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On August 9, 2023, the smoke finally cleared in Lahaina.
The scene was shocking. In the course of just a few hours on the afternoon of August 8, winds had fanned a dry grass fire on the northwest coast of Maui into an inferno that trapped fleeing residents and left more than 100 people dead and the city in ashes. “We understand that recovery will take years,” Kaniela Ing, the national director of the Green New Deal Network and a seventh-generation Indigenous Hawaiian, told me when we spoke in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. “And as that recovery unfolds, we want to make sure that the people, the communities, are actually empowered to rebuild themselves — that we don’t open the door for disaster capitalists.”
Since then, Ing and other community leaders have put in the work. Over the past year, their group, Lahaina Strong, has tried to empower the community and challenge the power structures they say contributed to the confluence of factors that made the fire possible.
“We’re all about the community arm — grassroots power, and coalitions,” he told me this week. “Unfortunately, our groups are the same groups that have had to respond to climate disasters like Hurricanes Maria, Harvey, Sandy, and the Paradise fires. There’s always something, and it’s getting more and more frequent.”
On the anniversary of the fire, I spoke to Ing about how other communities can learn from the Lahaina model, the victories organizers secured to ensure a better future for native Hawaiians and locals, and how to ride the momentum forward into November. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity.
It’s been almost a year since we last spoke; at that time, you’d just arrived in Maui from your home on Oahu after the fire. What happened after that?
I don’t think there had been a clear model of best practices for how to respond. So when [a climate disaster] happened in my backyard, it was like, “Okay, let’s learn from all the responses and organizing traditions that we’ve studied and been trained on” — from the Civil Rights era to the mutual aid of the Black Panthers and tenant rights and welfare organizers, to the modern efforts of the Alinsky-type ACORN model, to the Sunrise model, which is momentum-based. But how do you draw from everything at once?
That is where Lahaina Strong came from. Because this is where I grew up, we knew which community leaders would be stepping up. But it’s not common for everyone to work together — they can be on different sides of different issues. So we convened all of them — mostly those we call kupuna, the older generation of elders. We started coordinating the responses of our leaders and immigrant churches, the heads of canoe clubs and governmental departments, Indigenous leaders, and pro-surfers, because that’s what the community here looks like. And what came of it was a few younger leaders — Millennials, so young for our community — were given the elders’ blessing and told, “It’s time for y’all to lead.”
There was Pa’ele [Kiakona], who was a server at a restaurant, and Courtney [Lazo] and Jordan [Ruidas], who were expecting mothers, and they’re the ones who really blew it up. I raised some money to get them on a salary and train them, but they were already community leaders in their own right. So the question was, “How do we maximize their power?”
The first thing we did was needs assessments. Everyone lived in a hotel, but many of the more established charities were opening up in malls 13 or 14 miles away. But our team had iPads and lived in the hotels, too, so while more established groups were getting 100 or so folks signed up, we were getting thousands every day because they were neighbors.
Yeah, you have to be there.
Right, and they all knew each other. We were working on a team with Salesforce — Marc Benioff was helping us back then — and we could figure out people’s needs and direct them to services. There are so many services, but people just lost their homes; they don’t know where to go. So that was the job.
The last question was, “Would you want to get involved down the line with the big decisions that the government will have to make about the priorities of the rebuild?” So once the council started holding hearings about the rebuilding and the policies of reopening and tourism, we were able to turn out hundreds of people instantly. We seized the momentum. We won unanimous support from the council for delaying the reopening of Lahaina to tourists, and we did a big petition delivery to the governor. The governor wasn’t supportive of us at the time, though, and we didn’t ultimately win that one.
From there, it was, “What else do we need?” We needed to house people; that was the main thing. There was also a government guy, Kaleo Manuel [who had been on the state Commission on Water Resource Management until a land developer accused him of delaying water resources during the fire], who we demanded to be reinstated, and we won that. We also had a demand for a billion dollars in direct aid; we won that. But the housing thing was a longer-term flight and went through the legislative session this year. We did this thing called Fishing for Housing, which involved the occupation of Kā’anapali Beach.
I saw your video about that!
That occupation was rough because we lived on a really sandy beach. And it was big. A lot of people came out. But the local news covered it pretty much daily, and it raised a lot of sympathy. We were educating tourists and raising money.
