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Recovering from a disaster like the Palisades or Eaton fire can take years. Here’s what they can expect.
Two weeks after two of California’s most destructive wildfires on record sparked on the same day in Los Angeles, tens of thousands of displaced residents are taking the first steps of their recovery processes. Officials have started lifting evacuation orders for both the Eaton and Palisades fires, allowing families to return to their properties for the first time. For those whose houses survived, that means suiting up in personal protective equipment and cautiously wiping away ash, throwing out spoiled food, and assessing the damage from smoke, heat, and flames. For those whose houses were lost, it means sorting through wreckage to see what, if anything, can be salvaged.
This moment marks the first of many milestones fire survivors will encounter in the weeks, months, and years to come. Urban wildfires launch complicated timelines that involve a braiding of bureaucratic checklists and personal choices. The volume of decisions can be daunting in both volume and scope, stretched over the course of months, if not years.
It took about 15 months for the first house to be rebuilt and occupied following the 2023 Lahaina Fire in Maui. Five years after the 2018 Camp Fire — which is currently the only California wildfire more devastating than the Eaton Fire — the hard-hit town of Paradise had still rebuilt only about a third of its lost structures. The recovery from the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado has notably outpaced many others. There, about two-thirds of the lost homes were rebuilt within the first three years, but that still leaves hundreds wading through their next steps with waning support.
Jennifer Gray Thompson, founder and CEO of the nonprofit group After the Fire U.S.A., told me it’s important to understand that every disaster — and therefore every recovery — is different. Her organization helps communities through this process, building on the knowledge of survivors from previous wildfires, and she said each community tends to make some adaptations and improvements. But the experiences of other wildfire-impacted areas can offer L.A.’s fire survivors an idea of the steps and potential concerns they can expect to encounter next.
Take the re-entry process. As Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass explained in a press conference on Monday, “Re-entry is based on safety.” And just because the fire has passed doesn’t mean the danger has: “Firefighters are still at work to prevent fires, to prevent flare-ups; there are hazardous materials being dealt with; utility repairs are underway; or there is other emergency work that makes it unsafe to be in the area,” Bass said. So far, officials doing this work have identified more than 16,000 destroyed structures and 28 fatalities from the two fires.
This waiting phase can be particularly challenging for those who evacuated, said Thompson. The adrenaline that helped impacted families make it through the fire might be waning under the weight of time, and the road ahead can start to feel overwhelming as various government agencies come to town and task forces pop up. It can take weeks for some evacuees to get the go-ahead to return home, particularly if they choose to wait for hazardous materials to get cleared, as L.A. County Department of Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer has recommended.
That brings us to the two phases of cleanup: removing hazardous materials and disposing of debris. Since the L.A. wildfires are a federally declared disaster, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is able to direct resources toward these tasks, with more than 500 Environmental Protection Agency employees currently surveying the burned areas to identify and collect of things like propane tanks, batteries, and other contaminants, which are packaged up and then disposed of off-site. This reduces the risks for residents returning to their properties, removing some obvious sources of chemicals and toxins like heavy metals and asbestos.
Once residents do make it back, they’ll have the opportunity to both survey and sift through their homes and choose whether they would like the government to remove the remains or contract out to a private company. This part of the process traditionally takes months, if not longer, depending on the scope of the damage, volume of the debris, and cooperation of the residents. For perspective, one year after the Lahaina Fire, debris removal was still ongoing and had racked up a more than $1 billion bill. The Army Corps of Engineers, which led this effort in Lahaina, will take charge again in L.A., with the L.A. Department of Public Works overseeing both phases from the local level.
While these are the larger hurdles residents will need to cross on the property level in order to rebuild, there will also be a number of government and utility-led efforts to make their homes habitable. That includes addressing issues with electric and water systems, from downed lines to blocked or broken sewers. These efforts are now underway in both burned areas, with utility trucks becoming a common sight across the county.
All of this can clear the way for construction to begin on the impacted properties, which comes with its own set of timelines, costs, and players. California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have issued executive orders to reduce some of the bureaucracy that often accompanies permitting and building in L.A. These include suspending environmental reviews, expediting permitting, and clearing the way to “rebuild homes as they were.”
