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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.
Why homes burn
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.
Why “zone zero” is political
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.
Where insurance fits in
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.
Innovations in agriculture can seem like the neglected stepchild of the climate tech world. While food and agriculture account for about a quarter of global emissions, there’s not a lot of investment in the space — or splashy breakthroughs to make the industry seem that investible in the first place. In transportation and energy, “there is a Tesla, there is an EnPhase,” Cooper Rinzler, a partner at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, told me. “Whereas in ag tech, tell me when the last IPO that was exciting was?”
That may be changing, however. Multiple participants in Heatmap’s Insiders Survey cited ag tech companies Pivot Bio and Nitricity — both of which are pursuing alternate approaches to conventional ammonia-based fertilizers — as among the most exciting climate tech companies working today.
Studies estimate that fertilizer production and use alone account for roughly 5% of global emissions. That includes emissions from the energy-intensive Haber–Bosch process, which synthesizes ammonia by combining nitrogen from the air with hydrogen at extremely high temperatures, as well as nitrous oxide released from the soil after fertilizer is applied. N2O is about 265 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 100-year timeframe and accounts for roughly 70% of fertilizer-related emissions, as soil microbes convert excess nitrogen that crops can’t immediately absorb into nitrous oxide.
“If we don’t solve nitrous oxide, it on its own is enough of a radiative force that we can’t meet all of our goals,” Rinzler said, referring to global climate targets at large.
Enter what some consider one of the most promising agricultural innovations, perhaps since the invention of the Haber–Bosch process itself over a century ago — Pivot Bio. This startup, founded 15 years ago, engineers soil microbes to convert about 400 times more atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia than non-engineered microbe strains naturally would. “They are mini Haber–Bosch facilities, for all intents and purposes,” Pivot Bio’s CEO Chris Abbott told me, referring to the engineered microbes themselves.
The startup has now raised over $600 million in total funding and is valued at over $2 billion. And after toiling in the ag tech trenches for a decade and a half, this will be the first full year the company’s biological fertilizers — which are applied to either the soil or seed itself — will undercut the price of traditional fertilizers.
“Farmers pay 20% to 25% less for nitrogen from our product than they do for synthetic nitrogen,” Abbott told me. “Prices [for traditional fertilizers] are going up again this spring, like they did last year. So that gap is actually widening, not shrinking.”
Peer reviewedstudies also show that Pivot’s treatments boost yields for corn — its flagship crop — while preliminary data indicates that the same is true forcotton, which Pivot expanded into last year. The company also makes fertilizers for wheat, sorghum, and other small grains.
Pivot is now selling these products in stores where farmers already pick up seeds and crop treatments, rather than solely through its independent network of sales representatives, making the microbes more likely to become the default option for growers. But they won’t completely replace traditional fertilizer anytime soon, as Pivot’s treatments can still meet only about 20% to 25% of a large-scale crop’s nitrogen demand, especially during the early stages of plant growth, though it’s developing products that could push that number to 50% or higher, Abbott told me.
All this could have an astronomical environmental impact if deployed successfully at scale. “From a water perspective, we use about 1/1000th the water to produce the same amount of nitrogen,” Abbott said. From an emissions perspective, replacing a ton of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer with Pivot Bio’s product prevents the equivalent of around 11 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. Given the quantity of Pivot’s fertilizer that has been deployed since 2022, Abbott estimates that scales to approximately 1.5 million tons of cumulative avoided CO2 equivalent.
“It’s one of the very few cases that I’ve ever come across in climate tech where you have this giant existing commodity market that’s worth more than $100 billion and you’ve found a solution that offers a cheaper product that is also higher value,” Rinzler told me. BEV led the company’s Series B round back in 2018, and has participated in its two subsequent rounds as well.
Meanwhile, Nitricity — a startup spun out of Stanford University in 2018 — is also aiming to circumvent the Haber–Bosch process and replace ammonia-based and organic animal-based fertilizers such as manure with a plant-based mixture made from air, water, almond shells, and renewable energy. The company said that its proprietary process converts nitrogen and other essential nutrients derived from combusted almond shells into nitrate — the form of nitrogen that plants can absorb. It then “brews” that into an organic liquid fertilizer that Nitricity’s CEO, Nico Pinkowski, describes as looking like a “rich rooibos tea,” capable of being applied to crops through standard irrigation systems.
