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Arsonists have “the power of a nuclear bomb at their fingertips.”
When a wildfire starts, there is rarely a witness.
Deep in the mountains, lightning strikes a tree on the hottest day in millennia. A dragging trailer chain, unnoticed by a driver, sends sparks into the bone-dry roadside brush. Hikers splash water over an illegal campfire, but it continues to smolder after they leave. And on the right day, in the right weather, unattended and unreported, these fires start to grow.
There is another kind of fire, too — one where the presence of a witness, some would argue, is the entire point. Arson officially accounts for only about 10% of fires handled by Cal Fire, the agency that manages wildfires and structure fires on California’s 31 million acres of wildlands and forests. But when there are thousands of fires across the state during a given season, that’s not an inconsequential number. “Getting 300 to 400 confirmed arson fires a year — that’s a lot of fires that don’t need to occur,” Gianni Muschetto, the staff chief of Cal Fire’s law enforcement division, told me.
The Park Fire, which has burned nearly 400,000 acres near Paradise, north of Sacramento, is now the fourth biggest wildfire in California’s recorded history. As of Friday afternoon, it is still only 24% contained. Investigators have charged 42-year-old Ronnie Dean Stout II with felony arson in connection with starting the blaze, alleging he pushed his burning car into a gully, where it ignited the surrounding vegetation. (Reports conflict over whether Stout set his car on fire intentionally or the engine accidentally caught fire while he was revving it.) Stout was then “seen calmly leaving the area by blending in with the other citizens who were in the area,” Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey said in a statement. Stout denies the charges.
In California, which has extremely strict arson laws, the felony is divided in the penal code into two different categories: “reckless” and “intentional” arson. Muschetto explained that someone shooting off illegal fireworks on a dry day might be charged with reckless arson: “They weren’t necessarily trying to start a wildland fire, but because of their reckless act, they did.” On the other hand, if the person shot the fireworks directly into dry grass to purposefully start a fire, “that would be a malicious arson act” and considered intentional. (Investigators had initially planned to charge Stout, the Park Fire suspect, with intentional arson but ultimately charged him on Monday with reckless arson, according to reports.)
Cal Fire lumps reckless and intentional arson together in their public statistics, which show an uptick in arson arrests from 61 in 2018 to over 110 every year since 2020, peaking at 162 in 2022. Muschetto attributes that rise to the fact that fire seasons have gotten longer due to climate change, meaning small acts of arson are more likely to result in fires big enough to warrant resources, investigations, and arrests. In 2023, for example, Cal Fire’s arson arrests dipped slightly, potentially because it wasn’t as long or severe of a fire season in the state.
The 2024 season has kicked off relatively normally, and Muschetto said he expects arson arrests to top 100 but not “break any record number, hopefully.”
The truth, though, is that arson happens “every single day,” Ed Nordskog, a retired Los Angeles arson investigator and the founder of the Serial and Wildland Arson Investigation Training program, told me. “But most of the year, it’s not conducive to a massive fire because of the weather and fuel conditions, so nobody gets excited.” Nordskog disputes reported arson numbers, pointing to the inconsistencies between fire agencies and the lack of resources available to investigate every fire with the thoroughness required to determine its origin. He estimates that closer to 50% of urban and wildland fires are caused by arson, though he agrees that number is likely lower when it comes to wildfires; many experts, however, admit that the commonly cited 10% statistic is probably an undercount.
Nordskog told me that arson investigators don’t care about the size of the fire; they care about the intent of the person who committed the act. Someone like the Park Fire suspect “didn’t have the ability to light a big fire; he didn’t have the ability to light a small fire,” Nordskog said. “He just lit a fire, and he did it on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and now you have a catastrophe.”
Nordskog is particularly rankled when people try to connect climate change to acts of arson, calling it a misconception that hot weather brings out the firebugs. Arsonists “are there all the time, 24 hours a day, doing their thing,” including in the winter, Nordskog explained. But a warmer world has made extreme fire conditions more common, as have decades of misbegotten fire suppression policies in the Western United States. As a result, arson fires in rural areas are more likely to burn out of control than they would have been half a century ago. That element of chance is why Nordskog likes to say that “a wildland arsonist has the power of a nuclear bomb at their fingertips: They’re the only criminal in the world that can do that kind of damage.”
