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California passed a new fire safety law more than four years ago. It still isn’t in force.
For more than four years, California has had a law on the books meant to protect homes and buildings during an urban firestorm like the Palisade and Eaton fires. But it’s never gone into effect.
In theory, the policy was simple. It directed state officials to develop new rules for buildings in areas with high fire risk, which would govern what people were allowed to put within the five-foot perimeter immediately surrounding their homes. A large body of evidence shows that clearing this area, known in the fire mitigation world as “zone zero,” of combustible materials can be the difference between a building that alights during a wildfire and one that can weather the blaze.
The new rules — essentially just a list of items allowed in that five-foot zone — were due two years ago, by January 1, 2023. But the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has yet to begin a formal rulemaking process. Ask anyone who’s been following this thread what’s taking so long, and they’ll almost certainly point to one thing: politics.
“There’s a ton of science about what to do, but the science has run into challenges with social acceptance, and therefore political acceptance,” Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, told me. People do not want to be told how they can or can’t landscape or furnish or otherwise adorn the outside of their homes. Inevitably, when the rules do come out, you’ll hear about Gavin Newsom coming to take away people’s decks and policing gardens.
No one thinks that zone zero rules, if enacted and adhered to, could have prevented fires in the Pacific Palisades or Altadena or saved every structure in the recent fires’ path. But alongside other fire mitigation strategies, zone zero design can significantly lower the chances of a given building burning, and therefore the chances that a fire will spread to neighboring buildings, and ultimately reduce the risk of fires becoming compounding, devastating disasters. Wara likened it to car safety rules like seatbelts and airbags — people still die in car accidents, but far fewer than would otherwise.
The question now is whether the record-breaking destruction in Los Angeles will be enough to convince people that zone zero rules are effective and worthwhile. Past experience shows the answer is not an obvious yes.
There are three ways buildings ignite during a wildfire, Yana Valachovic, a forest scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network who specializes in community resilience and the built environment, told me. They are either exposed to burning embers, direct flames, or radiant heat, though most often a combination.
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Embers — hot, hard debris of burned material from a fire — can be carried miles away from their origin by the wind and create new spot fires next to homes. “What happens with those embers is they get thrown at the building, they hit the walls, the siding, and then drop to the base and collect at the base,” Valachovic said, “so you can have not just one, but thousands of embers at the base of our structures.”
Embers can also penetrate buildings through open windows and ventilation systems. If radiant heat from nearby burning structures causes windows to shatter or fall out, that can also create new vectors for embers to enter the home. “Embers find their way,” Valachovic said.
Fire mitigation experts promote two strategies for reducing vulnerability, and they go hand in hand. The first is home hardening, which could mean building with fire-resistant materials but also includes smaller but effective actions like covering air vents with fine mesh screens and sealing gaps to try to block embers. The second is creating so-called “defensible space,” or a buffer around the building, where any vegetation is carefully selected and managed to slow the spread of fire to and from the building. California divides defensible space into three different zones: Zone one extends from 5 feet away from the structure to 30 feet, and zone two goes out to 100 feet away. Then, of course, there’s zone zero.
The state has had regulations on the books to require at least 30 feet of defensible space in high-risk areas since 1965, and it updated the standards to establish a two-zone system in 2006. In both cases, the rules were “really framed around, how do you interrupt flames running at the building?” said Valachovic. The regulations included thinning trees and removing lower branches, clearing some trees that were closer to homes, clearing dead wood and litter, and pruning branches that hang over buildings. But they still allowed for vegetation right up against the house.
Since then, wildfire post-mortems have found that this scenario of flames burning a path to a building is not a primary driver of structure loss. “It was missing the point,” Valachovic told me of the previous rule structure. “What we’ve seen now for the last decade is that embers are really driving our home loss issue, and so we’re basically allowing all this vegetation and combustible material to be present in the zone that is really very vulnerable.”
In August 2020, after Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in California due to an explosion of wildfires, the state legislature passed AB 3074, which finally sought to bridge the gap by creating a new, “ember-resistant zone” — zone zero. Had the rules been implemented under the timeline mandated by the law, new homes would have had to comply beginning in 2023, and existing homes would have had to comply beginning in 2024. Like the earlier defensible space rules, they would have applied to homes located in parts of the state designated as Fire Hazard Severity Zones. These are generally areas that you might think of as the “wildland-urban interface,” where homes abut wildland vegetation like forests or scrublands, but others extend into more urban areas. Almost all of the burned area in the Pacific Palisades, for instance, would have been subject to the rules, while only a small portion of the homes in Altadena are in the zone.
When I reached out to the California Natural Resources Agency, the umbrella group for both the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection and CalFire, to ask if there was an updated timeline for the regulations, one of the first things that Tony Andersen, the Deputy Secretary for Communications, told me, was not about the timeline but about the ultimate cost of compliance.
“We recognize there are costs associated with doing this work around homes and structures,” Andersen told me via email, “and we are focused on identifying options for financial assistance as well as education and outreach to help owners prepare and prioritize mitigations.” He then noted that the rulemaking was a “complex process” that the agency wanted to get right, and said it aimed to present a draft proposal to the Board “as soon as is feasible, most likely in the coming months.”