For confidentiality reasons, the company was unable to provide more precise technical details regarding how it sources and converts sufficient nitrogen into a usable form via only air, water, and almond shells, given that shells don’t contain much nitrogen, and turning atmospheric nitrogen into a plant-ready form typically involves the dreaded Haber–Bosch process.
But investors have bought in, and the company is currently in the midst of construction on its first commercial-scale fertilizer factory in Central California, which is expected to begin production this year. Funding for the first-of-a-kind plant came from Trellis Climate and Elemental Impact, both of which direct philanthropic capital toward early-stage, capital-intensive climate projects. The facility will operate on 100% renewable power through a utility-run program that allows customers to opt into renewable-only electricity by purchasing renewable energy certificates,
Pinkowski told me the new plant will represent a 100‑fold increase in Nitricity’s production capacity, which currently sits at 80 tons per year from its pilot plant. “In comparison to premium conventional fertilizers, we see about a 10x reduction in emissions,” Pinkowski told me, factoring in greenhouse gases from both production and on-field use. “In comparison to the most standard organic fertilizers, we see about a 5x reduction in emissions.”
The company says trial data indicates that its fertilizer allows for more efficient nitrogen uptake, thus lowering nitrous oxide emissions and allowing farmers to cut costs by simply applying less product. According to Pinkowski, Nitricity’s current prices are at parity or slightly lower than most liquid organic fertilizers on the market. And that has farmers really excited — the new plant’s entire output is already sold through 2028.
“Being able to mitigate emissions certainly helps, but it’s not what closes the deal,” he told me. “It’s kind of like the icing on the cake.”
Initially, the startup is targeting the premium organic and sustainable agriculture market, setting it apart from Pivot Bio’s focus on large commodity staple crops. “You saw with the electrification of vehicles, there was a high value beachhead product, which was a sports car,” Pinkowski told me. “In the ag space, that opportunity is organics.”
But while big-name backers have lined up behind Pivot and Nitricity, the broader ag tech sector hasn’t been as fortunate in its friends, with funding and successful scale-up slowing for many companies working in areas such as automation, indoor farming, agricultural methane mitigation, and lab-grown meat.
Everyone’s got their theories for why this could be, with Lara Pierpoint of Trellis telling me that part of the issue is “the way the federal government is structured around this work.” The Department of Agriculture allocates relatively few resources to technological innovation compared to the Department of Energy, which in turn does little to support agricultural work outside of its energy-specific mandate. That ends up meaning that, as Pierpoint put it, ”this set of activities sort of falls through the cracks” of the government funding options, leaving agricultural communities and companies alike struggling to find federal programs and grant opportunities.
“There’s also a mismatch between farmers and the culture of farming and agriculture in the United States, and just even geographically where the innovation ecosystems are,” Emily Lewis O’Brien, a principal at Trellis who led the team’s investment in Nitricity, told me of the social and regional divides between entrepreneurs, tech investors and rural growers. “Bridging that gap has been a little bit tricky.”
Still, investors remain optimistic that one big win will help kick the money machines into motion, and with Pivot Bio and Nitricity, there are finally some real contenders poised to transform the sector. “We’re going to wake up one day and someone’s going to go, holy shit, that was fast,” Abbott told me. “And it’s like, well you should have been here for the decade of hard work before. It’s always fast at the end.”
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” the adage goes. But despite valiant efforts by companies to measure their supply chain emissions, the majority are missing a big part of the picture.
Widely used models for estimating supply chain emissions simplify the process by assuming that companies source all of their goods from a single country or region. This is obviously not how the world works, and manufacturing in the United States is often cleaner than in countries with coal-heavy grids, like China, where many of the world’s manufactured goods actually come from. A study published in the journal Nature Communications this week found that companies using a U.S.-centric model may be undercounting their emissions by as much as 10%.
“We find very large differences in not only the magnitude of the upstream carbon footprint for a given business, but the hot spots, like where there are more or less emissions happening, and thus where a company would want to gather better data and focus on reducing,” said Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and lead author of the paper.
Several of the authors of the paper, including Davis, are affiliated with the software startup Watershed, which helps companies measure and reduce their emissions. Watershed already encourages its clients to use its own proprietary multi-region model, but the company is now working with Stanford and the consulting firm ERG to build a new and improved tool called Cornerstone that will be freely available for anyone to use.