Most arsonists are one-and-done offenders, and the crime cuts across race, gender, and education levels. Mental illness and drug use can certainly be exacerbating factors. Additionally, the housing crisis and anti-homelessness legislation have pushed marginalized populations into living in wildland-urban interfaces, on the fringes of towns and cities, where both intentional and unintentional fires can cause more extensive problems.
Nordskog specializes in serial arsonists — a much smaller subset of arsonists who set fires repeatedly and intentionally, sometimes hundreds of times. They can be sophisticated operators, picking “the perfect time of day” to start a fire when temperatures are high and the wind picks up; some even use delay ignition devices to avoid getting caught. “They’re usually very frustrated and angry about something,” Nordskog said of a motive, and “the one thing that anybody can do is light a fire.”
Nordskog, like Cal Fire’s Muschetto, told me he’s doubtful there is any significant rise in the number of people actually committing arson; discrepancies in investigations, annual fire conditions, and several other factors are the likelier reason for the fluctuations in numbers.
For Muschetto, though, it defies belief that someone would intentionally start a fire at all. “It blows my mind that [arson] occurs and how often it occurs,” Muschetto told me. An arson fire takes firefighters away from their families for potentially weeks on end; it puts first responders and the public in danger; and between the smoke pollution, immense environmental degradation, and potential loss of life and property, the damage can be incalculable.
“We’re always going to get accidental or natural ignitions” in California, Muschetto said. That’s why “reducing these intentional fires is very important.”
Editor’s note: This story was last update August 2 at 4:30 p.m. ET.
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On Musk vs. Trump, tech emissions, and V2G charging
Current conditions: Polar air could deliver Australia’s most widespread snowfall in years this weekend • Toronto and Montreal have some of the worst air quality in the world going into Friday due to smoke from the Manitoba fires • Global average concentrations of CO2 exceeded 430 parts per million in May, the highest level in millions or possibly tens of millions of years.
Elon Musk’s criticisms of the Republican reconciliation bill triggered a very public falling out with President Trump on Thursday. Earlier this week, just days after his Oval Office send-off from the government, Musk took to Twitter to slam Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” bill, which he claimed would “massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.” By Thursday, Musk was calling for Congress to kill the bill, and his criticisms had escalated: “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” he tweeted. Trump responded by telling reporters on Thursday afternoon that “Elon and I had a great relationship — I don’t know if we will anymore,” touching off a back-and-forth on social media that culminated in Musk claiming Trump is “in the Epstein files,” a reference to Jeffrey Epstein.
The conflict also sent “the value of Tesla shares into a freefall,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote in his accounting of the breakup. The company’s stock was down 14% by the time the dust settled, erasing $153 billion from Tesla’s market value in the company’s biggest one-day drop on record. “The whole thing is idiotic,” Wayne Kaufman, the chief market analyst at Phoenix Financial Services, said, per Bloomberg. “People in these kinds of positions should know better than to act like kids in junior high.”
Indirect emissions from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta rose 150% in the three years between 2020 and 2023 due to the energy demands of artificial intelligence, a new report by the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union found. Amazon saw the most significant jump in emissions, up 182% in 2023 compared to 2020, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145%, and Alphabet at 138% over the same periods. In total, 166 digital companies reviewed by the report contributed just under 1% of all global energy-related emissions in 2023.
Indirect emissions, also called scope 2 emissions, account for those from “purchased electricity, steam, heating, and cooling consumed by the company.” However, the report also found that nearly half of the companies it examined have committed to achieving net-zero emissions goals, with 51 companies setting ambitious deadlines of 2050 or earlier. Twenty-three of the companies in the report already operated on 100% renewable energy in 2023, up from 16 in 2022. You can read the full report here.
Renault Group
Renault Group announced Thursday that the Dutch city of Utrecht is officially the first in Europe to debut a vehicle-to-grid car-sharing service. The program, called Utrecht Energized, was announced last fall, with Renault supplying an initial 500 electric models featuring V2G bidirectional charging technology, allowing the cars to charge using clean energy and also feed power back into the grid during times of high demand.
