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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 a billion-dollar mineral push, the north’s grim milestones, and EV charging’s comeback
Current conditions: The Southeastern U.S. is facing flash floods through the end of Thursday • Temperatures in Fez, Morocco, are forecast to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit • Wildfires continue to rage across southern Europe, sending what Spain’s environment minister called a “clear warning” of the effects of climate change.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday named David Rosner, a centrist Democrat, as the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Since joining the commission in June 2024, Rosner focused the panel on the nation’s growing electricity demand from data centers and pushed for greater automation of the engineering process to connect power plants to the continent’s various grid systems. “Getting grid interconnection moving faster is essential to ensuring reliability,” Rosner told E&E News in March. “We’re starting to learn about these new tools and platforms that just make this work faster, smarter, saves us time, solves the reliability and affordability problems that are facing the country.”
The Bipartisan Policy Center, where Rosner previously worked as a staffer, hailed his promotion as a positive step. “Chairman Rosner’s strong understanding of the energy challenges facing our country, and demonstrated record of bipartisan work to address those challenges, make him well-suited to carry out the responsibilities of FERC chairman,” David R. Hill, the executive vice president of the group’s energy program, said in a statement.
Lithium production in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the world's main sources.John Moore/Getty Images
The Energy Department announced at least $925 million in funding for five proposed programs to bolster the country’s domestic supply of minerals. “For too long, the United States has relied on foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential to modern life and our national security,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release. “The Energy Department will play a leading role in reshoring the processing of critical materials and expanding our domestic supply of these indispensable resources.”
That funding includes:
The Trump administration has made bolstering America’s critical minerals industry one of its signature energy policy priorities. Though as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has written, it has also gone out of its way to annihilate sources of domestic demand for these minerals, especially in the wind energy and electric vehicle industries.
In Alaska, an overflowing glacial lake north of Juneau triggered the Mendenhall River to surge to a record height, flooding the state’s capital city. The problem has been growing for years as climate change in the nation’s most rapidly-warming state accelerates the volume of ice melt. In 2023, floodwaters eroded Mendenhall’s banks, causing homes to collapse, according to the Alaska Beacon. In 2024, the news outlet reported, “the flood was the worst yet.” The flood peaked Wednesday afternoon at nearly 17 feet, damaging hundreds of homes.
Across the border, meanwhile, the more than 700 active fires blazing in Canada have already made this the country’s second-worst fire season on record. The largest fire, the Shoe fire in Saskatchewan, has been burning across 1.4 million acres — an area larger than the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona — since May 7, The New York Times reported.
In an executive order on his first day back in office, Trump singled out the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, directing his Department of Transportation to pause and review the funding, with an eye toward cutting it entirely. Earlier this week, the Federal High Administration completed its review and issued a new guidance that, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday, “not only preserves it, but also purports to ‘streamline applications,’ ‘slash red tape,’ and ‘ensure charging stations are actually built.’”
“If Congress is requiring the federal government to support charging stations, let’s cut the waste and do it right,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a press release. “While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently.” The statement, Emily noted, is out of sync with the administration’s other actions to throttle the adoption of EVs: “Only time will tell whether the new guidance is truly a win for EV charging, however. It’s a win in the sense that many EV advocates feared the agency would try to kill the program or insert poison pills into the guidance. But it’s unclear whether the changes will speed up NEVI deployment beyond what might have happened had it not been paused.”
A researcher has designed a new centimeter-square device that could help probe the “ignorosphere,” a layer of ultra-thin air that has largely escaped exploration by balloons, aircraft and satellites. The contraption uses technology similar to a weathervane encased in a low-pressure chamber that will spin when exposed to light. “You don’t really believe it until you see it,” Ben Schafer, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Nature.
President Trump has had it in for electric vehicle charging since day one. His January 20 executive order “Unleashing American Energy” singled out the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program by name, directing the Department of Transportation to pause and review the funding as part of his mission to “eliminate” the so-called “electric vehicle mandate.”
With the review now complete, the agency has concluded that canceling NEVI is not an option. In an ironic twist, the Federal Highway Administration issued new guidance for the program on Monday that not only preserves it, but also purports to “streamline applications,” “slash red tape,” and “ensure charging stations are actually built.”
“If Congress is requiring the federal government to support charging stations, let’s cut the waste and do it right,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a press release. “While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently.”
Duffy’s statement stands in sharp contrast to the stance of other federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, which continue to block congressionally-mandated spending programs.
Only time will tell whether the new guidance is truly a win for EV charging, however. It’s a win in the sense that many EV advocates feared the agency would try to kill the program or insert poison pills into the guidance. But it’s unclear whether the changes will speed up NEVI deployment beyond what might have happened had it not been paused.
