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“We all need to get our heads wrapped around more fire, in more places, at more times of the year.”
When I initially set out to interview Justin Angle, one of the authors of This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Yourself, Your Home, and Your Community in the Age of Heat, I’d expected we’d mostly be talking about California.
The forthcoming book is a practical guide and a history of living in the age of wildfires, and has been an invaluable resource in my own reporting on the subject. Written with environmental journalist Nick Mott, This Is Wildfire springs from the co-authors’ six-part 2021 podcast Fireline, and is shrewdly scheduled to be published on August 29, when western fire season really starts to pick up (you can preorder the book here).
Though midsummer is often considered “peak wildfire season,” it is September and October that are “far more destructive and burn through many more acres” due to the abundance of dried-out vegetation and blustery autumnal winds, the Western Fire Chiefs Association writes. In fact, the 2018 Camp Fire — the most deadly and destructive wildfire in California’s history — didn’t start until early November. But last week, as a benchmark for modern wildfire devastation, the Camp Fire was surpassed by the horrific wildfires in Maui; so far, there are 96 confirmed fatalities, a number that authorities expect to rise as search efforts continue.
When I spoke to Angle at the end of last week, we were both still reeling from the news. Our conversation touched on why the tragedy in Hawaii is “shocking but not surprising,” the practicalities of home-hardening and evacuation preparedness, and how Americans will need to come together to learn to live with wildfire. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
This Is Wildfire feels like a natural progression from your podcast, Fireline, but I wanted to go back before that, to when you first became interested in wildfires. What was — if you’ll excuse the pun — the spark?
It might not seem obvious; I’m a business school professor at the University of Montana. But when I moved here in 2012, it was a particularly bad fire and smoke year and I’d never really been exposed to those things in my life. Living through it for the first time, I quickly learned that fire plays a large role not only in the ecosystem here in the northern Rocky Mountains but also in the culture. Missoula is an epicenter for so much important fire work, whether it’s the smokejumper training center and the base, the Rocky Mountain research lab, or the Forest Service and the University of Montana College of Forestry and Conservation doing some really important fire science.
Many of the people I was meeting were prominent players doing important work on fire. So I set out to understand it myself and quickly realized that there seemed to be a lack of general understanding in the community. You know, you read about wildfires and there will be all kinds of vocabulary and jargon, “type three this,” “type one this,” “incident response team,” all sorts of stuff that seemed like gobbly-gook to the average person. It seemed like there was a need for a general explainer. And I was a podcaster — I’d been doing a current affairs radio show for a few years at the time — and I thought about doing a single episode [on wildfire] and quickly realized that, wow, this is a much bigger project that needs journalistic treatment. I’m not trained in journalism so I teamed up with Nick [Mott], who’s an outstanding journalist, and we made Fireline together.
This has been a strange fire year so far, from the smoke event on the East Coast in June to the deadly fires in Maui this week. I have the uneasy sense that your book is going to be increasingly relevant to people who live beyond the traditional borders of the American West in the coming years. As an expert on the topic of wildfire, what are you making of all this?
It’s shocking but not surprising. If you think back to a very formative moment in our country’s relationship with fire, that was the Big Blowup in 1910 when 3 million acres burned [in the inland Northwest]. The smoke from that event blanketed New York City and caused a lot of folks living in that area to think a lot more about wildfire. So maybe we’re witnessing a similar moment where the smoke effects reach more people.
Fiery images in the media this time of year are common, but seeing it in a place that’s unusual, that people don’t associate with burning to the extent they’re seeing now — maybe it breaks through and helps. I mean, one of the big themes of the book is trying to help people imagine and grasp how they can be a part of solutions moving forward. Maybe this is a little motivation for people to, you know, not necessarily wake up, that might be too pejorative a framing, but for fire to be more on the radar screen and for folks to think, Oh, this is a thing that I should be more cognizant of and be thinking about protecting myself and my family from.