Utrecht was already one of Europe’s “most progressive renewable-energy cities,” per the announcement, with 35% of its roofs equipped with solar panels. “To manage the grid with a high proportion of renewables requires a system that quickly adapts to the changes in energy generation and consumption,” Renault wrote in its announcement, adding that the bidirectional cars in the program can deliver 10% of the flexibility to balance Utrecht’s wind-and-solar-generated electricity during peak times. Although the program is the first of its kind in Europe, similar programs are also underway in China, Japan, and Australia, Autoevolution writes.
Battery cell maker Envision Automotive Energy Supply Co. announced a work stoppage on Thursday of the construction of its manufacturing plant near Florence, South Carolina. “AESC has informed the state of South Carolina and our local partners that due to policy and market uncertainty, we are pausing construction at our South Carolina facility at this time,” spokesman Brad Grantham said in a statement, per the South Carolina Daily Gazette. The pause jeopardizes 1,600 new jobs and a planned $1.6 billion investment in the facility by the Japan-based company. The state’s Republican Governor Henry McMaster, a Trump ally, acknowledged that “the tariffs are going up and down” and some projects are “being paused,” but added, “Let things play out, because all of these changes are taking place. So, I’d say, relax if you can.”
Record-fast snowmelt in the western United States could be cueing up a particularly severe fire season, The Guardian reports. Despite some states, including California, seeing above-average snowfall this winter, all western states already have below-normal snowpacks, indicative of a rapid melt rate that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described in a recent special notice as “not normal.” Additionally, a third of the states in the West are in “severe” drought or worse, the highest proportion in more than two years. Combined with a forecast for above-average summer temperatures, the “quickly depleting mountain snows will limit summertime water availability in streams and rivers throughout the West, and may kick off a potential feedback loop that could intensify and expand the current drought,” The Guardian writes, singling out the Pacific Northwest as especially vulnerable to wildfires as a result.
A Ginko tree at the Miaoying Temple in Beijing. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
A study of 50,000 trees in China found that thousands of endangered varieties have been preserved for centuries within the walls of religious sites and temples. “The researchers found that the density of ancient trees inside the temples was more than 7,000 times higher than those outside temples and in the wild,”Nature writes. Eight of the tree species identified by the researchers can only be found on temple grounds.
SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” contends Johannes Ackva of Founder Pledge.
Johannes Ackva likes a contrarian bet. Back in 2020, when he launched the climate program at Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to philanthropic causes, he sought out “surgical interventions” to support technologies that didn’t already enjoy the widespread popularity of wind turbines and solar panels, such as advanced nuclear reactors and direct air carbon capture.
By late 2023, however, the Biden administration’s legislative sweep was directing billions to the very range of technologies Ackva previously saw as neglected. So he turned his attention to shoring up those political wins.
The modern climate movement came into its own demanding that the world stop shrinking from inconvenient truths. But as polls increasingly showed the 2024 election trending toward Republicans, Ackva saw few funders propping up advocates with any influence over the GOP. Founders Pledge pumped millions into Deploy/US, a climate group where former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida served as the top adviser, which then distributed the money to upward of 30 right-leaning climate groups, including the American Conservation Coalition and the Evangelical Environmental Network.
The bipartisan gamble paid off. In April 2024, Founders Pledge received an anonymous $40 million donation to bolster its efforts. Now an anonymous donor has granted Founders Pledge’s climate fund another $50 million, Heatmap has learned.
Founders Pledge declined to say whether the money came from the same unnamed source or separate donors. But the influx of funding has “radically transformed our ability to make large grants,” Ackva told me, noting that the budget before 2024 came out to about $10 million per year.
“The word exponential is overused,” he said. “But that’s roughly the trajectory.”
Amid the so-called green freeze that followed the Trump administration’s rollback of climate funding, Founders Pledge has joined other climate philanthropies in stepping in to back projects that have lost money. When Breakthrough Energy shuttered its climate program in March, Founders Pledge gave $3.5 million to serve as the primary funding for the launch of the Innovation Initiative, started by former staff from the Bill Gates-backed nonprofit.
Ackva said his organization is looking to invest in climate efforts across the political spectrum. But Founders Pledge’s focus on right-of-center groups wasn’t an election-year gimmick.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” he said. “That’s not an authentic way to build a civil society ecosystem.”
As Republicans in Congress proceed with their gutting of green funding, including through Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Ackva said it’s too soon to say whether the political strategy is paying off.