“The real story to me is the needless delay,” Joe Halso, a senior attorney for Sierra Club, told me. “They took six months to produce something that they could have done in an afternoon, and that didn’t require them to halt the program in the first place. Every day of that delay stalled critical EV charging projects.”
The goal of the NEVI program was to help states install charging stations in areas that the market, on its own, was not serving. States had to submit annual plans to the FHWA for how they would deploy the funds to fill gaps in regional EV charging networks. Once those plans are approved, states could issue requests for proposals from EV charging companies to build the new charging stations and award grants to help get them financed.
In February, Duffy issued a letter to state Departments of Transportation suspending approval of their plans for all fiscal years, pending forthcoming new guidance from the agency. That meant states would not be able to issue new awards, essentially freezing the program. At the time, the agency had approved state spending plans totaling more than $3.2 billion for fiscal years 2022 through 2025. Of that money, states had committed only about $526 million to specific projects.
In early May, 16 states plus the District of Columbia challenged the DOT’s actions in court, winning a preliminary injunction that prevented the agency from suspending or revoking their previously-approved plans. While the injunction unfroze the program in the plaintiff states, about $1.8 billion for the rest of the country was still locked up. But the judge allowed a coalition of national, regional, and community groups, including the Sierra Club, to become parties in the case and fight for the funding to be restored across the board. That means that if the plaintiffs are ultimately successful, the verdict will apply to every state, not just those 16 that filed the case.
The fact that the DOT issued new guidance this week doesn’t change anything about the case, Halso of the Sierra Club told me. The move could wind up delaying the program further.
“This new guidance prolongs the freeze by forcing states to resubmit already approved plans to access money they’re already entitled to,” Halso explained. “And we don’t know if or when federal highways will approve those plans and restore states’ access to money.” The guidance gives states 30 days to submit their plans, though it does allow them to simply re-submit previously-approved versions.
In Monday’s press release, Duffy declared the program’s implementation to date a “failure,” citing the fact that only 16% of the funds had been obligated so far. It’s true that the program has been slow in getting underway. As of this week, there are at least 106 NEVI-funded charging stations with 537 ports across 17 states, Loren McDonald, the chief analyst for the EV charging data analytics firm Paren, told me. That’s a long way off pace to achieve President Biden’s stated goal of installing 500,000 by 2030.
It’s also true that the new rules are simpler. The previous guidance, which was 30 pages long, contained more than five pages of detailed “considerations” states had to follow in developing their plans, which designated specific distances between chargers, required projects to mitigate adverse impacts to the electric grid, and mandated that States target “rural areas, underserved and overburdened communities, and disadvantaged communities,” among other rules. The new guidance, by contrast, is a tight seven pages devoid of almost any obligations not explicitly required by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which created the program.
Under the previous guidance, for example, NEVI-funded stations had to be built within one mile of a federally-designated EV corridor and at no greater than 50-mile increments along those corridors. The new guidance simply says that states should “consider the appropriate distance between stations to allow for reasonable travel and certainty that charging will be available to corridor travelers when needed.”
McDonald told me that some states had been frustrated with the 50-mile siting requirement and would likely welcome that change. NATSO and SIGMA, two industry associations that represent rest stops, travel centers, and fuel marketers, issued a joint statement praising the “flexible, consumer-oriented approach.” They also specifically applauded the guidance for encouraging states to prioritize projects that are built and operated by the site owner. Some NEVI projects were being developed by a third party, such as Tesla, which had to sign a long-term lease with the site owner, like a grocery store or hotel. These agreements took time to work out, and would sometimes fall apart, McDonald told me.
But from McDonald’s vantage point, what was slowing down the program most was the fact that every state had different requirements and a different process for soliciting and scoring proposals from developers. Also, while a few states already had previous experience administering EV charging grant programs, many lacked staff and expertise in the subject. “I don’t mean this the way it’s going to come out,” McDonald said. “But they barely knew how to spell EV charging. A lot of the state DOTs really just were about building roads and bridges, and they had never had to deal with any charging.”
The new DOT guidance doesn’t seek to address either of those issues. “I’m not seeing anything in here that’s going to lead to a significant reduction in time,” McDonald said. “It seems to sort of miss where the lengthy processes were.”
The Zero Emission Transportation Association, an industry group, had a more positive outlook. Research associate Corey Cantor told me the new guidance is “workable” for the industry and provides regulatory certainty. When I asked Cantor if the changes the agency made to the guidance would help get more money out the door, he said it “remains to be seen on the implementation side,” but that states had been asking for more flexibility.
Cantor emphasized that it was important for state DOTs to have regulatory certainty and to get the funds flowing again. “Charging anxiety, after the upfront cost of EVs, is one of the highest cited barriers for entry for new adopters of electric vehicles,” he said. “And so getting the charging network filled out is key to helping us move to this next stage of the transition.”