Still, residents will have to get those permits approved and source labor and materials for the project in what’s become a crowded national market. Other disasters, such as last year’s one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, have created unusually high competition, with one development firm executive telling the Wall Street Journal he foresees a “Hunger Games-style competition for materials and labor.”
Fire survivors will also need to find the funds to put towards these projects, whether that’s through government aid, insurance, fundraising campaigns, or digging deep into their own pockets. Robert Fenton, Jr., a FEMA regional administrator, said that as of Wednesday, the agency has registered nearly 100,000 fire survivors to receive aid so far, including money to cover immediate needs for evacuees and to provide personal property and displacement assistance. But many previous disaster survivors will attest that navigating FEMA’s system can be challenging, particularly if you are also insured. Insurance claims need to be filed first — so that FEMA avoids duplicating aid homeowners are already receiving — another process that is known to be both slow and time-consuming, requiring a litany of paperwork and receipts.
And all of this is assuming no additional disasters occur during the recovery process. Wildfire-scorched areas are vulnerable to debris flows when it rains, as it is forecasted to do for the first time in months this weekend. Speaking at a county press conference Wednesday, Mark Pestrella, director of the L.A. Department of Public Works, said his office will be conducting 24/7 storm patrols, making assessments of burned properties and deploying sediment traps and sandbags in at-risk areas. Other weather conditions, like extreme heat or high winds, can also suspend operations and further delay residents from returning.
Overall, Thompson referred to rebuilding after a wildfire as “the biggest group project most people will have ever done in their lives.” Individuals, government officials, non-profits, attorneys, insurers, utilities, developers, and all sorts of laborers will be a part of the process, each bringing their own perspectives, needs, and costs to the table — some complementary and some competing.
Already, there is tension between the desire to rebuild for displaced residents and the desire to make the impacted area more resilient in the face of future hazards. In her newsletter, Susan Crawford, a climate adaptation expert and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described the urge to quickly restore what was lost in L.A. as “both understandable and unthinkable” given the county’s ongoing housing crisis and wildfire risk. (Crawford is also a Heatmap contributor.)
“It’s obvious we should be taking a step back and thinking how and where we are rethinking how and where we live, but it may be too much to contemplate in this thickly populated area,” Crawford told me.
For those in L.A. trying to find their own way forward through these agencies and agendas, Thompson recommends turning to others who understand what you’re going through, like your neighbors. Establishing ways to share information, support, and organize can help ensure your community’s concerns and priorities are taken into account in the recovery process.
“You can actually do this,” she said. “It feels right now like it can’t, and it’s going to take time and it comes in stages. But you’re not alone.”
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Rob and Jesse get into the nitty gritty on China’s energy policy with Joanna Lewis and John Paul Helveston.
China’s industrial policy for clean energy has turned the country into a powerhouse of solar, wind, battery, and electric vehicle manufacturing.
But long before the country’s factories moved global markets — and invited Trump’s self-destructive tariffs — the country implemented energy and technology policy to level up its domestic industry. How did those policies work? Which tools worked best? And if the United States needs to rebuild in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, what should this country learn?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with two scholars who have been studying Chinese industrial policy since the Great Recession. Joanna Lewis is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. She’s also the author of Green Innovation in China. John Paul Helveston is an assistant professor in engineering management and systems engineering at George Washington University. He studies consumer preferences and market demand for new technologies, as well as China’s longstanding gasoline car and EV industrial policy. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: One kind of classical hard problem about industrial policy is selecting the technology that is going to eventually be a winner. And there’s a few ways to get around this problem. One is to just make lots of bets.
One thing that’s been a little unclear to me about the set of technology bets that China has made is that it has seemed to pick a set of technologies that are now extremely competitive globally, and it did seem to pick up on those technologies before Western governments or firms really got to them. Is that entirely because China just made a bunch of technology bets and it happened that these are the ones that worked out? Is it because China could look ahead to the environmental needs of the world and the clean development needs of the world and say, well, there’s probably going to be a need for solar? There’s probably going to be a need for wind? There’s probably going to be a need for EVs? Or is it a third thing, which is that China’s domestic needs, its domestic energy security needs, just happen to align really well with the direction of development that the world is kind of interested in moving in anyway.
John Paul Helveston: All of the above. I don’t know — like, that’s the answer here. I’ll add one thing that’s a little bit nuanced: There’s been tremendous waste. I’ll just put that out there. There’s been all kinds of investments that did not pan out at all, like semiconductors for a long, long time. Just things that didn’t work.
