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Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “Super Scooper” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the Super Scooper collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the Super Scooper collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the Super Scooper, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Québécois firefighting planes are called Super Scoopers, not super soakers.
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Current conditions: A late-season nor’easter could bring minor flooding to the Boston area• It’s clear and sunny today in Erbil, Iraq, where the country’s first entirely off-grid, solar-powered village is now operating • Thursday will finally bring a break from severe storms in the U.S., which has seen 280 tornadoes more than the historical average this year.
1. House GOP passes reconciliation bill after late-night tweaks to clean energy tax credits
The House passed the sweeping “big, beautiful” tax bill early Thursday morning in a 215-214 vote, mostly along party lines. Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio voted no, while House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present;” two additional Republicans didn’t vote.
The bill will effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written — although the Wednesday night manager’s amendment included some tweaks to how, exactly, as well as a few concessions to moderates. Updates include:
The bill now heads to the Senate — where more negotiations will almost certainly follow — with Republicans aiming to have it on President Trump’s desk by July 4.
2. FEMA cancels 4-year strategic plan, axing focus on ‘climate resilience’
The combative new acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, rescinded the organization’s four-year strategic plan on Wednesday, per Wired. Though the document, which was set to expire at the end of 2026, does not address specific procedures for given disasters, it does lay out goals and objectives for the agency, including “lead whole of community in climate resilience” and “install equality as a foundation of emergency management.” In axing the strategic plan, Richardson told staff that the document “contains goals and objectives that bear no connection to FEMA accomplishing its mission.”
A FEMA employee who spoke with Wired stressed that while rescinding the plan does not have immediate operational impacts, it can still have “big downstream effects.” Another characterized the move by the administration as symbolic: “There are very real changes that have been made that touch on [equity and climate change] that are more important than the document itself.”
3. Energy Department redirects Puerto Rican rooftop solar investment to upkeep of fossil fuel plants
The U.S. federal government is redirecting a $365 million investment in rooftop solar power in Puerto Rico to instead maintain the island’s fossil fuel-powered grid, the Department of Energy announced Wednesday. The award, which dates to the Biden administration, was intended to provide stable power to Puerto Ricans, who have become accustomed to blackouts due to damaged and outdated infrastructure. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority declared bankruptcy in 2017, and a barrage of major hurricanes — most notably 2017’s Hurricane Maria — have destabilized the island’s grid, Reuters reports.
In Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s statement, he said the funds will go toward “dispatching baseload generation units, supporting vegetation control to protect transmission lines, and upgrading aging infrastructure.” But Javier Rúa Jovet, a public policy director for Puerto Rico’s Solar and Energy Storage Association, added to The Associated Press that “There is nothing faster and better than solar batteries.”
4. EDF, Shell, and others to collaborate on hydrogen emission tracker
The Environmental Defense Fund announced Wednesday that it is launching an international research initiative to track hydrogen emissions from North American and European facilities, in partnership with Shell, TotalEnergies, Air Products, and Air Liquide, as well as other academic and technology partners. Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that, through chemical reactions, can affect the lifetime and abundances of planet-warming gases like methane and ozone. Despite being a “leak-prone gas,” hydrogen emissions have been poorly studied.
“As hydrogen becomes an increasingly important part of the energy system, developing a robust, data-driven understanding of its emissions is essential to supporting informed decisions and guiding future investments in the sector,” Steven Hamburg, the chief scientist and senior vice president of EDF, said in a statement. Notably, EDF took a similar approach to tracking methane over a decade ago and ultimately exposed that emissions were “a far greater threat” than official government estimates suggested.
5. The best-selling SUV in America will now be available only as a hybrid
Toyota
The bestselling SUV in America, the Toyota RAV4, will be available only as a hybrid beginning with the 2026 model, Car and Driver reports. The car will be available both as a conventional hybrid and as a plug-in that works with CCS-compatible DC fast chargers, meaning “owners can quickly fill up its battery during long road trips” to minimize their fossil fuel mileage, The Verge adds. The RAV4 will also beat the Prius for electric range, hitting up to 50 miles before its gas engine kicks in.
Toyota’s move might not come as a complete surprise given that the automaker already introduced a hybrid-only lineup for its Camry. But given the popularity of the RAV4, Car and Driver notes that “if you ever wondered whether or not hybrids have entered the mainstream yet, perhaps this could be a tipping point.”
Nathan Hurner/USFWS
The Fish Lake Valley tui chub, a small minnow threatened by farming and mining activity, could become the first species to be listed as endangered under the second Trump administration.
The House passed its version of the budget bill early Thursday morning, with even deeper cuts to clean energy added overnight.
Trump’s tax bill passed the House early Thursday morning, after a marathon session in the Rules Committee that began early Wednesday morning and stretched late into the night. The final floor vote came down to the slimmest of margins, 215 yeas to 214 nays, with House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris voting “present.”
