You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
A conversation with Stephen Pyne, the world’s most prominent wildfire historian
The world's most prominent wildfire historian found his way into his life's work by accident. A few days after he graduated from high school, Stephen Pyne had been brought on as a laborer on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and was signing his hiring papers when he was asked if he’d be interested in joining a forest fire crew on the North Rim instead.
“I said sure,” Pyne told me. “And it was transformative. Everything I’ve done since then dates from that time on the North Rim.”
Pyne spent fifteen seasons on the North Rim, including twelve as a crew boss, and went on to study fire for a living. He became a fire historian, practically the first of his kind, joined the faculty at Arizona State University, and wrote dozens of books about the history of fire around the world. He retired from teaching in 2018, but continues to work on books — he’s wrapping up one about Mexico at the moment.
I spoke with Pyne about the history of wildfires in the United States, and what the future could look like. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How have we historically thought about fire in the United States?
Well, it depends what time in history you want to go back to. The attitudes we have now are pretty recent, probably less than 100 years. The native peoples used fire widely, for all kinds of things. Heating, lighting, entertainment, agriculture, hunting, foraging, and self-protection. It was all over the place.
Europeans also had fire in their background, but always embedded within an agricultural context of pastoralism or farming. Nobody was particularly putting fires out unless it immediately threatened some asset of theirs, like their house or town. It was just sort of spring clean, part of maintenance of the landscape. So people were always around fire, it was just a constant companion. And then that changes when we began going to industrial combustion, powered by fossil fuels. Suddenly, we don't have fire around us anymore.
Where did it go?
Well, it went into machines. The burning is done off-site and we get the fire through electricity. Processed fossil biomass gave us a lot of the petrochemicals we use for agriculture, so we don't burn the fields for fertilizing and fumigating. We found all these substitutes and then we use machines to deliver those things. So it's taken fire out of the built environment.
When did the American policy of fire suppression really come into being? Was there a turning point?
A couple of things happened. Part of it is we have a long run almost 50 years after the Civil War of very large and disastrous fires. They were associated with clearing settlement, widespread logging, and a lot of it was catalyzed by railroads, which were also a source of these large, disastrous fires that were probably an order of magnitude larger than what we've seen in recent years. Hundreds of people were killed.
And then in the summer of 1910, a series of large fires sort of amassed into what became known as the Big Blowup. This was about three and a quarter million acres burned in the Northern Rockies, killing 78 firefighters the Forest Service had hired in six different incidents all at the same time, during the afternoon and evening of August 20. Traumatized the US Forest Service, which at the time was five years old.
Its leaders determined they were never going to allow that to happen again, and the two guys who were in charge of the firefighting in the Northern Rockies became chief foresters during the 1920s and 1930s. So it was just one generation of leaders, mostly younger men, who were traumatized, and the easiest way to sell the message of what they were doing was to eliminate all fires. The urban elites understood that message, because that's how urban fire services work.
So we spent about 50 years trying to take all fires out of the landscape. And we've spent the last 50 years trying to put good fire back in.
How’s that been working?
It turns out fire is one of these things that’s easy to remove and hard to reinstate. It’s like a threatened species — if you want to reintroduce a species to a landscape, you often find that a lot of conditions have changed. That’s tough to work with.
What are the conditions that have changed that made reintroducing fires so hard?
Well, a lot of it is just the forest changed. And this was a result of overgrazing. selective logging, or outright clear cutting, which allowed stuff to grow back in ways that are outside the norm. Sheep and cattle have stripped away the grasses that made light [more manageable] fires possible, and other stuff grew up in their place. Now you've paved the landscape with dense layers of pine needles and shrubs, and they don’t burn the same way, so you've created a fire trap. All of this actually started with westward expansion, before the Forest Service entered the scene.
And so that 50 year period of suppression must’ve made it worse.
Yeah, that was really disastrous. By the ‘60s, we see pushback. We’d seen the consequences. And I'll point out that this is well before global climate change is on anybody’s agenda. These landscapes were messed up ecologically. Trees and other species weren’t regenerating.
So what starts happening in the ‘60s?
We saw civil society begin to create an alternative to state-sponsored fire suppression. There was a ranch north of Tallahassee that began hosting fire ecology conferences in 1962, they really introduced the term fire ecology. That same year, the Nature Conservancy conducted its first burn at a prairie because they couldn’t maintain the prairie without burning.
