also took away the gradual decline of the benefit; it was supposed to stick around, in full, until 2032. But despite Trump’s on-again, off-again bromance with Elon Musk, the president followed through on his long-term antagonistic rhetoric against EVs by repealing the benefit as part of this month’s disastrous big bill.
Trump, despite his best efforts, won’t kill the EV. The electric horse has simply left the barn — the world has come too far and seen too much of what electrification has to offer to turn back just because the current U.S. president wants it to. But the end of the EV tax credit (until a different regime comes into power, at least) seriously imperils the economic math that allowed EV sales to rise steadily over the past few years.
As a result, now might be the best time for a long time to buy or lease an electric vehicle, with remarkably low lease payments to be found on great EVs like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Chevy Equinox. Once the tax breaks are gone, lease deals (which got lots of drivers into EVs without them having to worry about long-term ownership questions) are likely to grow less enticing. EVs that would have been cost-competitive with gasoline counterparts when the tax credits taken into account suddenly aren’t.
Plenty of drivers will continue to choose electric even at a premium price because it’s a better product, sure. But hopes of reaching many more budget-first buyers have taken a serious hit. It could be a dream summer to buy an EV, but we’re all going to wake up when September ends.
On the NRC, energy in Pennsylvania, and Meta AI
Current conditions: Air quality alerts will remain in place in Chicago through Tuesday evening due to smoke from Canadian wildfires • There is a high risk of a tropical depression forming in the Gulf this week • The rain is clearing on the eastern seaboard after 2.64 inches fell in New York’s Central Park on Monday, breaking the record for July 14 set in 1908.
The Trump administration is putting pressure on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “rubber stamp” all new reactors, Politico reports based on conversations with three people at the May meeting where the expectation was relayed. The directive to the NRC’s top staff came from Adam Blake, a representative of the Department of Government Efficiency, who apparently used the term “rubber stamp” specifically to describe the function of the independent agency. NRC’s “secondary assessment” of the safety of new nuclear projects would be a “foregone conclusion” following approval by the Department of Energy or the Pentagon, NRC officials were made to believe, per Politico.
A spokesperson for the NRC pointed to President Trump’s recent executive order aiming to quadruple U.S. nuclear power by 2050 in response to Politico’s reporting. Skeptics, however, have expressed concern over the White House’s influence on the NRC, which is meant to operate independently, as well as potential safety lapses that might result from the 18-month deadline for reviewing new reactors established in the order.
President Trump and Republican Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania will announce a $70 million “AI and energy investment” in the Keystone State at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit today in Pittsburgh. The event is meant to focus on the development of emerging energy technologies. Organizers said that more than 60 CEOs, including executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, BlackRock, and Palantir, will be in attendance at the event hosted by Carnegie Mellon University. BlackRock is expected to announce a $25 billion investment in a “data-center and energy infrastructure development in Northeast Pennsylvania, along with a joint venture for increased power generation” at the event, Axios reports.
Ahead of the summit, critics slammed the event as a “moral failure,” with student protests expected throughout the day. Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, wrote on Bluesky that the summit was a “slap in the face to real clean energy researchers,” and that there is “nothing innovative about propping up the fossil fuel industry.” “History will judge institutions that chose short-term gain over moral clarity during this critical moment for climate action and scientific integrity,” she went on.
On Monday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed on Threads that the company aims to become “the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online” — an ambitious goal that will require the extensive development of new gas infrastructure, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reports. The first gigawatt-level project, an Ohio data center called Prometheus, will be powered by Meta’s own natural gas infrastructure, with the natural gas company Williams reportedly building two 200-megawatt facilities for the project in Ohio. The buildout for Prometheus is in addition to another Meta project in Northeast Louisiana, Hyperion, that Zuckerberg said Monday could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. “To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts,” Matthew writes. Read his full report here.
BYD
Electric vehicle sales are currently on track to outpace gasoline car sales in China this year, Bloomberg reports. In the first six months of 2025, new battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, and extended-range electric cars accounted for 5.5 million vehicles sold in the country (compared to 5.4 million sales of new gasoline cars), and are projected to top 16 million before the end of December — both of which put EVs a hair over their combustion-powered competitors.
By contrast, battery-electric cars only accounted for 28% of new-car sales in China last year, per the nation’s Passenger Car Association. But “sales this year have been spurred by the extension of a trade-in subsidy” as well as the nation’s expansive electrified lineup, including “several budget options” like BYD’s Seagull, Bloomberg writes. “China is the only large market where EVs are on average cheaper to buy than comparable combustion cars,” BloombergNEF reported last month.
Window heat pumps are an extremely promising answer to the conundrum of decarbonizing large apartment buildings, a new report by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has found. Previously, research on heat pumps had primarily focused on their advantages for single-family homes, while the process of retrofitting larger steam- and hot-water-heated apartment buildings remained difficult and expensive, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo explains. But while apartment residents used to have to wait for their building to either install a large central heat pump system for the whole structure, or else rely on a more involved “mini-split” system, newer technologies like window heat pumps proved to be one of the most cost-effective solutions in ACEEE’s report with an average installation cost of $9,300 per apartment. “That’s significantly higher than the estimated $1,200 per apartment cost of a new boiler, but much lower than the $14,000 to $20,000 per apartment price tag of the other heat pump variations,” Emily writes, adding that the report also found window heat pumps may be “the cheapest to operate, with a life cycle cost of about $14,500, compared to $22,000 to $30,000 for boilers using biodiesel or biogas or other heat pump options.” Read Emily’s full report here.
California was powered by two-thirds clean energy in 2023 — the latest year data is available — making it the “largest economy in the world to achieve this milestone,” Governor Gavin Newsom’s office announced this week.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.
Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.
“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis that
That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.
At the end of last year, Zuckerberg said that a datacenter project in Northeast Louisiana, now publicly known as Hyperion, would take 2 gigawatts of electricity; in his post on Monday, he said it could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts.
As one could perhaps infer from the fact that their size is quoted in gigawatts instead of square feet or number of GPUs, whether or not these data centers get built comes down to the ability to power them.
Citing information from the natural gas company Williams, Semianalysis reported that Meta “went full Elon mode” for the New Albany datacenter, i.e. is installed its own natural gas infrastructure. Specifically, Williams is building two 200-megawatt facilities, according to the gas developer and Semianalysis, for the Ohio project. (Williams did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment.)
Does this mean Meta is violating its commitments to reach net zero? While the data center buildout may make those goals more difficult to achieve, Meta is still investing in new renewables even as it’s also bringing new gas online. Late last month, the company announced that it was procuring almost 800 new megawatts of renewables from projects to be built by Invenergy, including over 400 megawatts of solar in Ohio, roughly matching the on-site generation from the Prometheus project.
But there’s more to a data center’s climate footprint than what a big tech company does — or does not — build on site.
The Louisiana project, Hyperion, will also be served by new natural gas and renewables added to the grid. Entergy, the local utility, has proposed 1.5 gigawatts of natural gas generation near the Meta site and over 2 gigawatts of new natural gas in total, with another plant in the southern part of the state to help balance the addition of significant new load. In December, when the data center was announced, Meta said that it planned to “bring at least 1,500 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid.” Entergy did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment on its plans for the Hyperion project.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!” Zuckerberg wrote.