With that, we were able to form a historic partnership. Pa’ele’s uncle is an activist who wants to return water from the hotels to the communities and restore public streams. The unions generally don’t like that kind of stuff in Hawaii, but we were able to bring in ILWU, the hotel union here, and Local 5, another hotel union, which hadn’t partnered with ILWU since 1940. When we came to the legislative session, it was like, “Okay, we have real power now.” The governor came around and committed to passing the bill.
Our theory was that we had to raise a ton of money for direct relief; that was the most important thing, getting direct monetary aid to people. But it was not going to be enough; we weren’t going to raise $10 billion. We could buy one house if we raised a million and a half. Instead, we did this through a [501(c)4 social welfare organization], where you can advocate and contest power where it matters. And we were able to win 50,000 homes instead.
What’s next?
The next steps are on the climate front. The Inflation Reduction Act is a good step; building and electricity, we’re also on track. Agriculture and transportation on a national level are where we need to fill the gaps. Why is Maui growing mono-crops like sugar and coffee for people thousands of miles away? Why can’t we feed our own people? And transportation — when the fires hit, everyone was stuck because of the one-way-in, one-way-out road. Those issues are pertinent not only on the disaster, resiliency, and community infrastructure levels, but also on the mitigation side.
People are also excited about the possibility of microgrids or community-owned energy systems. When we initially had community hubs, members were using Star Link or small solar systems, and locals were like, “Wow, why can’t we do this everywhere?” It’d be way cheaper than fixing the grid at this point.
We have a blank slate to build the future we need. And we’re going to be up against a lot of powerful opponents in the next 10 years.
When we spoke last year, you talked about how rebuilding after the fire was an opportunity to ensure that the people came first and that the forces that contributed to the problem were pushed out of power. Has that effort been successful?
It’s ongoing. Power has many forms: There are the institutional forms, like CEOs and politicians, but there are the shadows — how ideas are organized, industry association gatherings — that are harder to crack. It’s a chess game, and we’re all trying to stay a step ahead.
I think that’s what is critical about our work. If we were to stop, if we could no longer provide our organizers with salaries, they’d have to go back to working two service jobs, and they wouldn’t have the time to compete with full-time lobbyists.
You mentioned other climate disasters early in our conversation. What advice would you give to people in other communities about incorporating mutual aid and holding corporate powers accountable after a catastrophe?
If you come out right away and say, “Hey, this is a climate disaster!” then everyone is like, Oh, an activist. But if you just come out and help and earn people’s trust — that’s what it really takes. Listen to folks.
The thing about climate action and climate solutions is that they have been so polarized over the last few years. I think it’s been moving in our favor. Generally, the population supports us. But those who don’t are much more vocal than they were 10 years ago, and that matters because as soon as they start speaking up, the less political people are just like, “Keep me out of this.” So we have to be careful about how we approach these communities. They’re not thinking about climate; they’re thinking about how to feed their family and how they will get their kids to school or if school is even available. You have to meet them where they are.
Then you go from there. You start to have conversations with them, and they will support getting the polluters out and not being taken advantage of by corporate utilities. You don’t have to talk to them about climate like we always do among advocates; you shouldn’t. If you want to build power in a community, you’ve got to have a different approach. These people, their power is ultimately that they’re survivors, not activists. The public doesn’t perceive them as having an agenda other than just surviving and showing up for their community.
There’s still a lot of work to be done. How do you plan to keep up the forward momentum heading into this fall and the election season?
Visibility and outreach. There’s that old saying that politics is downstream from culture, and our group has been really political, especially during the legislative session. So we’re trying to show up for the community in more direct ways. Today, we paddled with the canoe clubs to honor the first anniversary of the fire. We’re showing up in these more community-based ways so we grow in cultural power, too — not just as an advocacy group, but as a holistic community.
Do you think anything has been missing from the media narrative about Lahaina?
Some of the media that came out today was like, “A year later, people are still without homes.” But if you look at the numbers, the per capita investments from the federal government, and the commitment from FEMA — I mean, it wasn’t great at first, I’ll admit that, but we’ve won quite a bit. We’re winning. The momentum is on our side, and I think it’s important for folks to understand that. They have to feel like it’s worth it and that there’s hope to keep going. I know it’s not the sexiest media narrative and it’s easier to draw criticism, but this is the rise of self-determination. The survivors, to me, are the real story.