“Our hope is that with the release of scientific papers like this one and with the launch of Cornerstone, we can help the ecosystem transition to higher quality open access datasets,” Yohanna Maldonado, Watershed’s Head of Climate Data told me in an email.
The study arrives as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a nonprofit that publishes carbon accounting standards that most companies voluntarily abide by, is in the process of revising its guidance for calculating “scope 3” emissions. Scope 3 encompasses the carbon that a company is indirectly responsible for, such as from its supply chain and from the use of its products by customers. Watershed is advocating that the new standard recommend companies use a multi-region modeling approach, whether Watershed’s or someone else’s.
Davis walked me through a hypothetical example to illustrate how these models work in practice. Imagine a company that manufactures exercise bikes — it assembles the final product in a factory in the U.S., but sources screws and other components from China. The typical way this company would estimate the carbon footprint of its supply chain would be to use a dataset published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that estimates the average emissions per dollar of output for about 400 sectors of the U.S. economy. The EPA data doesn’t get down to the level of detail of a specific screw, but it does provide an estimate of emissions per dollar of output for, say, hardware manufacturing. The company would then multiply the amount of money it spent on screws by that emissions factor.
Companies take this approach because real measurements of supply chain emissions are rare. It’s not yet common practice for suppliers to provide this information, and supply chains are so complex that a product might pass through several different hands before reaching the company trying to do the calculation. There are emerging efforts to use remote sensing and other digital data collection and monitoring systems to create more accurate, granular datasets, Alexia Kelly, a veteran corporate sustainability executive and current director at the High Tide Foundation, told me. In the meantime, even though sector-level emissions estimates are rough approximations, they can at least give a company an indication of which parts of their supply chain are most problematic.
When those estimates don’t take into account country of origin, however, they don’t give companies an accurate picture of which parts of their supply chains need the most attention.
The new study used Watershed’s multi-region model to look at how different types of companies’ emissions would change if they used supply chain data that better reflected the global nature of supply chains. Davis is the first to admit that the study’s findings of higher emissions are not surprising. The carbon accounting field has long been aware of the shortcomings of single-region models. There hasn’t been a big push to change that, however, because the exercise is already voluntary and taking into account global supply chains is significantly more difficult. Many countries don’t publish emissions and economic data, and those that do use a variety of methods to report it. Reconciling those differences adds to the challenge.
While the overall conclusion isn’t surprising, the study may be the first to show the magnitude of the problem and illustrate how more accurate modeling could redirect corporate sustainability efforts. “As far as I know, there is no similar analysis like this focused on corporate value chain emissions,” Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told me in an email. “The research is an important reminder for companies (and standard setters like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol), who in practice appear to be overlooking foreign supply chain emissions in large numbers.”
Broekhoff said Watershed’s upcoming open-source model “could provide a really useful solution.” At the same time, he said, it’s worth noting that this whole approach of calculating emissions based on dollars spent is subject to significant uncertainty. “Using spending data to estimate supply chain emissions provides only a first-order approximation at best!”
A federal court has lifted Trump’s stop work order on the Empire Wind offshore wind project, the second defeat in court this week for the president as he struggles to stall turbines off the East Coast.
In a brief order read in court Thursday morning, District Judge Carl Nichols — a Trump appointee — sided with Equinor, the Norwegian energy developer building Empire Wind off the coast of New York, granting its request to lift a stop work order issued by the Interior Department just before Christmas.
Interior had cited classified national security concerns to justify a work stoppage. Now, for the second time this week, a court has ruled the risks alleged by the Trump administration are insufficient to halt an already-permitted project midway through construction.
Anti-offshore wind activists are imploring the Trump administration to appeal this week’s injunctions on the stop work orders. “We are urging Secretary Burgum and the Department of Interior to immediately appeal this week’s adverse federal district court rulings and seek an order halting all work pending appellate review,” Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast New Jersey, said in a statement texted to me after the ruling came down.
Any additional delays may be fatal for some of the offshore wind projects affected by Trump’s stop work orders, irrespective of the rulings in an appeal. Both Equinor and Orsted, developer of the Revolution Wind project, argued for their preliminary injunctions because even days of delay would potentially jeopardize access to vessels necessary for construction. Equinor even told the court that if the stop work order wasn’t lifted by Friday — that is, January 16 — it would cancel Empire Wind. Though Equinor won today, it is nowhere near out of the woods.
More court action is coming: Dominion will present arguments on Friday in federal court against the stop work order halting construction of its Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department