“If you think of grantmaking as making bets, some bets exceed others sooner, but that doesn’t make them bad bets,” Ackva told me. “Ultimately, philanthropy cannot define how a given policy goes. You can adjust the probabilities, maybe level the bets. But obviously it’s larger forces at play that shape how the One Big, Beautiful Bill gets made.”
The Senate may save or even expand parts of the IRA that support baseload power, e.g. nuclear and geothermal. But regardless, Ackva said, climate advocates are making a mistake training their focus so intently on the fate of this one law.
“It’s kind of the only thing that’s being discussed,” he said.
Meanwhile the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set for reauthorization next fall. The Energy Act of 2020 is slated for renewal this year. And funding for the Department of Energy is up for debate as the White House now pushes to expand the Loan Programs Office’s lending authority for nuclear projects by $750 million.
“Those are things we would see as at least as important as the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ackva said.
Given those deadlines, Ackva said he expected other donors to press advocates for plans last year on how to sway Republicans toward more ambitious bills this Congress. But after former Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket last year, he said he’d heard from his grantees “that they were asked what they were going to do with a Harris trifecta.”
“Everyone was betting on Harris to win,” he said. “There’s a very strong ideological lean among climate funders to a degree that was frankly a little bit shocking.”
The partisan divide over climate wasn’t always so pronounced. In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, ran on a more ambitious decarbonization platform than what President Barack Obama proposed in the White House.
There are dueling — though not mutually exclusive — narratives about how the American climate movement over-indexed on one side of the political spectrum. Both stories start in 2010.
The version liberals and leftists will find familiar is one that blames fossil fuel megadonors such as Charles and David Koch for aggressively promoting climate denial among Republican lawmakers.
The version told by Ted Nordhaus, the founder of the Breakthrough Institute think tank where Ackva got his start years before joining Founders Pledge, starts with the failure of the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill to pass through Congress.
When the legislation “went up in flames in 2010,” Nordhaus told me, a bunch of environmental philanthropies hired Harvard professor Theda Skocpol to author a 145-page report on what triggered the blaze.
“The report concluded that the problem is we were too focused on the technocratic, inside-the-Beltway stuff,” Nordhaus summarized. “We needed to build political power so the next time there’s an opportunity to do big climate policy, we would have the political power to put a price on carbon.”
Out of that finding came what Nordhaus called the “two-pronged, boots-on-the-ground” era of the movement, which backed college campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and also efforts to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline.
Reasonable people could debate the fiduciary merits of scrapping investments in natural gas companies or the value of blocking oil infrastructure whose cancellation spurred more shipments of crude on rail lines that face higher risk of a spill or explosion than pipelines. But once supporting fossil fuel divestment or opposing pipelines became the key litmus tests activists used to determine if a Democrat running for office took climate change seriously, the issue became more ideological.
“That made it impossible for any Democrat to become a moderate on climate, and made it impossible for any Republican to be a moderate on climate,” Nordhaus said. “The Republican Party has its own craziness and radicalism, but a bunch of that is negative polarization.”
To fund an effective “climate right,” Nordhaus said, Founders Pledge should seek out groups that don’t explicitly focus on the climate or environment at all.
“I’d be looking at which groups are all-in on U.S. natural gas, which has been the biggest driver of decarbonization in the U.S. over the last 15 years; which groups are all in and really doing work on nuclear; and which groups are doing work on permitting reform,” Nordhaus said. “That’s how you’re going to make progress with Republicans.”
I asked Ackva where the line would be for funding an eco right. Would Founders Pledge back groups that — like some green-leaning elements of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party or allies of France’s Marine Le Pen — support draconian restrictions on immigration in the name of reducing national emissions from the increased population?
“That would not be appropriate,” Ackva told me. “When we say we’re funding the eco right, like when we’re funding groups on the left or in the center, the things they are proposing don’t need to be exactly the things we will be prioritizing, but they need to be plausible, high-impact solutions.”
To Emmet Penney, a senior fellow focused on energy at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, it’s an obvious play. The green left that has long dominated climate policy debates “is premised on aggressive permitting and environmental law that makes it impossible to actually build anything useful toward addressing the things they’re most afraid of.”
“It’s become clear to anyone who wants to build anything that what the environmental left has to offer simply doesn't work,” he told me. “Naturally, more centrist organizations who might not even otherwise be slated as right-wing now look that way and are becoming increasingly attractive to people who are interested in building.”