It was a real David versus Goliath story. Forestry was too dyed-in-the-wool hostile towards fire. They had sort of made their public identity as firefighters. But all kinds of things started coming together and there was the sentiment that fire should be restored just like wolves and grizzlies.
You mentioned burning had historically been done by the indigenous communities. How involved were those communities in these discussions? Were they involved at all?
Almost none. There were some people who was reintroducing fire to indigenous reservations, but they were foresters with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But it’s only much more recently that [Native American communities] have sort of taken on cultural burning as a way of restoring their identities and their traditions and maybe even claiming back some of their lands.
We often say that colonialism suppressed indigenous knowledge. Well, that’s true. But something that gets lost, I think, all the time, is that there was a quarrel between the elites and traditional knowledge. Europe’s elites treated Europe’s peasants with disdain as well. Many of the white settlers who weren’t elites used fire as well, but the elites didn’t like that.
Obviously in the last couple of weeks Hawaii has been on everyone's mind. What’s the history of fire in Hawaii?
Before it was colonized, Hawaii was fairly immune to fire. The forests don’t seem to have been particularly responsive to it. You have lightning caused fires, you have volcanoes that set fires but then the lava was the bigger problem there.
Fire in Hawaii starts with human contact, when they begin clearing the forest and introducing exotics. This started with Polynesians before Europeans got into the act. There was a lot of extermination particularly of flightless birds and they introduced pigs and rats and other things. But then it really began accelerating with European contact, when they converted large areas to plantations for sugar and pineapples or grass pastures to raise cows, and so forth. So you have larger scale land clearing that goes on.
But Hawaii was not built to burn in the way California is. We created more combustible landscapes. Tropical grasses grow very well there and burn very well, and once they burn they create conditions that are more favorable to themselves. So it’s a positive feedback system.
We’ve seen a lot of coverage about how climate change is going to intensify wildfires. What do you, as a person who studies wildfires from around the world, think needs to happen going forward?
I mean, these really nasty megafires we've seen recently and that are doing a lot of damage to communities are really a pathology of the developed world. You don’t you don’t see these in the developing world. They have lots of burning, but they don’t have these massive fires.
I think we need to do three things, and we need to do them at the same time. The first is to protect our communities. It’s totally absurd that we have so many fires started by power lines. There’s no reason for towns to burn, and we know how to keep them from burning. So hardening our cities is the first step. The second is we need to recover the countryside. Not just wild lands, but the countryside. We have to put it into a shape that makes fire control easier and will probably also enhance the biology of the site. There are a lot of controversies around that, and there’s but we have got to have ways of negotiating all those values and perceptions. But that’s something that can be done.
The third thing we need to do is tame climate change. We can do a lot of mitigation but at some point unless the accelerating climate upheaval isn’t stopped and even reversed, it will override all the other stuff we do.
Do you think of fire as something to fear?
I think there’s bad fire. Bad fire kills people, it destroys towns, it can trash ecosystems. Fire can do a lot of damage, but it can also be absolutely essential. So it’s not either good or bad.
We have a species monopoly over fire. We made a mutual assistance pact with it a long time ago. You have to tend it, you have to feed it, you have to train it, you have to clean up after it. You have to integrate it into social activities. It’s not just a physical tool like a hammer or an axe that can be picked up and put down. It’s something we domesticated in a way. And we’ve lost control over what’s been a companion that we’ve had for all our existence as a species.
We are fire creatures. You know, we use fire in a way that no other creature does. We’ve abrogated that role. We’ve abused it. But it’s only in the last century or so that we have lost the capacity to manage fire. So this is just us reclaiming our heritage and taking responsibility for the power that our relationship with fire gave us. It’s not beyond our ability to deal with it.
Read more about wildfires:
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and the rest only have so much political capital to spend.
When Donald Trump first became a serious Presidential candidate in 2015, many big tech leaders sounded the alarm. When the U.S. threatened to exit the Paris Agreement for the first time, companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook (now Meta) took out full page ads in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal urging Trump to stay in. He didn’t — and Elon Musk, in particular, was incensed.
But by the time specific climate legislation — namely the Inflation Reduction Act — was up for debate in 2022, these companies had largely clammed up. When Trump exited Paris once more, the response was markedly muted.
Now that the IRA’s tax credits face clear and present threats, this same story is playing out again. As the Senate makes its changes to the House’s proposed budget bill, tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are keeping quiet, at least publicly, about their lobbying efforts. Most did not respond to my request for an interview or a statement clarifying their position, except to say they had “nothing to share on this topic,” as Microsoft did.