I think where China has had a lot of success is in areas where … It’s like the inverse of what the United States innovation ecosystem does well. China’s ecosystem is really driven around production, and a lot of that is part of the way the government’s set up, that local provinces have a ton of power over how money gets spent, and often repurpose funds for export-oriented production. So that’s been a piece of the engine of China’s economic miracle, is mass producing everything.
But there’s a lot of knowledge that goes along with that. When you look at things like solar, that technology goes back many, many decades for, you know, satellites. But making it a mass produced product for energy applications requires production innovations. You need to get costs down. You need to figure out how to make the machine that makes the machine. And that is something that the Chinese ecosystem does very well.
So that’s one throughline across all of these things, is that the technology got to a certain level of maturity where production improvements and cost decreases were the bigger things that made them globally competitive. I don’t think anyone would be considering an EV if we were still looking at $1,000 a kilowatt hour — and we were there just 15 years ago. And so that’s the big thing. It’s just production. I don’t know if they’ve been exceptionally good at just picking winners, but they’re good at picking things that can be mass produced.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
That’s according to new research published today analyzing flows of minerals and metals vs. fossil fuels.
Among fossil fuel companies and clean energy developers, almost no one has been spared from the effects of Trump’s sweeping tariffs. But the good news is that in general, the transition to clean energy could create a world that is less exposed to energy price shocks and other energy-related trade risks than the world we have today.
That’s according to a timely study published in Nature Climate Change on Wednesday. The authors compared countries’ trade risks under a fossil fuel-based energy economy to a net-zero emissions economy, focusing on the electricity and transportation sectors. The question was whether relying on oil, gas, and coal for energy left countries more or less exposed than relying on the minerals and metals that go into clean energy technologies, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and uranium.
First the researchers identified which countries have known reserves of which resources as well as those countries’ established trading partners. Then they evaluated more than a thousand pathways for how the world could achieve net-zero emissions, each with different amounts or configurations of wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, and electric vehicles, and measured how exposed to trade risks each country would be under each scenario.
Ultimately, they found that most countries’ overall trade risks decreased under net-zero emissions scenarios relative to today. “We have such a concentration of fossil resources in a few countries,” Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study, told me. Transition minerals, by contrast, are less geographically concentrated, so “you have this ability to hedge a little bit across the system.”
The authors’ metric for trade risk is a combination of how dependent a given country is on imports and how many trading partners it has for a given resource, i.e. how diverse its sourcing is. “If you have a large domestic supply of a resource, or you have a large trade network, and you can get that resource from lots of different trading partners, you're in a relatively better spot,” Davis said.
Of course, this is a weird time to conclude that clean energy is better equipped to withstand trade shocks. As my colleagues at Heatmap have reported, Trump’s tariffs are hurting the economics of batteries, renewables, and minerals production, whether domestic or not. The paper considers risks from “random and isolated trade shocks,” Davis told me, like losing access to Bolivian lithium due to military conflict or a natural disaster. Trump’s tariffs, by contrast, are impacting everything, everywhere, all at once.
Davis embarked on the study almost two years ago after working as a lead author of the mitigation section of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a report delivered to Congress every four years. A lot of the chapter focused on the economics of switching to solar and wind and trying to electrify as many end uses of energy as possible, but it also touched on considerations such as environmental justice, water, land, and trade. “There's this concern of having access to some of these more exotic materials, and whether that could be a vulnerability,” he told me. “So we said, okay, but we also know we're going to be trading a lot less fossil fuels, and that is probably going to be a huge benefit. So let's try to figure out what the net effect is.”
The study found that some more affluent countries, including the United States, could see their energy security decline in net-zero scenarios unless their trade networks expand. The U.S. owns 23% of the fossil reserves used for electricity generation, but only 4% of the critical materials needed for solar panels and wind turbines.
One conclusion for Davis was that the U.S. should be much more strategic about its trade partnerships with countries in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Companies are already starting to invest in developing mineral resources in those regions, but policymakers should make a concerted effort to develop those trade relationships, as well. The study also discusses how governments can reduce trade risks by investing in recycling infrastructure and in research to reduce the material intensity of clean energy technologies.