Andersen’s response illustrates one of several tensions that have made it difficult to write the zone zero rules — and will ultimately make them difficult to implement. If the rules say you can’t have a wooden deck, for example, or you can’t have a fence that touches the building, homeowners could face costly retrofits. And despite witnessing the horror of destructive wildfires, many homeowners don’t want to switch their wooden fence for a metal one, or replace their bushes with gravel.
Five feet might sound like a negligible amount of space, but people are attached to the aesthetics of this zone. Homeowners have become used to “softening” the line where the walls meet the ground by filling it in with vegetation, Valachovic told me. “We really developed this idea that we don’t visually want to see our foundations,” she said. “From a fire defense perspective, this idea that we have combustible material basically ringing our houses and our structures, that is problematic.”
Several people I interviewed for this story asked if I had seen a documentary about the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California called Bring Your Own Brigade. The film captures a series of city council meetings in 2019, when officials were considering updating local building standards. They weigh a number of ideas that would reduce the risk of embers collecting on top of, inside, or next to homes, including eliminating gutters and requiring roof overhangs and a five-foot setback for any combustible material.
At the time, the Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history, killing 85 people, displacing more than 50,000, and destroying more than 18,000 structures. But during a public hearing, community members lashed out at the potential cost, warned that new standards would prevent displaced residents from moving back, and decried the aesthetic implications.
“Paradise is an individualistic town,” one person says. “That’s part of the charm and the quirkiness. We don’t need consistency and uniformity.”
In another scene, a city councilmember asks Paradise Fire Chief John Messina to narrow down the list to just one rule that would make the community more fire resistant. “That five-foot barrier around your house is extremely important,” he replies. “That would be the No. 1 thing out of all of this that I would say would defend your home the best and have the most impact.” Shortly after, the council votes down the measure.
Michael Wara, who recalled the scene to me over the phone, said a similar thing happened when the fire chief in his community in Mill Valley tried to get the city council to adopt zone zero rules. “The word got out in the community that this crazy fire chief was going to make us rip up our front yards,” he said. When the council convened for a vote, more than a thousand people showed up to oppose it. The council ended up passing it as a voluntary measure.
To Wara, part of the problem is the language used to communicate these ideas with the public. “Zone zero” and “hardening” conjure a bunker mentality, he said. “I do not want my family to live in a bunker that is hardened to attack. I want my family to live in a home that is welcoming.”
He also thinks the state can reach a compromise, like allowing succulents and other fire-resistant greenery in zone zero. The rules don’t have to turn these areas into gravel and concrete wastelands to be effective.
Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department
The Los Angeles County Fire Department recently included photos in a notice to homeowners about defensible space rules and the upcoming zone zero regulations that illustrate how landscapes might strike that balance. The images feature stone walkways immediately next to homes, followed by raised beds made of metal and concrete containing attractive landscaping. Not quite “quirky” and “charming,” but far from a barren dystopia.
Despite the delay in implementing zone zero, California has tried to pitch it as part of a strategy to solve the state’s insurance crisis. In 2022, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara enacted new rules requiring insurance companies to provide discounts to homeowners who do home hardening retrofits and create defensible space.
“That’s terrific,” Dave Jones, the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lara’s predecessor as insurance commissioner, told me. “But you don’t get the discount if they won’t write you the insurance.”
Jones said the bigger issue is that the models insurance companies use to decide whether or not to write a policy do not account for fire mitigation efforts. A homeowner could take every action on the list for home hardening, create a zone zero, live in a community that’s investing in aggressive fuels reduction, and so on, and insurance companies could still deny them coverage. Last year, Jones wrote a bill that would have required companies to change the models they use to determine coverage to account for mitigation. Several insurance industry trade groups opposed the bill, arguing that it was “premature and impossible to implement given the real-world data constraints,” and that it was “inconsistent” with the state’s efforts to “restore a healthy and competitive insurance market.” It didn’t pass.
If following zone zero guidelines meant having a shot at getting insurance, maybe people would be more open to doing it, Jones argued to me. But as things stand, that’s not the case. “I don’t think the failure is so much in the state developing the standards as it is in the lack of political courage to stand up to the insurance industry and say, hey, look, enough is enough. We’re going to pass a law to require your models to account for this.”
This past year, the California legislature passed a law giving existing homes three years, instead of just one, to comply with zone zero rules once they are finalized, whenever that is. And if the regulations are finalized this year, it’s possible that some of the rebuilt structures in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena will have to meet them.
Ultimately, Valachovic sees hope in fire mitigation work. The narrative that climate change is driving these destructive wildfires can make people feel helpless. But there are so many low-cost, simple things people can do to reduce their exposure. “I just feel like we have a moral imperative to share practical, reasonable actions that people can take to make a difference, and to know that with that, the odds improve substantially.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the role of the California Natural Resources Agency in the rulemaking process.
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Same goes for the Midwest, according to Stanford air quality researcher Marshall Burke.
It’s not just you: Summers are getting smokier.
For the third year in a row, cities like Detroit, Minneapolis, Boston, and New York are experiencing dangerously polluted air for days at a time as smoke drifts into the U.S. from wildfires in Canada.
Smoke has traveled to these places in the past, Stanford University researcher Marshall Burke told me. But the data is clear that the haze is becoming more severe.