One of the really scary things we saw in the Maui fire was how little time people had to evacuate, in part because the fire spread so quickly and unpredictably due to the high winds. In writing a guide for wildfires, what did you want your readers to understand about what they should do in the seconds and minutes after getting an evacuation alert?
First off, be tuned in to all those sources of information. Be signed up for evacuation notices and air quality notices. How that information is disseminated varies a lot from locality to locality. It’s often organized at the county level, but it’s hard to give a one-size-fits-all recommendation; you really have to investigate it in your own area. But that’s absolutely worth the effort, it’s critical.
In the book, we talk about a simple thing called a go bag. If you live in wildfire-prone lands, or any place where natural disaster is a risk — and that’s almost everywhere now — have a go bag with your essential items ready to go. If you need to scramble out the door in moments, it’s ready with your critical items. And it helps put you in that mindset of preparedness.
The other thing for homeowners, with a wind-driven fire — in Maui, I don’t know exactly how much of this occurred — but one of the biggest risks to homes is floating embers finding a weak spot in your home, whether that’s some pine needles in your gutter, or a wooden roof, or some spare wood under your deck. Understand the risks to your home and how they manifest and the work you can do to make your home safer. That could provide a margin of safety and protection that, as a homeowner, you have a lot of control over. Understand how home ignitions work and how they can be prevented with sound maintenance and in some communities, better zoning and better construction and better materials. Some of it is very much accessible to the individual and some of it is going to take more change at the system and policy level.
How close to your home does a wildfire have to be in order to be considered a threat? When should someone start to follow the progress and alerts?
I would advise any distance, and what I mean by any distance is a couple of considerations. If a fire is throwing smoke into your breathing air, then you should be paying attention, you should be in tune with the air quality ratings and how that has an effect on your health, and you should be moderating your activities according to the air quality.
The studies on embers and how far they can float — it’s up to two miles in some of the studies, although some of these fires are creating more intense wind systems. I don’t think I’d want to put a number on it. If there’s a fire within 20 miles of my home, I’m paying attention to it for sure. It’s most likely throwing smoke my way and these fires can spread really fast.
Understanding not only the distance away, but: What are the prevailing wind patterns? What’s the landscape like between your home and the fire? And how much vegetation is there? What areas of defense are there — existing burn scars or areas that have been thinned from previous work by the Forest Service? What sort of access does the Forest Service and other agencies have to that area? So a few different things make it hard to say, like, “This is the number,” but if you’re getting smoke from a fire, generally speaking, it’s close enough for you to be paying attention.
In the book you write, “When [fire is] on the news, it’s nearly always an enemy — something wreaking havoc that we must put an end to.” How should people who write about and cover wildfires rethink the narrative?
Fire is a scary thing and it’s a scary thing for good reason: It can cause tremendous loss of life and property. But I think the notion that it’s always this terrible thing that we have to eradicate from the natural world is, one, incorrect, and two, impossible.
We got really good at suppressing fire for a really long time — so much so that the public expected it to be this thing that the government did for us. Clearly, seeing by the intensity of many of these fires we’re experiencing, that is no longer the case. These fires, if they get out of hand, nobody can control them.
And the other piece of that is: A certain amount of fire is needed. We actually need more fire at the right times of the year in the right places to create more balance in the ecosystem. Our forests will be more resilient to fire; there will be better species health. Some species of trees and animals require fire to germinate, to be healthy. And so I think framing fires as an enemy, as this imminently scary thing, has had some consequences that we now need to think through a little bit more and with a little bit more complexity.
How do you tell the difference between a good and bad fire?
A fire that can burn without creating any risk to human values, homes, and life; a fire that can rejuvenate a forest, clean out the understory, thin out the trees, and create defensible space for future fires to run into or for firefighters to base operations out of — they’re called “resource benefit fires” by the agencies. The takeaway is that not all fire is bad: some are good and in general, we need more of them.
