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The human mind can’t handle this being just a fire.
Almost no city in the country is destroyed more often than Los Angeles. America’s second-biggest city has been flattened, shaken, invaded, subsumed by lava, and calved off into the sea dozens of times on screen over the years; as the filmmaker and critic Thom Andersen has said, “Hollywood destroys Los Angeles because it’s there.”
But, understandably, when this destruction leaps from Netflix to a newscast, it’s an entirely different horror to behold. The L.A. County fires have now collectively burned an area more than twice the size of Manhattan; more than 10,000 businesses and homes that were standing last weekend are now ash. Officially, 10 people have died, but emergency managers have warned the public to brace for more. “It looks like an atomic bomb dropped in these areas. I don’t expect good news, and we’re not looking forward to those numbers,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said in a late Thursday press conference.
The mind gropes for an explanation for this horror — and lands in bizarre places. Much has been made in the past few days of the rampant proliferation of conspiracy theories and rumors about the fires, ranging from the believable to the totally absurd. Alex Jones has claimed the fires are part of a “globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialize the U.S.” (a theory incoming government official Elon Musk endorsed as “true”). Libs of TikTok and others have said that the Los Angeles Fire Department’s hiring practices emphasizing diversity have left it strapped for personnel to fight the wildfires (Musk endorsed this one, too). President-elect Donald Trump has blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the well-publicized occurrence of dry fire hydrants, citing a “water declaration resolution” that supposedly limited firefighters’ access to water, even though such a thing doesn’t exist. Still others have taken to TikTok to spread claims that the fires were intentionally started to burn rapper and producer Sean “Diddy” Combs’ property and hide criminal evidence that could be used to support sex trafficking and racketeering charges against him (another lie). Mel Gibson even used the disaster as an opportunity to share his thoughts about climate change on The Joe Rogan Podcast (spoiler alert: he doesn’t think it’s real), even as his house in Malibu burned to the ground.
“We need some kind of explanation psychologically, especially if you’re not accustomed to that kind of thing happening,” Margaret Orr Hoeflich, a misinformation scholar, told me of how conspiracy theories spring up during disasters. She added that much of the rhetoric she’s seen — like that some cabal set the fires intentionally — has been used to “explain” other similar disasters, including the wildfire in Lahaina in 2023. (“The Diddy one is really unique,” she allowed.)
It’s convenient to call this the coping mechanism of loons, bad actors, the far right, or people who want to promote a political agenda disingenuously, but left-leaning thinkers aren’t exempt. Posts blaming ChatGPT make important points about AI technologies’ energy and water use, but the fires aren’t “because” of ChatGPT.
I’ve also seen the fires blamed on “forest management,” although the landscape around L.A. isn’t trees; it’s shrubland. “This kind of environment isn’t typically exposed to low intensity, deep, frequent fires creeping through the understory, like many dry forests of the Sierra Nevadas or even Eastern Oregon and Washington,” where the U.S. Forest Service’s history of fire has created the conditions for the high-intensity megafires of today, Max Moritz, a cooperative extension wildfire specialist at U.C. Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, told me earlier this week. The shrublands around L.A., rather, “naturally have long-interval, high-intensity, stand-replacing fires” — that is, fires that level almost all vegetation in an area before new growth begins.
The fires in L.A. are extreme not so much because the landscape hasn’t been managed properly (not to mention that prescribed burns in the steep hillsides and suburbs are challenging and huge liabilities), but rather because we’ve built neighborhoods into a wildland that has burned before and will burn again. But unless your algorithm is tuned to the frequency of climate and weather models, you won’t necessarily find this more complicated narrative on social media.
We should also be precise in how we talk about climate change in relation to the fires. It’s true the fires have an excess of dry vegetative fuels after a wet winter and spring, which germinated lots of new green shoots, followed by a hot, dry summer and delayed start to the rainy season, which burned them to a crisp — classic “see-sawing” between extremes that you can expect to see as the planet warms. But droughts don’t always have a strong climate change signal, and wildfires can be tricky to attribute to global warming definitively. Were the Los Angeles fires exacerbated by our decades of burning fossil fuels? It is pretty safe to say so! But right-wing narratives aren’t the only ones that benefit from an exaggerated posture of certainty.
To state what is hopefully obvious: Being overly confident in attributing a disaster to climate change is not equivalent to denying the reality of climate change, the latter being very much more wrong and destructive than the former. But it’s also true overall that humans, as a species, don’t like ambiguity. Though the careful work of uncovering causes and attributing them can take years, it’s natural to look for simple answers that confirm our worldviews or give us people to blame — especially in the face of a disaster that is so unbelievably awful and doesn’t have a clear end. If there’s a role for the creative mind during all of this, it’s not in jumping to logical extremes; it’s in looking forward, ambitiously and aggressively, to how we can rebuild and live better.
“There’s a lot of finger-pointing going around, and I would just try to emphasize that this is a really complex problem,” Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, told me this week. “We have lots of different responsible parties. To me, what has happened requires more of a rethink than a blame game.”
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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.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”