“The worst days are worse,” said Burke, “and you can see that in the averages, the last couple of years are much, much higher across the Midwest and the East Coast than we’ve observed in the past many decades.”
Burke is one of the leading scholars studying wildfire smoke, investigating everything from its effect on air quality, public health, and behavior, to preventative and adaptive public policy responses. In one of his most recent papers, which has not yet been peer reviewed, he and his co-authors analyzed the influence of smoke on air quality over the past two decades, using satellite imagery of smoke plumes to disentangle how much of the fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, measured by air monitoring stations came from fires versus more typical sources like cars and furnaces.
The study shows a sharp increase in the amount of smoke in the air around the U.S. in just the past few years. From 2020 to 2023, the average American breathed in concentrations of smoke-related PM2.5 that were between 2.6 and 6.7 times higher than the 2006 to 2019 average.
The paper also contains a stunning set of charts that show that wildfires are eroding decades of air quality gains — and the efficacy of air quality regulation in general — and that without these smoke events, PM2.5 levels would have been significantly lower.
Courtesy of Marshall Burke
I caught up with Burke to better understand what we know about this seemingly sudden escalation of smoke events, and what we can do to better protect ourselves from them moving forward. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Given the smoke events we’ve seen in the last three years, can we say anything about the next three years?
I don’t think you want to make bets on any specific years. The long run trend, unfortunately, suggests that the last few years are going to be more representative than the sorts of years we got 10 to 15 to 20 years ago. And that is due to the underlying physical climate that’s warming and drying out fuels and making fire spread faster and fires much larger. Larger fires generate more smoke.
Has it all been driven by Canadian wildfires?
No. The East Coast and the Midwest will get exposure from fires as far as California, often in the Northern Rockies. But the recent very bad exposure — 2023 was by far the worst year in the Midwest and East Coast — that was nearly all from Canadian fires. This year, again, it’s nearly all from Canadian fires.
Why is that?
The reason we’ve seen a lot more Canadian fires is the same reason we’ve seen a lot more fires in the U.S. West — increasing fuel aridity. As temperatures warm, forests dry out. And so when you get lightning strikes, which tend to start most of the large fires in Canada, you get faster fire spread and much larger fires.
Interestingly, we’ve seen in Canada fewer total fires over time. Often I see people posting this on Twitter — Climate change is not a problem, we’re getting fewer fires in Canada — and that’s true. I think they’ve reduced other sources of ignitions. But you still get lightning ignitions.
Burned area has gone the other way — you’ve seen an increase in burned area. So, fewer fires, but much larger fires, and these larger fires are the ones that put out a lot more smoke, and the smoke gets pushed into population centers in Canada and into the U.S.
There were really large wildfires in California before 2023. Why weren’t places on the East Coast having smoky days as a result of those?
It’s the way the wind blows and how far it has to go. In the large 2020 and 2021 fire seasons we had in the U.S. West, some of that smoke certainly was making it to the East Coast, but given the prevailing wind patterns and the distance the smoke had to travel, the influence of those fires on air quality was not as big as the recent Canadian fires.
Are there other events that cause comparable air quality degradation to wildfires?
You can get really specific things — if a train crashes and lights on fire and a given town is exposed to really high levels of whatever pollutant for a few days. Sometimes you can get dust events that have broad scale exposure. But basically never do you reach the AQI levels that we see in wildfires. Wildfires are pretty unique in their ability to expose very large numbers of people to a very high level of pollutants for days, or unfortunately now, weeks, at a time. Nothing else compares in the U.S.
If you go to other parts of the world where you have large anthropogenic sources — Indian cities, Chinese cities — it can be quite different. There’s some exceptions. Salt Lake City and places where you get inversions and you get pollution trapped for many days, you can get pretty high levels of exposure, but typically nowhere close to what you get during these acute wildfire events.
When the AQI goes back down to levels that are more common in a city after a smoke event and people feel safer going outside, are you able to measure how much of the PM2.5 remaining in the air is from a wildfire? Does it matter?
We try to measure that directly — on any given day, how much of the PM that you’re experiencing is from wildfires versus from other sources. What you see is these events can turn on really quickly, and they can also turn off really quickly, either because the wind direction changes or because it rains — if it rains, you rain out a lot of these pollutants, and then you’re breathing mostly clean air right away.
We also try to measure, how does human health respond? One thing that science doesn’t give us a crisp answer to yet is, is one day of 100 micrograms better or worse than 10 days of 10 micrograms of exposure? We don’t actually really know. What we do see is people respond very differently to those two scenarios in ways that likely affect health outcomes. On really bad days, people tend to stay inside. In California, total emergency department visits go down instead of up, and that’s because people are not getting in their cars, they’re not getting in car accidents, they’re not spraining their ankle playing football or whatever because they’re staying at home.
On lower smoke days, we see emergency department visits go up. That’s probably because people are not changing their behavior. But, maybe surprisingly, we still don’t have a crisp answer if you’re thinking about asthma or mortality or other cardiovascular outcomes.
What are some of the other questions researchers are trying to answer as this becomes more of a national issue?