And it’s going to take a long time. The fact that it’s like, “Oh, we can’t rebuild a year later.” It was still toxic just a few months ago! There’s debris everywhere. The focus should be less on charity and more on the change and how the power structures have shifted. That’s been really positive.
Do you feel optimistic about the Harris-Walz ticket heading into this fall?
I do. Many reporters have asked me, “Why Harris and not Biden?” Politics is all about coalitions; our movement did a lot of work to become part of the Biden coalition, which was great. But Big Oil was also a part of the coalition he needed to win, so there was always that tension, from my perspective, during his presidency. But with Harris, we’ll have the opportunity to build a dual coalition — perhaps with us and labor, and not Big Oil.
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On budget negotiations, Climeworks, and DOE grants
Current conditions: It’s peak storm season in the U.S., with severe weather in the forecast for at least the next six days in the Midwest and East• San Antonio, Texas, is expected to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit today• Monsoon rains have begun in Sri Lanka.
The House Budget Committee meeting to prepare the reconciliation bill for a floor vote as early as next week appears to be a go for Friday, despite calls from some Republicans to delay the session. At least three GOP House members, including two members of the Freedom Caucus, have threatened to vote no on the budget because a final score for the Energy and Commerce portion of the bill, which includes cuts to Medicaid, won’t be ready from the Congressional Budget Office until next week. That is causing a “math problem” for Republicans, Politico writes, because the Budget Committee “is split 21-16 in favor of Republicans, and Democrats are expecting full attendance,” meaning Republicans can “only lose two votes if they want to move forward with the megabill Friday.” Republican Brandon Gill of Texas is currently out on paternity leave, further reducing the margin for disagreement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is also contending with discontent in the ranks over cuts to clean energy tax credits. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still pretty bad,” New York Republican Andrew Garbarino, a co-chair of the House Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, told Politico on Thursday. But concerns about the cuts, which would heavily impact Republican state economies and jobs, do not appear to be a “red line” for many others, including Georgia’s Buddy Carter, whose district benefits from Inflation Reduction Act credits for a Hyundai car and battery plant that is among the targets for elimination. You can learn more about the cuts Republicans are proposing to the IRA in our coverage here.
The Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks is preparing for significant cuts to its workforce, citing the larger economic landscape and the Trump administration’s lack of consistent support. The company currently has 498 employees, but is undergoing a consultation process, indicating it is looking to cut more than 10% of its workforce at once, SwissInfo.ch reports. “Our financial resources are limited,” Climeworks’ co-founder and managing director Jan Wurzbacher said in comments on Swiss TV.
Though Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is a known proponent of carbon capture, and there had been excitement in the industry that Trump’s attempts to expedite federal permitting would benefit carbon storage sites, the administration has also hollowed out the Department of Energy’s carbon removal team, my colleague Katie Brigham has reported. The ongoing funding cuts and uncertainty have made it difficult to get information from the government that could affect Climework’s Project Cypress in Louisiana, although Wurzbacher stressed that “we are not currently aware that our project would be stopped.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced in a Thursday memo that the department will be reviewing at least $15 billion worth of grants awarded to “power grid and manufacturing supply chain projects” under the Biden administration, Reuters reports. “With this process, the Department will ensure we are doing our due diligence, utilizing taxpayer dollars to generate the largest possible benefit to the American people and safeguarding our national security,” Wright said in his statement.
The memo goes on to note that the DOE plans to prioritize “large-scale commercial projects that require more detailed information from the awardees for the initial phase of this review, but this process may extend to other DOE program offices as the reviews progress.” Projects that don’t meet the DOE’s standards could be denied, as could projects of grantees who fail to “respond to information requests within the provided time frame, does not respond to follow-up questions in a timely manner.” As of last week, Wright told lawmakers, “we’ve canceled zero” existing projects so far, E&E News writes; the agency will reportedly be reviewing at least 179 different awards during its audit.
The number of National Weather Service offices ending 24-hour operations and severe weather alerts is increasing. On Thursday, The San Francisco Chronicle confirmed that California’s Sacramento and Hanford offices, which provide information to more than 7 million people in the Central Valley, have been forced to reduce service due to “critically reduced staffing.”