Davis also acknowledged that focusing on the raw materials alone oversimplifies the security question. It also matters where the minerals are processed, and today, a lot of that processing happens in China, even for minerals that don’t originate there. That means it will also be important to build up processing capacity elsewhere.
One caveat to the paper is that comparing the trade risks of fossil fuels and clean energy is sort of apples and oranges. A fossil fuel-based energy system requires the raw resource — fuel — to operate. But a clean energy system mostly requires the raw materials in the manufacturing and construction phase. Once you have solar panels and wind turbines, you don’t need continuous commodity inputs to get energy out of them. Ultimately, Davis said, the study’s conclusions about the comparative trade risks are probably conservative.
“Interrupting the flow of some of these transition materials could slow our progress in getting to the net zero future, but it would have much less of an impact on the actual cost of energy to Americans,” he said. “If we can successfully get a lot of these things built, then I think that's going to be a very secure situation.”
Businesses were already bracing for a crash. Then came another 50% tariff on Chinese goods.
When I wrote Heatmap’s guide to driving less last year, I didn’t anticipate that a good motivation for doing so would be that every car in America was about to get a lot more expensive.
Then again, no one saw the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s tariffs coming. “We would characterize this slate of tariffs as ‘worse than the worst case scenario,’” one group of veteran securities analysts wrote in a note to investors last week, a sentiment echoed across Wall Street and reflected in four days of stock market turmoil so far.
But if the economic downturn has renewed your interest in purchasing a bike or e-bike, you’ll want to act fast — and it may already be too late. Because Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs stack on top of his other tariffs and duties, the U.S. bicycle trade association PeopleForBikes calculated that beginning on April 9, the day the newest tariffs come into effect, the duty on e-bikes from China would be 79%, up from nothing at all under President Biden. The tariff on most non-electric bikes from China, meanwhile, would spike to 90%, up from 11% on January 1 of this year. Then on Tuesday, the White House announced that it would add another 50% tariff on China on top of that whole tariff stack, starting Wednesday, in retaliation for Beijing’s counter-tariffs.
Prior to the latest announcement, Jay Townley, a founding partner of the cycling industry consulting firm Human Powered Solutions, had told me that if the Trump administration actually followed through on a retaliatory 50% tariff on top of those duties, then “we’re out of business because nobody can afford to bring in a bicycle product at 100% or more in tariffs.”
It’s difficult to overstate how existential the tariffs are for the bicycle industry. Imports account for 97% of the bikes purchased in the United States, of which 87% come from China, making it “one of the most import-dependent and China-dependent industries in the U.S.,” according to a 2021 analysis by the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates for trade-protectionist policies.
Many U.S. cycling brands have grumbled for years about America’s relatively generous de minimis exemption, a policy of waiving duties on items valued at less than $800. The loophole — which is what enables shoppers to buy dirt-cheap clothes from brands like Temu, Shein, and Alibaba — has also allowed for uncertified helmets and non-compliant e-bikes and e-bike batteries to flood the U.S. market. These batteries, which are often falsely marketed as meeting international safety standards, have been responsible for deadly e-bike fires in places like New York City. “A going retail for a good lithium-ion replacement battery for an e-bike is $800 to $1,000,” Townley said. “You look online, and you’ll see batteries at $350, $400, that come direct to you from China under the de minimis exemption.”
Cyclingnews reported recently that Robert Margevicius, the executive vice president of the American bicycle giant Specialized, had filed a complaint with the Trump administration over losing “billions in collectable tariffs” through the loophole. A spokesperson for Specialized defended Margevicius’ comment by calling it an “industry-wide position that is aligned with PeopleForBikes.” (Specialized did not respond to a request for clarification from Heatmap, though a spokesperson told Cyclingnews that de minimis imports permit “unsafe products and intellectual property violation.” PeopleForBikes’ general and policy counsel Matt Moore told me in an email that “we have supported reforming the way the U.S. treats low-value de minimis imports for several years.”)
Trump indeed axed China’s de minimis exemption as part of his April 2 tariffs — a small win for the U.S. bicycle brands. But any protection afforded by duties on cheap imported bikes and e-bikes will be erased by the damage from high tariffs imposed on China and other Asian countries. Fewer than 500,000 bicycles in a 10 million-unit market are even assembled in the United States, and essentially none is entirely manufactured here. “We do not know how to make a bike,” Townley told me flatly. Though a number of major U.S. brands employ engineers to design their bikes, when it comes to home-shoring manufacturing, “all of that knowledge resides in Taiwan, China, Vietnam. It isn’t here.”