All sorts of things. The immediate health impacts that you think about — respiratory outcomes have been the one that’s been measured best in a lot of different settings. Cardiovascular outcomes, I would say the evidence is surprisingly more mixed on that. There’s a long-standing literature that shows cardiovascular mortality impacts of exposure to PM, but for wildfire PM, specifically, that evidence is less clear. Sorting that out and trying to understand whether there are differences is important.
Cognitive outcomes — does it increase your risk of dementia? Does student learning go down? Does it reduce cognitive performance at work? I think there’s emerging evidence that smoke is pretty important. Exposure to air pollution, more broadly, is important, but wildfire smoke, specifically, can impact these outcomes.
Birth outcomes is another one we and others have looked at. You see a pretty clear signature of wildfire smoke in birth outcomes — increases to the risk of pre-term birth, for instance. We used to just think about sensitive populations as elderly populations or people with pre-existing conditions. And basically what the research is showing is, no, actually, everyone is sensitive in some way. The list of people who are likely affected probably includes most, if not all of us.
What are the potential policy responses to this in places that haven’t had to deal with it in the past?
I think there’s three policy buckets. This is more true in the U.S. than Canada, but our fire problem is a combination of a warming climate and a century of fire suppression that has left abundant fuel in our landscapes, so number one is dealing with climate change as best we can, and two is doing something about the accumulated fuel loads. There’s a lot we can do there — prescribed burning is one approach that we and others are studying a lot; mechanical thinning, where you go out and actually remove the fuel. Understanding when and where to do that and what the benefits are is an ongoing scientific challenge, but I think most of the evidence would suggest we’re going to need a lot more of that than we’ve done, historically.
But even if we do a lot of that, we’re going to get more of these smoke events, unfortunately. And so we need to protect ourselves when these events happen. Indoor air filtration works really well, so we need to make sure people have access to filters of various types. The evidence would suggest that we see health impacts even at pretty low levels of exposure, and so if you have a portable filter — I drive my family crazy, I’m turning ours on all the time. You should basically just be running them all the time.
What about in terms of messaging? I’m thinking about city officials or state officials, when a smoke event is coming — and maybe this is still an active area of research — but what’s the current thinking on what message to send to people?
Yeah, I think it is an ongoing area, in terms of exactly how to do this and who to target with the information. The way we typically do this is to set these thresholds, right? So, above some threshold, you get a notice, and below, you don’t. That is understandable.
But what we see in the data is that there’s not some level below which you’re fine and above which you’re screwed. What we see is the more smoke you’re exposed to, the worse off you are, and so our goal should just be to reduce our exposure as best we can. How to message that effectively is not something we have a crisp social scientific answer to yet.
A lot of the advice has historically been that you should stay at home with your windows and doors closed. In California homes that is not very protective because California homes tend to be not very tight. In my view, just telling people to close their windows and doors is not sufficient for protecting health. They need some sort of active filtration — portable air filter, central air — to do that.
The other thing that’s happened in California, and I’ve seen this with my own kids — should we cancel school on really bad days? The assumption is that kids are better protected at home than they would be in the school environment, and that’s just not obviously true. It could be the case that for many kids, schools are better. We don’t know, because we do not have comprehensive measurement of indoor air quality, and this is a huge failing that we need to fix. Just as we measure it pretty comprehensively outside, we’ve got to do the same thing inside, and we just haven’t done this.
On TVA’s new nuclear deal, plastics talks’ ‘abject failure’, and powerless Puerto Rico
Current conditions: After briefly strengthening into a Category 5 storm, Hurricane Erin continues toward Puerto Rico as a Category 4 • China is reeling from flash floods that killed 10 in Inner Mongolia on Sunday • Spain is battling 20 major wildfires as blazes across Europe displace thousands.
The Internal Revenue Service released guidance on Friday for wind and solar projects attempting to access the federal tax credits that start phasing out next year. For more than a decade, renewable developers needed to show only that they’d spent 5% of the total cost of the construction to qualify in a given tax year. Once the new rules kick in next month, almost all new projects will need to actually begin physical construction to be eligible. The change comes in response to an executive order President Donald Trump issued after signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which directed the Treasury Department to raise the hurdles for wind and solar developers to tap what remained of the federal tax credits the new law had dramatically curtailed.
Trade associations representing renewables developers balked at the new rules. But solar stocks soared on Friday in large part because the guidance was less strict than many had anticipated, as I reported for Latitude Media. Prior to its release, some sources had speculated to me that the guidance could lift the investment threshold from 5% to somewhere closer to 51%, effectively requiring that developers spend more than half the total cost upfront or lose out on tax credits. “It’s not good, it’s not helpful, but from my perspective, the guidance could have been a lot worse,” David Burton, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright who specializes in energy tax credits, told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo. “Utility-scale solar and wind developers should be able to plan around this and not be that harmed.” This past weekend was also the third anniversary of many of these tax credits, which were created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. As Center for Public Enterprise researcher Advait Arun wrote in an essay for Heatmap, going beyond past policy endeavors to “deliver an energy policy that stabilizes Americans’ cost of living while driving an energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward the technologies of the future ― Democrats should embrace this challenge. But they should also be aware that climate ambition runs headlong into the same institutional problems facing American democracy at large.”