The clean energy tax credits, already on life support, barely made it out alive.
The text that now heads to the Senate retains many of the provisions that came out of the Ways and Means Committee last week, but would terminate some of the tax credits even more rapidly to appease Republican hardliners.
It still eliminates the electric vehicle tax credits after this year, except for vehicles produced by automakers that have sold fewer than 200,000 tax credit-qualified cars, which will be eligible for one additional year. It still terminates tax credits for residential energy efficiency, rooftop solar, and new, energy-efficient homes. And it still ends the clean hydrogen tax credit at the end of this year.
But for the clean electricity subsidies, the revised text nixes the previously proposed three-year phase-down schedule and bluntly cuts off any project that doesn’t break ground within 60 days of the bill’s passage — basically the same deal handed to the hydrogen industry.
The only concession to the many objections to the bill from the clean energy industry appears to be some carve outs for nuclear plants.
Here’s a rundown of everything that changed.
The revised text demands that clean power projects start construction within 60 days of the bill’s final passage in order to qualify for the production and investment tax credits, 45Y and 48E. Projects that are able to hit that deadline would also have to meet a second one — they would have to start operating before 2029.
But there’s an exception for advanced nuclear facilities, which would only have to start construction by 2029 to be eligible for the credits and would have no deadline to begin sending power to the grid.
The amended text also speeds up material sourcing requirements that prohibit clean power projects from using anything made in China. Under the earlier iteration, power companies would have had a full year to reorganize their supply chains — a timeline that industry experts already said was unworkable. The revised bill imposes the restriction starting January 1 of next year.
In summary, if you are developing a wind farm and want to qualify for tax credits, you now face an almost impossibly short eligibility timeline. You would have to start construction within two months of the reconciliation package passing, eliminate Chinese goods from your supply chain before the end of the year, and then get your project hooked up to the grid and operating by the end of 2028.
When that 60-day clock starts will depend on how long it takes the Senate to pass its version of the reconciliation bill and both houses to approve the final text, which could take weeks or months. Regardless, these new time restrictions would likely “TANK real projects in active development right now, killing jobs and costing investment,” as industry group Advanced Energy United’s managing director Harry Godfrey posted on social media Wednesday night. Godfrey went on to name six projects in Republican districts, including solar farms, solar on schools, and a long-duration storage installation, that would be affected.
To the few clean energy developers that can hit all of these deadlines, House Republicans have offered a small reward. The revised bill appears to retain transferability, the ability for developers to sell their clean energy tax credits to other companies and thereby access more capital more quickly and easily than they otherwise would. There is some confusion among energy experts, however, about exactly how this provision would apply, with Politico Pro reporting Thursday morning that only nuclear would be able to use it. Regardless, the 60-day deadline to start construction makes this mostly moot.
A new section of text takes aim at companies like Sunrun that lease solar installations to homeowners and businesses. Under current law, Sunrun typically claims the commercial investment tax credit (48E) for solar installations on customers' roofs. But the change would prohibit any company that leases solar or wind installations to a third party from claiming the tax credits for those projects.
Under the Way and Means version of the budget bill, the tax credit for electricity produced by existing nuclear plants would have phased down over three years before terminating in 2032. The revised bill nixes the phase-out, keeping the full amount of the credit in place until 2032, which is just one year earlier than the phase-out timeline in the Inflation Reduction Act.
The revised bill also allows nuclear plant owners to take advantage of transferability for as long as the credit is in effect — a provision that nuclear industry advocates told me was essential to keeping existing plants online.
The text does not make any amendments to the Ways and Means bill’s changes to the carbon capture (45Q), clean fuels (45Z), and advanced manufacturing (45X) projects. These projects would still not be able to use transferability past 2027.
The clean fuels credit would still be extended for four years, through the end of 2031, and come with looser carbon accounting rules. The clean manufacturing credit would still be cut short by a year, with wind manufacturers losing their eligibility even earlier, in 2028.
These provisions are not yet law, and there are a number of Republican Senators who have subtly, though publicly disagreed with the approach the House has taken to paring back the tax credits. Regarding the short timeline the Ways and Means Committee had proposed for claiming the tax credits, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told Politico, “we’ll have to change that.” Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said she expected the “blanket” repeal of the tax credits to change, noting “there has been job creation around these tax credits.” And four Republicans led by Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski also sent a letter to party leadership back in April arguing to maintain the tax credits.
The House appeared to have its clean energy holdouts too, however. But as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote on Wednesday, “at no point have these members ever seriously threatened to vote against the bill” in support of the tax credits, and at the end of the day their concerns were mostly ignored.