On Sierra Club drama, OBBB’s price hike, and deep-sea mining blowback
Current conditions: Tropical Erin is expected to gain strength and make landfall in the Caribbean as the first major hurricane of the season, lashing islands with winds of up to 80 miles per hour and 7 inches of rain • More than 152 fires have broken out across Greece in the past 24 hours alone as Europe battles a heatwave • Typhoon Podul is expected to make landfall over southeastern Taiwan on Wednesday morning, lashing the island with winds of up to 96 miles per hour.
The Department of Energy selected 11 nuclear projects from 10 reactor startups on Tuesday for a pilot program “with the goal to construct, operate, and achieve criticality of at least three test reactors” by next July 4. The Trump administration then plans to fast-track the successful technologies for commercial licensing. The effort is part of the United States’ attempt at catching up with China, which last year connected its first high-temperature gas-cooled reactor to the grid. The technologies in the program vary among the reactors selected for the program, with some reactors based on Generation IV designs using coolants other than water and others pitching smaller but otherwise traditional light water reactors. None of the selected models will produce more than 300 megawatts of power. The U.S. hopes these smaller machines can be mass produced to bring down the cost of nuclear construction and deploy atomic energy in more applications, including on remote military bases, and even, as NASA announced last week, the moon.
Here are the companies:
The Sierra Club terminated executive director Ben Jealous this week, ending a rocky tenure that culminated earlier this summer in votes of no confidence among statewide chapters, Inside Climate News’ Lee Hedgepeth reported. A former chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the 2018 Democratic nominee for Maryland governor, Jealous’ rise to the green group’s top job in November 2022 seemed like a watershed moment for what is arguably the nation's most prominent environmental groups. The first non-white leader of the 133-year-old organization promised to close the book on the Sierra Club’s internal wrestling with the racist legacy of its founder, John Muir.
But budget cuts, layoffs, and fights with the group’s union marred his time at the helm. In June, the executive committee of the Sierra Club’s Oregon Chapter voted unanimously to request a vote of no-confidence in Jealous from the national organization’s board, citing his hiring of a senior staff member who was registered as lobbyist for the cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, The New York Times’ Claire Brown reported. Weeks later, the Missouri Chapter voted unanimously to make the same request. Allies on the board accused Jealous’ critics of a racist “pattern of misinformation, character assassination, and discrimination” against the first Black man to hold the top job. But the board placed Jealous on leave last month and, on Monday, said in a statement that it had “unanimously voted to terminate Ben Jealous’ employment for cause.”
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The price of power purchase agreements in the U.S. has increased by 4% on average since the passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. That’s according to data released this morning by the industry group LevelTen Energy, which called the calculations “the clearest signal yet that the market has already begun to reprice in light of these new risks and headwinds.”
Of the 86 U.S. developers surveyed from the LevelTen Marketplace, 86% said “they are now adapting their approach — either by accelerating construction timelines, reprioritizing project pipelines, or both.” Next Monday, the Treasury Department is due to issue guidance for renewable energy projects accessing federal tax credits, following Trump’s executive order directing the Internal Revenue Service to place new restrictions on solar and wind developers. Industry groups have been “circling the wagons” since the orders release, according to Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo, bracing for restrictions that will push up prices for renewables.
The United States is the only major country that hasn’t ratified the United Nations’ 1994 Law of the Sea treaty. Yet the Trump administration has used the country’s “observer” status to push for finalizing a code under the UN-affiliated International Seabed Authority that would allow for permitting commercial mining on the ocean floor. Trump also signed an executive order in April to unilaterally license deep-sea mining if global rules don’t come into effect. At the center of the effort is the Canadian startup The Metals Company, which has designed special machines to harvest mineral-rich nodules on the deep-sea floor. The company and its backers say it’s a cleaner, faster way to increase global mineral supplies than opening more mines on land. But skeptics — including France and China — warn that the rush to industrialize one of the planet’s last untouched wildernesses risks harming fragile and scarcely understood ecosystems, and criticized Washington for threatening to go it alone without international regulations in place.
China was the first country to publicly condemn Trump’s order in April, but Brazil and Panama spoke at last month’s ISA meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, to express support for Beijing’s position, Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reported from the Caribbean capital.
The sweltering streets of Midtown Manhattan on July 29, 2025. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Great news for anyone who, like me, is getting increasingly spooked about microplastics: New research in the journal Sustainable Food Technology found that grapevine cane films could be a great alternative to petrochemical plastics. They’re transparent, leave behind no harmful residues, and biodegrade into soil within 17 days. “These films demonstrate outstanding potential for food packaging applications,” Srinivas Janaswamy, an associate professor in South Dakota State University's Department of Dairy and Food Science, said in a press release. “That is my dream.”
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect the fact that, at the time of publication, Tropical Storm Erin was not yet a hurricane.