For all the hype around building new types of reactors, the only new nuclear deals U.S. utilities have so far finalized involve what’s called third-generation designs. That means the reactors are still cooled with water like the rest of the traditional U.S. nuclear fleet, and include everything from the large-scale Westinghouse AP1000 to the small modular reactors NuScale and GE Vernova-Hitachi Nuclear Energy are promoting. On Monday, the Tennessee Valley Authority became the first U.S. utility to sign onto a power purchase agreement to buy electricity from what’s called a fourth-generation reactor company, whose SMR design uses a coolant other than water. The company, Kairos Power, is building its first reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with backing from Google. Under the terms of the new deal announced this morning, Google will buy as much power from the TVA grid as Kairos’ debut reactor produces.
If successful, the project could be the first next-generation nuclear plant to hook onto the U.S. grid. Reaching that goal has become a major political priority for the Trump administration since China hooked its first fourth-generation nuclear plant onto its grid last December.
For two weeks, international negotiators gathered in Geneva to hash out a global treaty to curb plastic pollution. More than 100 countries backed a pledge to halt production of new plastic waste. But oil-producing nations whose crude petroleum is transformed into plastics blocked the effort. Those included the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. When talks ended last Friday, the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law called the process “an abject failure.”
“When faced with a failure of this magnitude, it’s essential to learn from it,” David Azoulay, the head of the center’s delegation to the talks, said in a statement. “It’s impossible to find a common ground between those who are interested in protecting the status quo and the majority who are looking for a functional treaty that can be strengthened over time.”
The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists sued the Department of Energy, accusing the agency of violating the law by secretly recruiting a group of people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to author a report downplaying the risk of rising temperatures. The lawsuit alleges that Secretary of Energy Chris Wright “quietly arranged for five handpicked skeptics of the effects of climate change” to form a committee called the Climate Working Group. This, the litigation alleges, violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972,which does not allow federal agencies to recruit or rely on secret groups when engaging in policymaking, according to The New York Times.
Without major events such as a hurricane, Puerto Ricans lost power for a combined 30 hours last year..EIA
Puerto Ricans experienced an average of 27 hours of combined power grid interruptions each year between 2021 and 2024, according to new data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And that’s without counting major events such as hurricanes. By comparison, ratepayers in the mainland United States experienced about two hours of outages per year without major events. The frequency of blackouts increased throughout the three-year period. On average, Puerto Ricans faced 19 service interruptions in 2024: 14 without major events and 5 from major events.
The frequency of outages also increased last year. EIA
Earlier this month, Trump fired nearly the entire fiscal control board that Congress put in charge of the U.S. territory’s finances. His administration has said the terminations are part of an overhaul meant to reindustrialize the bankrupt island.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers uncovered a link between the properties of graphite and how the material behaves in response to radiation. The findings could lead to more accurate, less destructive ways of predicting the lifespan of graphite materials in nuclear reactors. “The paper proposes an attractive idea for industry: that you might not need to break hundreds of irradiated samples to understand their failure point,” Boris Khaykovich, the MIT research scientist who authored the study, said in a statement.
On the third anniversary of the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, Heatmap contributor Advait Arun mourns what’s been lost — but more importantly, charts a path toward what comes next.
Today, the Inflation Reduction Act would have turned three years old — if it hadn’t been buried alive in a big, beautiful grave. While the IRA was a hodgepodge of programs salvaged from President Biden’s far more ambitious Build Back Better agenda, it still represented the biggest climate investment in U.S. history. It catalyzed over $360 billion in energy and manufacturing investments and was expected to drive the installation of over 155 gigawatts of new solar and wind energy by 2030. And now Republicans have taken a sledgehammer to its achievements.
The timing could not be worse — not just for the climate, but also for the energy systems that we rely on. At a moment when the energy sector requires $1.4 trillion worth of upgrades by 2030 just to keep up with rising energy demand and increasingly erratic weather, Republicans have instead delivered a one-two punch of tariffs and tax hikes, sabotaging the industrial base required to deliver those investments and raising the retirement age of our power generation fleet.
All over the country (Texas and California maybe exempted), our aging electricity system is putting in its two-weeks notice. Staring down the barrel of precipitous demand growth, the country’s regulated utilities have requested over $29 billion in rate increases, concentrated across the West and South. The Department of Energy ordered the delayed retirement of coal plants and oil generators to manage this summer’s demand peaks. Meanwhile, capacity market prices on two of the country’s largest grids, PJM and MISO, have reached record highs ― a cry for new supply that is now increasingly unlikely to materialize quickly or cheaply. Two months ago, an unplanned nuclear reactor outage on a congested part of Louisiana’s energy grid led to a blackout for 100,000 people in and around New Orleans. That meant no working AC or refrigerators across large swaths of the city during a sweltering Memorial Day weekend.
All of this amounts to an opening for Democrats to shift public opinion decisively in favor of renewed climate action. Moving forward, lawmakers cannot ignore our infirm fossil-fired energy system, which stands to thwart their ability to deliver affordability, employment, health, and resilience to their constituents. Despite our recent losses, we still need an energy policy ― a climate policy.
What should the Democrats’ second attempt at a clean investment program look like? Having delivered the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, laws that committed the state to the realization of a particular energy future, Democrats are well-positioned to build on their successes, and even to engage Republicans who remain interested in supporting innovative technologies, decarbonizing industry, and protecting public lands.