The Senate is about to take a week-long recess, and won’t be back in session until June 2. How long until the one big, beautiful bill becomes law, nobody knows. But we’ll soon see how hard the energy transition’s defenders are actually willing to fight.
As the process to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts approaches its denouement in the House of Representatives, the relative power of the various Republican factions who could hold up or alter the bill may be finally making itself clear.
And it’s the clean energy tax credit supporters who appear to be the weakest.
Three groups of House Republicans have been the most persistently critical of the emerging framework for the tax and spending bill. There are the members of the House Freedom Caucus, led by Texas Republican Chip Roy, who are fuming about the bill’s impact on the deficit. There are the SALT Republicans, a group whittled down to just five members from New York, New Jersey, and California — blue states all, with all the members from competitive districts — who want to raise the deductibility ceiling for state and local taxes, a.k.a SALT taxes, after it was slashed in 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
And then there are the tax credit defenders, a group of moderate Republicans from largely blue or purple states or districts who want to see at least parts of the Inflation Reduction Act preserved and protected. If that description sounds a lot like the description of the SALT caucus, well, you’re onto something: Every member of the SALT caucus has at one time or another criticized a slash-and-burn approach to dealing with the IRA’s clean energy tax credits.
Both the SALT caucus and the Freedom Caucus have been seen as credible threats to the bill, whose members must be appeased. The SALT caucus stands in a Manchin-esque position, where the five of them together could tank the bill on their own — and where some distance from the Republican party could help them in their districts. For the Freedom Caucus conservatives, the bill presents a pretty clear red line: A handful of them simply do not vote to raise the debt ceiling, which the House language does, and so would have to be appeased with substantial spending cuts.
The SALT caucus appears to have won meaningful concessions, reportedly bringing the deductibility level up to $40,000 for incomes under $500,000. It’s these concessions that seemed to be holding up the bill Wednesday afternoon, as Freedom Caucus members balked over the relative lack of attention their concerns had received. Earlier this week, President Trump was pressuring the SALT caucus to let the bill advance; now he’s putting the screws to the Freedom Caucus. And caught in the middle might be the Inflation Reduction Act.
The solution to bringing the budget harliners on board may be to further fetter and restrict the clean energy tax credits, with Republican leadership reportedly discussing bringing tax credits for projects placed in service after 2028 straight to zero rather than phasing them out gradually.
In the run up to the bill’s drafting, there was much speculation that the core clean energy tax credits of the Inflation Reduction Act could be preserved in large part thanks to the fact that they had sparked investment in Republican congressional districts. In August of last year, well before the presidential election, 18 House Republicans representing a mix of blue states and districts with substantial IRA-linked investments — including Conservative Climate Caucus Vice Chair Buddy Carter’s Savannah, Georgia-based district, with its Hyundai vehicle and battery plant — wrote a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson warning that “prematurely repealing energy tax credits … would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing.” A full repeal, they said, “would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return.”
In March, after some election-related turnover, a similar group wrote to House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith that “any proposed changes to the tax code be conducted in a targeted and pragmatic fashion that promotes conference priorities without undoing current and future private sector investments.”
But at no point have these members ever seriously threatened to vote against the bill — not even after Smith’s Ways and Means Committee proposed text that would essentially disembowel the climate law. Even going into Wednesday’s Rules Committee meeting, at least one tax credit supporter, Don Bacon of Nebraska, was leaning towards supporting the bill — hardly the kind of defiance that leads to concessions.
Not that the House IRA’s defenders have been entirely silent. After the Ways and Means Committee released its bill text, a smaller group of House Republicans (14 this time) wrote yet another letter, asking their colleagues to “consider” the effects of accelerating phase-outs, scrapping the ability to sell tax credits on the open market, and pushing out projects’ eligibility for tax credits later in their life cycle. This group, led by Virginia Republican Jen Kiggans, no longer included Buddy Carter, who in the interim had launched a campaign for Jon Ossoff’s Senate seat. It also did not include Mariannette Miller-Meeks, the Iowa Republican who chairs the Conservative Climate Caucus and who had signed the previous letters. Miller-Meeks has always shown special interest in biofuels, which arguably fared the best in the Ways and Means language — the phase-out of the IRA’s biofuel tax credit was extended from 2027 to 2031, winning plaudits from industry.
But these objections were exceedingly polite, especially compared to the Freedom Caucus’ characteristic bluster.
While the legislation is still in flux, it may be that the clean energy caucus, such as it was, contained within it the seeds of its own failure.
Of the five SALT caucus members, four signed on to Kiggans’ letter criticizing the original language altering the tax credits. Now, they appear to have won, or at least reached a deal with the House Republican leadership. And that means more fiscal space in the bill — which may be made up for with even stingier tax credits for clean energy. When the time came for choosing, SALT had to be on the menu.