In recent years, Chinese factories had become “very proficient at shipping goods from third-party countries” in order to avoid European anti-dumping duties, as well as leftover tariffs from Trump’s first term, Rick Vosper, an industry veteran and columnist at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, told me. “Many Chinese companies built bicycle assembly plants in Vietnam specifically so the sourcing sticker would not say ‘made in China,’” he added. Of course, those bikes and component parts are now also subject to Trump’s tariffs, which are as high as 57% for Vietnam, 60% for Cambodia, and 43% for Taiwan for most bikes. (A potential added tariff on countries that import oil from Venezuela could bump them even higher.)
The tariffs could not come at a worse time for the industry. 2019 marked one of the slowest years for the U.S. specialty retail bike business in two decades, so when COVID hit — and suddenly everyone wanted a bicycle as a way of exercising and getting around — there was “no inventory to be had, but a huge influx of customers,” Vosper told me. In response, “major players put in huge increases in their orders.”
But by 2023, the COVID-induced demand had evaporated, leaving suppliers with hundreds of millions of dollars in inventory that they couldn’t move. Even by discounting wholesale prices below their own cost to make the product and offering buy-one-get-one deals, dealers couldn’t get the bikes off their hands. “All the people who wanted to buy a bike during COVID have bought a bike and are not ready to buy another one anytime soon,” Vosper said.
Going into 2025, many retailers were still dealing with the COVID-induced bicycle glut; Mike Blok, the founder of Brooklyn Carbon Bike Company in New York City, told me he could think of three or four tristate-area shops off the top of his head that have closed in recent months because they were sitting on inventory.
Blok, however, was cautiously optimistic about his own position. While he stressed that he isn’t a fan of the tariffs, he also largely sells pre-owned bikes. On the low end of the market, the tariffs will likely raise prices no more than about $15 or $20, which might not make much of a difference to consumer behavior. But for something like a higher-end carbon fiber bike, which can run $2,700 or higher and is almost entirely produced in Taiwan, the tariffs could mean an increase of hundreds of dollars for customers. “I think what that will mean for me is that more folks will be open to the pre-owned option,” Blok said, although he also anticipates his input costs for repairs and tuning will go up.
But there’s a bigger, and perhaps even more obvious, problem for bike retailers beyond their products becoming more expensive. “What I sell is not a staple good; people don’t need a bike,” Blok reminded me. “So as folks’ discretionary income diminishes because other things become more expensive, they’ll have less to spend on discretionary items.”
Townley, the industry consultant, confirmed that many major cycling brands had already seen the writing on the wall before Trump announced his tariffs and begun to pivot to re-sale. Bicycling Magazine, a hobbyist publication, is even promoting “buying used” as one of its “tips to help you save” under Trump’s tariffs. Savvy retailers might be able to pivot and rely on their service, customer loyalty, and re-sale businesses to stay afloat during the hard days ahead; Moore of PeopleForBikes also noted that “repair services may increase” as people look to fix what they already have.
And if you don’t have a bike or e-bike but were thinking about getting one as a way to lighten your car dependency, decarbonize your life, or just because they’re cool, “there are still good values to be found,” Moore went on. “Now is a great time to avoid a likely increase in prices.” Townley anticipated that depending on inventory, we’re likely 30 to 40 days away from seeing prices go up.
In the meantime, cycling organizations are scrambling to keep their members abreast of the coming changes. “PeopleForBikes is encouraging our members to contact their elected representatives about the very real impacts these tariffs will have on their companies and our industry,” Moore told me. The National Bicycle Dealers Association, a nonprofit supporting specialty bicycle retailers, has teamed up with the D.C.-based League of American Bicyclists, a ridership organization, to explore lobbying lawmakers for the first time in decades in the hopes that some might oppose the tariffs or explore carve-outs for the industry.
But Townley, whose firm Human Powered Solutions is assisting in NBDA’s effort, shared a grim conversation he had at a recent trade show in Las Vegas, where a new board member at a cycling organization had asked him “what can we do” about Trump’s tariffs.
“I said, ‘You’re out of time,” Townley recalled. “There isn’t much that can be done. All we can do is react.”