Where they cannot meet Republicans halfway, Democrats should double their ambitions. They must continue to embrace the power of federal investment to shape markets and achieve policy goals. But they must also learn from the shortcomings of their previous legislative outings and substantively change how the federal government invests in the first place. The way forward for Democrats starts with mapping out exactly how far they didn’t go, and ends with going there.
IRA and BIL were paradigm-shifting attempts at market-shaping. They laid the groundwork for the deployment of promising clean firm energy technologies such as next-generation geothermal and nuclear energy, as well as for necessary grid and supply chain upgrades, such as long-distance transmission corridors and critical minerals processing.
IRA and BIL were not, however, a comprehensive climate policy. They created cost-share programs for infrastructure resilience but neglected to buttress municipal bond markets, which states and local governments can use to make longer-term investments in climate resilience and adaptation. They penalized methane emissions but organized no comprehensive or compulsory managed phaseout of fossil fuel infrastructure. They failed to advance or adequately finance a coordinated deployment strategy for any key energy sector. And they shed the transformative vision of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which sought to stabilize the cost of living for Americans in the meantime — a tactical retreat that, in retrospect, looks ill-advised given voters’ current worries about affordability.
I am aware that criticizing BIL and IRA on these grounds amounts to judging them for goals they didn’t attempt to achieve. Judging them by the goals they did attempt to achieve, however, reveals that they only ever worked incompletely. Taken together, BIL and IRA expanded the energy tax credit system, created powerful programs for piloting and deploying innovative energy technologies, and seeded an ecosystem of regional financing institutions devoted to more equitably distributing the benefits of decarbonization. But the energy tax credits were never expansive enough; the programs intended to motivate investments into deeper decarbonization were not flexible enough to drive the mass uptake of emerging technologies; and efforts to decarbonize disadvantaged communities lacked a coherent strategy and ran headlong into local capacity constraints.
Speeding up the energy transition and building new infrastructure at scale requires endowing federal and state agencies with adequate appropriations, access to liquidity, and crystal-clear, wide-ranging mandates, as well as empowering them in statute with considerable flexibility as to the financial products and strategies they deploy to achieve those mandates.
Although imperfect, the IRA’s tax credits scored some significant wins that should undoubtedly inform future policy. The law took an existing system of technology-specific subsidies that had been on the books in some form since 1978 and made them technology-neutral, allowing developers of nearly any zero-emissions energy technology to access tax relief. It expanded the credits to domestic manufacturers of certain low- and zero-carbon technologies. It created a tax credit transfer market, allowing developers with limited tax liability to sell their credits for cash on an open market to any tax-liable buyer, rather than engage in expensive and complex “tax equity” transactions with a few large banks. It made certain credits directly accessible to tax-exempt entities, significantly broadening the pool of potential users. And most of these credits remained entirely uncapped ― a “bottomless mimosa” for developers that spurred over $321 billion in clean energy and manufacturing investments and supported more than 2,000 new facilities across the country.
To be sure, the IRA did not level the playing field perfectly across developers or across technologies. Developers of energy transmission, grid transformers, and electric rail were shut out of the credits. Tax-exempt public and nonprofit developers ― entities as large as the New York Power Authority and as small as local churches ― could not monetize depreciation or participate in the transfer market. And some credits remained capped, forcing developers to apply and cross their fingers. But as early as 2023, Goldman Sachs argued that even with these inadequacies ― which have easy legislative and statutory fixes ― the IRA would still have spurred over $3 trillion in investment by 2033.
The GOP has gutted much of this system, shortcomings and all, and replaced it with a tangle of red tape. The energy tax credits are once again technology-specific ― solar and wind developers have a few months left to start a project and claim the credits as written, though what it means to start a project got more complex just yesterday. But even the “clean firm” energy technologies that can still claim credits until 2032, such as nuclear and geothermal, may not be safe under new “foreign entity of concern” rules, which condition credits on developers’ ability to limit their reliance on Chinese suppliers and investment, requiring them to map out their supply chains at an unprecedented level of detail.
Democrats seeking to restore and build upon this plank of the IRA have their work cut out for them. The developers and manufacturers of any technology that contributes to zero-emissions energy production should be able to access and monetize federal support regardless of their tax status and free from the rigmarole and uncertainties imposed by competitive application procedures. Goldman Sachs’ $3 trillion estimate is now the lower bound of what’s possible — for instance, a tax credit for transmission investments suggested as part of Build Back Better but excluded from the IRA could have catalyzed over $15 billion in investment and supported the economics of all other energy projects. To the degree that the tax credits can help build industrial capacity and institutional support for decarbonization, future policymaking should maximize their remit and their distribution.
Tax credits alone, however, are hardly a skeleton key to decarbonization. Being disbursed only once a project is complete, tax credits do not substitute for the kinds of upfront financial support that project developers — especially developers of emerging technologies — require to complete their projects in the first place. Private investors have been comfortable with solar, batteries, and onshore wind because these projects can be completed, claim their tax credits, and earn revenues on the grid on a mostly predictable timetable. But new nuclear reactors, geothermal, hydrogen, green steel, and carbon capture are unfamiliar investments, have uncertain development pathways and return profiles, and thus remain un-bankable to investors.