Eliminating 24-hour service is especially concerning for the Central Valley and surrounding foothills, where around-the-clock weather updates can be critical. “These are offices that have both dealt with major wildfire episodes most of the past 10 years, and we are now entering fire season,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told the Chronicle. “That’s a big, big problem.” Swain additionally shared on LinkedIn a map he’d put together of regions in the U.S. that no longer have full-service weather coverage, including “a substantial chunk of Tornado Alley during peak tornado season and the entirety of Alaska’s vast North Slope region.” The NWS is additionally seeking to fill 155 vacancies in coastal states that could face risks as the Atlantic hurricane season begins at the end of the month, The Washington Post reports. An estimated 500 of 4,200 NWS employees have been fired or taken early retirements since the start of Trump’s term.
Heatmap’s “most fascinating” EV of 2025 just got pushed back to 2026. The Ram 1500 Ramcharger — which has a 140-mile electric range as well as a V6 engine attached to a generator to power the car when the battery runs out — is now set to launch in the first quarter of next year due to “extending the quality validation period,” Crain’s Detroit Business reported this week. Parent company Stellantis also pushed back the launch of its fully electric Ram 1500 REV until summer 2027, with a planned model year of 2028. “Our plan ensures we are offering customers a range of trucks with flexible powertrain options that best meet their needs,” Stellantis spokeswoman Jodi Tinson told Crain’s in an email. Though you now have even longer to wait, you can read more about the car Jesse Jenkins calls “brilliant” here.
GMC
The 2026 GMC Hummer EV just got even more ridiculous. “Thanks to the new Carbon Fiber Edition,” the 9,000-pound car “can zoom to 60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds,” InsideEVs reports.
A conversation with Jillian Blanchard of Lawyers for Good Government about the heightened cost of permitting delays
This week I chatted with Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice with Lawyers for Good Government, an organization that has been supporting beneficiaries of the Inflation Reduction Act navigate the uncertainties surrounding tax credits and grant programs under the Trump administration. The reason I wanted to chat with Jillian is simple: the IRA is under threat for the first time under a Republican Congress. I wanted to understand how solar and wind projects could be impacted by the House Republican reconciliation bill and putting IRA tax credits in doubt. I learned a lot.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay, Jillian, what’s the topline here? How would the GOP reconciliation bill impact individual projects’ development?
There are big chunks of the reconciliation bill that will have dramatic impacts on project development, including language that would repeal or phase out bipartisan and popular tax credits in a way that would make it very, very difficult to invest in projects. I can get into the weeds next.
But it’s worth saying first – the group of programs aside from tax credits that [House Republicans] would repeal represents every single part of America. Hundreds of projects that will not go forward if these programs are not going well. And they have several legally obligated grants that EPA has already mucked up in a litany of ways. But what they’re proposing to do is to pull the rug out from under those programs. On top of that they want to pull any unobligated funding out.
I think it’s extremely misrepresentative to say these are not big cuts. They’re significant cuts to clean air and clean water across the board.
Help me get into the weeds about how phasing out the credits will make it harder to invest in a project.
Right now, a bank might want to invest a certain amount of money in a clean energy project because they know on the back end they can get 30% or 40% back on their investment. A return through tax credits. They can bank on that, because tax credits are a guarantee.
Was that an intentional pun? “Bank”?
Yeah, it is. I love a good pun. You opened the floodgates, that was a mistake.
But anyway, the program itself was supposed to be around until at least 2032 and the bank could bank on those tax credits. That’s a big runway, because projects could get delayed and you could lock in the credit as soon as you started construction.
Now they’re doing a phase-out approach where if your project is not placed into service before a certain date, you don’t avoid the phase out. You don’t get any protections if you’re starting your project now or next year. It has to be placed in service before 2028 or else your project may not be eligible. You are constructing it, you are financing it, but then through no fault of your own – a storm or whatever – then suddenly that project is no longer entitled to get 30% or 40% back.
That’s a big risk. And banks don’t like risk.
Opposition on the ground also delays projects the way a storm does. Would this empower those opponents?
Oh, totally. Totally. If anyone wants to fight a project, a bank might be even less likely to invest in it. The NIMBYs for that particular project become a risk.
What would you tell a developer at this moment who is wondering about the uncertainty around the IRA?
I would tell them that now is the time to speak up. If they want to stay in this business and make sure their energy stays as low-cost as it already is, they need to speak up right now, no matter what their political party affiliation is. Make it clear solar isn’t going away, wind isn’t going away, storage isn’t going away. These are markets America needs to be competitive with the rest of the world.