That’s not to say they have no opinion about the fate of clean energy tax credits. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon have all voluntarily set ambitious net-zero emissions targets that they’re struggling to meet, largely due to booming data center electricity demand. They’re some of the biggest buyers of solar and wind energy, and are investing heavily in nuclear and geothermal. (On Wednesday morning, Pennsylvania’s Talen Energy announced an expanded power purchase agreement with Amazon, for nearly 2 gigawatts of power through 2042.) All of these energy sources are a whole lot more accessible with tax credits than without.
There’s little doubt the tech companies would prefer an abundant supply of cheap, clean energy. Exactly how much they’re willing to fight for it is the real question.
The answer may come down to priorities. “It’s hard to overstate how much this race for AI has just completely changed the business models and the way that these big tech companies are thinking about investment,” Jeff Navin, co-founder of the climate-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me. “While they’re obviously going to be impacted by the price of energy, I think they’re even more interested and concerned about how quickly they can get energy built so that they can build these data centers.”
The tech industry has shown much more reluctance to stand up to Trump, period, this time around. As the president has moved from a political outsider to the central figure in the Republican party, hyperscalers have increasingly curried his favor as they advocate against actions that could pose an existential risk to their business — think tighter regulations on the tech sector or AI, or tariffs on key supplies made in Asia.
As Navin put it to me, “When you have a president who has very strong opinions on wind turbines and randomly throws companies’ names in tweets in the middle of the night, do you really want to stick your neck out and take on something that the president views as unpopular if you’ve got other business in front of him that could be more impactful for your bottom line?”
It is undeniably true that the AI-driven data center boom is pushing these companies to look for new sources of clean power. Last week Meta signed a major nuclear deal with Constellation Energy. Microsoft is also partnering with Constellation to reopen Three Mile Island, while Google and Amazon have both announced investments in companies developing small modular reactors. Meta, Google, and Microsoft are also investing in next-generation geothermal energy startups.
But while the companies are eager to tout these partnerships, Navin suspects most of their energy lobbying is now being directed towards efforts such as permitting reform and building out transmission infrastructure. Publicly available lobbying records confirm that these are indeed focus areas, as they’re critical to bringing data centers online quickly, regardless of how they’re powered and whether that power is subsidized. “They’re not going to stop construction on an energy project that has access to electricity just because that electricity is marginally more expensive,” Navin told me. “There’s just too much at stake.”
Tech companies have lobbied on numerous budget, tax, sustainability, and clean energy issues thus far this year. Amazon’s lobbying report is the only one to specifically call out efforts on “renewable energy tax credits,” while Meta cites “renewable energy policy” and Microsoft name-drops the IRA. But there’s no hard and fast standard for how companies describe the issues they’re lobbying on or what they’re looking to achieve. And perhaps most importantly, the reports don’t disclose how much money they allot to each issue, which would illuminate their priorities.
Lobbying can also happen indirectly, via industry groups such as the Clean Energy Buyers Association and the Data Center Coalition. Both have been vocal advocates for preserving the tax credits. The Wall Street Journal recently detailed a lobbying push by the latter — which counts Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google among its most prominent members — that involved meetings with about 30 Republican senators and a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
DCC didn’t respond to my request for an interview. But CEBA CEO Rich Powell told me, “If we take away these incentives right now, just as we’re getting the rust off the gears and getting back into growth mode for the electricity economy, we’re really concerned about price spikes.”
The leader of another industry group, Advanced Energy United, shared Powell’s concern that passing the bill would mean higher electricity prices. Taking away clean energy incentives would ”fundamentally undercut the financing structure for — let’s be frank — the vast majority of projects in the interconnection queue today,” Harry Godfrey, the managing director of AEU, told me.
Being part of an industry association is by no means a guarantee of political alignment on every issue. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are also members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — by far the largest lobbying group in the U.S. — which has a long history of opposing climate action and the IRA itself. Apple even left the Chamber in 2009 due to its climate policy stances.
But Powell and Godfrey implied that the tech giants' views are — or at least ought to be — in alignment with theirs. “Many of our members are lobbying independently. Many of them are lobbying alongside us. And then many of them are supporting CEBA to go and lobby on this,” Powell told me, though he wouldn’t reveal what actions any specific hyperscalers were taking.