This is why BIL and IRA created powerful programs worth tens of billions of dollars to finance the deployment of emerging clean technologies and break this vicious cycle of uncertainty. The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, or OCED, and the Loan Programs Office, or LPO, in particular, were empowered to support, at scale, the testing and commercialization of these emerging technologies as well as conversions of whole electricity grids.
OCED, with over $27 billion in appropriations, set up hubs for hydrogen and carbon capture projects across the country, and funded a suite of advanced steel and iron decarbonization projects. Endowed by BIL and IRA with over $15 billion in total credit subsidy and well over $300 billion in total loan authority, LPO made ambitious investments across a host of innovative technology categories, including ― but certainly not limited to ― energy storage, sustainable aviation fuels, virtual power plants, EV charging, and bioenergy. At the end of 2024, the LPO had over 200 loan applicants in its queue.
By rescinding OCED’s unobligated funding, ambiguously rewriting LPO’s lending authorities (while rescinding most of its unobligated credit subsidy), and pulling the plug on billions of dollars worth of conditional commitments, the GOP has stopped years of progress in its tracks. In the meantime, LPO has shed considerable staff while the administration has prevented it from making any new commitments. The combination of the “foreign entity of concern” rules constraining tax credit eligibility and this shuttering of federal financing opportunities could seriously throttle the development and commercialization of nuclear energy in particular, the darling du jour of Republicans’ energy strategy.
If these offices were once the engines of decarbonization, they needed a stronger spark plug. The LPO, in particular, has a special authority to finance state government-backed, non-innovative clean energy projects, such as regional battery manufacturing clusters or a state power developer’s renewables portfolio, but has never used it. And while OCED and LPO can provide developers with some degree of upfront support, LPO cannot easily provide construction loans, cannot derisk project cash flows to provide security to investors, and cannot mandate offtake. These deficiencies prevent ambitious borrowers with unproven technologies from scaling up: they scare off private lenders in the infrastructure sector, many of which are skittish about construction risk, require project developers to demonstrate three to five years of stable cash flows, have a low tolerance for market price uncertainty, and have shareholders who demand a certain level of returns.
The DOE can bridge this “valley of death” by using its broader market-shaping authorities to take a more aggressive “dealership” role in these sectors, providing stable offtake for developers through upfront purchasing while becoming a reliable source of supply to downstream customers (like an actual car dealership or a grocery store). The DOE has in fact already used this approach to provide demand-side support to its now-endangered hydrogen hubs through OCED.
These kinds of public dealership arrangements are not unique or path-breaking: The Federal Reserve’s backstop of the municipal bond market in 2020, nonprofit investor Climate United’s planned EV trucking purchase-and-lease program in California, and even the Department of Defense’s recent MP Materials deal are all examples of public entities addressing a mismatch in the supply of and demand for a critical good and, in doing so, shaping markets toward public ends.
For all that BIL and IRA built avenues for developing and deploying energy technologies, they were also full of programs aimed at distributing the fruits of decarbonization equitably. Both the energy community bonus credits, a provision in the IRA that increased the value of the energy tax credits for projects in poorer, higher-unemployment, and energy facility-adjacent communities, and President Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which directed 40% of federal spending toward poorer and more rural communities, exemplified the administration’s “place-based” approach to industrial policy and economic development. The Biden administration heavily encouraged disadvantaged communities, local governments, schools, nonprofits, and tribal nations to develop their own clean energy projects — aided by the IRA’s direct pay mechanism, which allowed tax-exempt entities to access subsidies — by drawing on the various local decarbonization programs in BIL and IRA.
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, perhaps the most important of these programs, exemplifies the promises and pitfalls of the administration’s approach to “place-based” industrial policy. Managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, GGRF provided $27 billion to disadvantaged communities for the financing of rooftop solar, zero-emissions transport, and net-zero housing. That pot was split into three thematic buckets ― $7 billion to the Solar for All program, specifically for rooftop solar development; $14 billion to the National Clean Investment Fund, for supporting clean energy project finance more broadly in disadvantaged communities; and $6 billion more to local and regional technical assistance providers. Each program then subdivided its appropriations further. Solar for All went to 60 recipients across the country via a competitive application. The National Clean Investment Fund’s $14 billion was split among three awardees, each a coalition of various financial institutions designed to lend to energy projects, such as green banks, impact investors, and nonprofits ― and each of those recipient coalitions planned to subdivide much of its funds still further, first among coalition partners and then to subordinate local and state partners.
That dizzying program structure was meant to endow local communities with the ability to finance their own projects. And by including so many nonprofit institutions, GGRF could make significant inroads into Republican states, whose officials might otherwise reject federal funding.
But there was not much coordination between partners and subawardees around how best to deploy those funds. And what seemed like a firehose of financing often reached local recipients as a trickle of pre-development and technical assistance grants. Demanding that local organizations build their own capacity to plan, finance, and develop projects (or hire expensive external consultants to do so) ― with limited and one-time funds, no less ― is duplicative and inefficient, and it defeats GGRF’s own stated goal of mobilizing private capital through building standardized markets for decarbonization, thereby slowing down the pace of emissions reductions. The program’s complexity also left it vulnerable to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s efforts to hound the program in court and freeze its funding.
