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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.
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Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture
Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”
AccuWeather
Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year. Overall, renewables added a record 858 terawatt hours, nearly 50% more than the previous record set in 2022. Hydro was the largest source of low-carbon power, followed by nuclear. But wind and solar combined overtook hydro last year, while nuclear’s share of the energy mix reached a 45-year low. More solar capacity was installed in 2024 than in any other single year.
Ember
The report notes that demand for electricity rose thanks to heat waves and air conditioning use. This resulted in a slight, 1.4% annual increase in fossil-fuel power generation and pushed power-sector emissions to a new all-time high of 14.5 billion metric tons. “Clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures,” the report said.
President Trump’s new tariffs will have a “limited” effect on the amount of solar components the U.S. imports from Asia because the U.S. already imposes tariffs on these products, according to a report from research firm BMI. That said, the U.S. still relies heavily on imported solar cells, and the new fees are likely to raise costs for domestic manufacturers and developers, which will ultimately be passed on to buyers and could slow solar growth. “Since the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand for solar, wind, and grid components, we do expect that costs will increase for developers due to the tariffs which will now be imposed upon these components,” BMI wrote.
In other tariff news, the British government is adjusting its 2030 target of ending the sale of new internal combustion engine cars to ease some of the pain from President Trump’s new 25% auto tariffs. Under the U.K.’s new EV mandate, carmakers will be able to sell new hybrids through 2035 (whereas the previous version of the rules banned them by 2030), and gas and diesel vans can also be sold through 2035. The changes also carve out exemptions for luxury supercar brands like McLaren and Aston Martin, which will be allowed to keep selling new ICE vehicles beyond 2030 because, the government says, they produce so few. The goal is to “help ease the transition and give industry more time to prepare.” British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insisted the changes have been “carefully calibrated” and their impact on carbon emissions is “negligible.” As The New York Timesnoted, the U.S. is the largest single-country export market for British cars.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Occidental Petroleum’s application to capture and sequester carbon dioxide at its direct air capture facility in Texas, and issued permits that will allow the company to drill and inject the gas more than one mile underground. The Stratos DAC plant is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, Stratos is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. Its success (or failure) could shape the future of DAC investment at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out the Department of Energy’s nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team and casting doubt over the future of the DOE’s $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, it will use the same technology as Occidental’s South Texas DAC hub.
The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub are launching a $27 million effort to fund research into selectively breeding cattle that emit less methane.