Godfrey said that AEU’s positions are “certainly reflective of what large energy consumers, notably tech companies, have been working to pursue across a variety of technologies and with applicability to a couple of different types of credits.”
And yet hyperscalers may have already spent a good deal of their political capital fighting for a niche provision in the House’s version of the budget bill, which bans state-level AI regulation for a decade. That would make the AI boom infinitely easier for tech companies, who don’t want to deal with a patchwork of varying regulations, or really most regulations at all.
On top of everything else, big tech in particular is dealing with government-led anti-trust lawsuits, both at home and abroad. Google recently lost two major cases to the Department of Justice, related to its search and advertising business. A final decision is pending regarding the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta, regarding the company’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. Not to be outdone, Amazon will also be fighting an antitrust case brought by the FTC next year.
As these companies work to convince the public, politicians, and the courts that they’re not monopolistic rule-breakers, and that AI is a benevolent technology that the U.S. must develop before China, they certainly seem to be relinquishing the clean energy mantle they once sought to carry, at least rhetorically. We’ll know more once all these data centers come online. But if the present is any indication, speed, not green electrons, is the North Star.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Amazon’s power purchase agreement with Talen Energy.
The new funding comes as tax credits for geothermal hang in the balance.
The good news is pouring in for the next-generation geothermal developer Fervo Energy. On Tuesday the company reported that it was able to drill its deepest and hottest geothermal well to date in a mere 16 days. Now on Wednesday, the company is announcing an additional $206 million in financing for its Cape Station project in Utah.
With this latest tranche of funding, the firm’s 500-megawatt development in rural Beaver County is on track to deliver 24/7 clean power to the grid beginning in 2026, reaching full operation in 2028. The development is shaping up to be an all-too-rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.
The bulk of this latest financing comes from the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program, which provided $100 million in project-level equity funding. The energy and commodity trading company Mercuria provided $60 million in corporate loans, increasing its existing fixed-term loan from $40 million to $100 million. An additional $45.6 million in short-term debt financing came from XRL-ALC, an affiliate of X-Caliber Rural Capital, which provides loans to infrastructure projects in rural areas. That comes on top of a previous $100 million loan from the firm.
The plan is for Cape Station to deliver 100 megawatts of grid power in 2026, with the additional 400 megawatts by 2028. The facility has the necessary permitting to expand production to two gigawatts — twice the size of a standard nuclear reactor. And on Monday, the company announced that an independent report from the consulting firm DeGolyer & MacNaughton confirms that the project could expand further still — eventually supporting over 5 gigawatts of clean power at depths of up to 13,000 feet. The company’s latest drilling results, which reached 15,765 feet at 520 degrees Fahrenheit, could push the project’s potential power output even higher.
Traditional geothermal wells normally max out at around 10,000 feet, and must be built in locations where a lucky confluence of geological features come together: high temperatures, porous rock, and naturally occurring water or steam. But because Fervo can drill thousands of feet deeper, it’s able to access hot rocks in locations that weren’t previously suitable for geothermal development, pumping high-pressure water down into the wells to fracture rocks and thus create its own geothermal reservoirs.
The primary customer for Fervo’s Cape Station project is Southern California Edison, which signed a 320-megawatt power purchase agreement with the company last year, advertised as the largest geothermal PPA ever. Shell was also announced as a customer this year. Fervo is already providing 3.5 megawatts of power to Google via a pilot project in Nevada, which it’s seeking to expand, entering into a 115 megawatt PPA with NV Energy and the tech giant to further build out production at this location.
Fervo’s latest funding comes on top of last February’s $244 million Series D round led by Devon Energy, as well as an additional $255 million in corporate equity and debt financing that it announced last December. On top of investments from well known climate tech venture firms such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Galvanize Climate Solutions, the company has secured institutional investment from Liberty Mutual as well as public pension funds such as the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Fervo, like all clean energy startups, also stands to benefit greatly from the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, which are now in jeopardy as President Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill works its way through the Senate. While Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has traditionally been a booster of geothermal energy and is advocating to keep tax incentives for the technology in place through 2031, the bill as it stands would essentially erase incentives for all geothermal projects that start construction more than 60 days after the bill’s passage.
Fervo broke ground on Cape Station in 2023, so that project will make the cut. For future Fervo developments, it’s much less clear. But for now, the company seems to be flush with cash and potential in a climate tech world awash in ill omens.