Pandemic-era proposals for a National Investment Authority, as well as legislative proposals for a national green bank ― predecessors to the GGRF ― differ sharply from this status quo, instead highlighting how public finance can benefit from economies of scale. Larger financial institutions tasked with deploying clean energy projects can more easily prepare portfolios of projects for co-investors, engage with utilities, raise debt on municipal bond markets, and build a bench of trustworthy private developers to contract for projects. If they are publicly administered, these institutions can also take more risk, undercut private lenders, support more developers, engage with local communities to meet their needs, and use revenues from higher-return projects to derisk lower-return projects that might be necessary to build to achieve their resilience and affordability goals.
Should policymakers get a second shot at building a national green bank system, they should not try to recreate GGRF’s fractal approach to energy finance. Rather, policymakers must ensure that financing sits in the hands of public agencies that already have the authorities and expert staff to be ambitious market-shapers: bond banks, state-led energy finance authorities, and public developers. The good news is that state-level green banks empowered with state funding and a political mandate are already exercising their capacities to shape markets and support disadvantaged communities directly: the New York Power Authority, the Minnesota Climate Innovation Finance Authority, the Connecticut Green Bank, and the Greater Arizona Development Authority, to name a few, are all taking it upon themselves to raise debt and contract with developers to undertake ambitious energy and infrastructure investment programs.
But Democrats should be clear-eyed about the consequences of this reorientation: It means rejecting the prevailing wisdom that local nonprofits should necessarily coordinate local project development. Local groups can be extremely effective advocates for communities’ needs ― but in contrast to public investment agencies, their capacity to finance and implement solutions is simply not great enough.
This analysis of IRA and BIL leaves out more parts of the laws than it includes ― to take just one example, the BIL’s $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure charging station program. But the story is similar: Ambitious as it seemed, NEVI money could only flow when state governments set up implementation offices and had their spending plans approved by federal officials. Most states, which had not prepared for any of this, took years to build the requisite capacity ― just in time for the Trump administration to try and snatch away the funding (though it recently admitted defeat in that project). In fairness to state governments, the EV charging sector is incredibly new. But even this program highlights how IRA and BIL lacked the capacity to be implemented as quickly and efficiently as their supporters hoped.
Going above and beyond BIL and IRA to deliver an energy policy that stabilizes Americans’ cost of living while driving an energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward the technologies of the future ― Democrats should embrace this challenge. But they should also be aware that climate ambition runs headlong into the same institutional problems facing American democracy at large. The Senate filibuster prevents either party from comprehensively redesigning the federal government, its institutions, and its regulations to serve Americans more quickly and more efficiently. That leaves both parties reliant on budget reconciliation ― to our detriment. The head-spinning design of GGRF was itself an artifact of the reconciliation process, which prevented Congress from creating a single green bank institution or giving it a specific mandate; its awardee organizations and coalitions certainly did not ask for the program structure they got.
There’s a lot more that budget reconciliation will never solve: the century-old American utility system, the regulatory thicket of U.S. electricity markets, or the land use and permitting rules that constrain project development and grid interconnection. And things could get worse: Trump-appointed judges and Supreme Court justices who reject federal agencies’ and state governments’ attempts to regulate fossil fuel infrastructure have placed the legal system itself at odds with responsible energy system management. The courts may no longer be able to block clawbacks and recissions of legally obligated federal spending. Democrats, like clean energy developers, do not fight on a level playing field.
While Democrats are out of federal power, they should practice ambitious climate policymaking at the state level. States already have considerable ability to raise finance and build capacity for ambitious infrastructure projects ― and they might have to quickly, considering the drain of federal capacity that might support them. By developing their own public programs for transmission finance, utility-scale battery procurement, virtual power plants, and clean firm energy pilots, Democratic state governments can ensure that the ecosystem of clean energy developers created by BIL and IRA does not disappear for lack of demand — and in doing so, these states would help stabilize the cost of clean energy project development.
Finally, Democrats should not forget that climate remains a cost of living issue. In a city like New Orleans, rocked by the recent nuclear outage, residents spend, on average, over 19% of their incomes on their energy bills, over three times the DOE’s threshold to be considered an energy-burdened community. Their bills already include adders for climate adaptation and disaster preparedness ― yet, for all they spend, they still face blackouts, and their costs will only increase as their grid continues to deteriorate. Here, climate policy is not about combating Chinese supply chain dominance, or even about delivering an American industrial renaissance. It’s about keeping the lights on, keeping bills low, keeping the air clean, and keeping residents safe from disaster.
It turns out that voters all over the country still care about these goals. A majority of likely voters in the next election think climate change will have a direct impact on their or their family’s finances. This constituency is still in play — and given sharply deteriorating macroeconomic conditions, soon-to-spike electricity prices, and the ever-increasing threat of climate disaster, these cost-of-living-focused voters could be far more vocal, relevant, and hungry for change than a coalition built on vague sabre-rattling against China.
In 2022, Democrats made a valiant first attempt to transform the state itself. Perhaps it was inadequate, perhaps it was impossible to do more at the time, but that’s no reason not to think seriously about the kind of policymaking, institutional, and financial interventions that would be called for should they get a second shot at realizing that goal. The rollback of the IRA only reveals how much Democrats left on the table three years ago ― and how much farther a real climate policy could go.