Investors are only just now starting to digest what the proposed cuts will mean, especially for energy storage.
Is Wall Street too sanguine about the House of Representatives’ proposal to gut the Inflation Reduction Act? When the House Ways and Means Committee unveiled its language on the law on Monday — phasing out tax credits, implementing strict restrictions on business relationships with Chinese companies, and altering when projects are eligible for credits — some investors responded to the cutbacks by driving up the prices of some clean energy stocks.
The residential solar company Sunrun traded up on Tuesday by 8.6%, and the American solar manufacturer First Solar was up over 22%. (Stock movements on Monday were largely in response to the pause of the U.S.-China trade war, also announced that morning.)
“The early drafts of a Republican tax and spending bill weren’t as bad for renewables as feared,” wrote Barron’s. Morgan Stanley analysts used the same language — “not as bad as feared” — in a note to clients on the text. “Industry was bracing for way worse,” Don Schneider, the deputy head of public policy for Piper Sandler and a former Republican staffer on the Ways and Means Committee, wrote on X.
While many analysts — and, to be honest, journalists at Heatmap — have issued dire warnings about how the various provisions of the Ways and Means language could together make much of the IRA essentially impossible to use, even before the tax credits phase out, investors on Wall Street and in Washington seem to have shrugged them off. Some level of cutting was all but inevitable, and “not as bad as it could have been” is reason enough to celebrate — plus there’s also “it’ll probably change, anyway.”
There’s something to this. A group ofmoderate Republicans criticized the language on Wednesday as too restrictive, specifically citing changes to three overarching features of the tax credits: when projects would be eligible for tax credits, where companies are able to source components and materials, and whether companies are allowed to freely buy and sell tax credits generated by their projects. (Wouldn’t you know it, these complaints largely echo what Heatmap has written in the past few days.)
In the Senate, meanwhile, Republican Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, said that the text as written would be too damaging to advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal generation. The phase-out timelines in the Ways and Means language are “too short for truly new technologies,” Cramer told Politico.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me that he expects the bill to evolve in a way to meet the concerns of Senate Republicans like Cramer.
“Given considerations both political and procedural, like the more flexible reconciliation instructions Senate Finance is afforded relative to House Ways and Means and the disproportionate impact current text entails for technologies Republicans traditionally favor, like nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower, I think it’s fair to say that this text will change over the coming weeks,” he said.
Finally, days after the Ways and Means committee made its thinking public, Wall Street seems to be catching on to the implications. The new foreign entities of concern rules pose a particularly huge danger to the renewable energy sector, according to Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith, and especially to energy storage, which would be the key provider of reliability on a renewable-heavy grid. Energy storage looks to account for almost 30% of new generator additions this year, according to the Energy Information Administration.
“We think the market got it wrong for storage,” Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients. The market has yet to “digest and fully interpret the implications of proposed tariff and tax policy, which as currently written do not bode well for storage,” he said. The foreign sourcing language “is more restrictive than initially thought, with some industry stakeholders calling the proposal a near repeal on IRA.”
The storage supply chain is intensely entangled with China. Many companies, including Tesla,have been forced to disclose to investors just how reliant they are on China for their storage businesses.
China alone accounted for 70% of battery imports in 2024, according to industry analysts at BloombergNEF, over $14 billion worth. About a quarter of the metals used in battery manufacturing — especially graphite — came from China, BNEF figures show. For specific battery chemistry like lithium iron phosphate, which is popular for stationary storage products, the supply chain is essentially 100% Chinese.
Wall Street revenue and profit estimates “do not adequately capture the extent of risks” facing the U.S. storage industry, Dumoulin-Smith wrote. The storage company Fluence’s stock fell around 1.5% today, and is down over 5.5% since close of trading on Monday, as the market began to digest the House language.
It is possible that the foreign sourcing rules will be loosened and phase-outs for tax credits and transferability lengthened, Venkatakrishnan told me, but not in a way that would endanger the overall structure of the bill. Cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act are a key source of revenue for the Republican bill-writers to ensure as many of the tax cuts they want can fit within the budgetary scope they’ve given themselves.
“Any adjustments will be made with an eye toward ensuring budgetary offsets are sufficient to enable success of the broader enterprise,” Venkatakrishnan said. In other words, as much as some lawmakers may want to see these tax credits preserved, ultimately, they’ve got to pass a bill to ensure Trump’s tax cuts stick around.