We need to accept that, and also be more accepting of smoke from prescribed fires at different times than we expect it. Here in Missoula, people commonly expect August to be a smoky time of the year and we brace ourselves for it. But sometimes when we get smoke in May, people get cranky, people get upset, and they might even get a little PTSD. Like, “Oh my gosh, is my summer gonna be ruined.” And you know, the truth of the matter is maybe some smoke in those times, when it’s safer to do prescribed burns, is something we need to adapt to. A lot of times, the smoke from prescribed burns or lower-intensity fires is much less concentrated and much shorter in duration. So cumulative exposure to smoke — even though any exposure can have consequences — might lead to better air quality in general if it is spread across a wider period of time.
That was one of the parts of the book that was both very surprising to me and also a lightbulb moment. I can’t remember what the quote was exactly, but it was something along the lines of, like, You’re going to have smoke one way or the other. Do you want it from a megafire, and to have that horrible choking thick smoke, or from a lower intensity burn?
That’s a quote the Forest Service uses commonly and it’s attributable, to the best of my knowledge, to Mark Finney, a scientist based out here in Missoula. He basically says: “How do you want your smoke and when do you want it?” I mean, you’re going to get it regardless.
One of the things we talked about in the book is the relationship between the climate and fire; higher temperatures mean more fire. If you were to look at the historical relationship between temperature and fire, we’re actually in a fire deficit. You would expect to see more fire right now. That’s largely attributable to our suppression. So that doesn’t necessarily mean what we’re seeing in Maui is the new normal, but I think we all need to get our heads wrapped around more fire, in more places, at more times of the year.
A major theme of This Is Wildfire is that we need to tackle these problems as a community, even when that runs against the rugged individualism and libertarian bent of much of the rural West. Are you optimistic that wildfires are something we can come together on?
I think so, mostly because I think we have to. The fire doesn’t care who you voted for if comes for you and your home. And though there is a sense of rugged individualism in the West, there’s also often a spirit of community, particularly in rural areas.
There are things that people can do at the individual level that we outlined in the book about making sure your home ignition zone is resilient to fire. But your efforts need to be part of a community effort. And that can just increase the need for neighborly relations and making fire more salient in community conversations. I’m optimistic that there is a pathway to more communication and coordination.
Where it gets a little thornier, I think, and where I’m still optimistic but maybe not as optimistic, is: Are we going to be able to have more productive conversations around zoning and building policies and saying, “Hey, is it a good idea to build in that place? Is it a good idea to rebuild in that place? Is that appropriate?”
Historically, particularly with wildfire, we’ve not done a good job of asking the hard questions of whether or not we should build in a certain place and how we should build in a certain place. We’re starting to see more and more of it with hurricanes and tornadoes in a variety of states with a variety of political sentiments, so I am optimistic that it can be done with fire and hopefully some of the fire events that we’re having are going to motivate the necessity for those types of hard conversations.
If there’s one thing readers walk away from your book understanding, what would you want that to be?
That not all fires are bad. Some are really beneficial and we actually, on balance, need more fire in the system. And doing so well, I think, gets us to a healthier place on a variety of levels.
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The saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund takes another turn.
On July 3, just after the House voted to send the reconciliation bill to Trump’s desk, a lawyer for the Department of Justice swiftly sent a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Once Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, the letter said, the group of nonprofits suing the government for canceling the biggest clean energy program in the country’s history would no longer have a case.
It was the latest salvo in the saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, former President Joe Biden’s green bank program, which current Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has made the target of his “gold bar” scandal. At stake is nearly $20 billion to fight climate change.
Congress created the program as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. It authorized Biden’s EPA to award that $20 billion to a handful of nonprofits that would then offer low-cost loans to individuals and organizations for solar installations, building efficiency upgrades, and other efforts to reduce emissions. The agency announced the recipients last summer, before its September deadline to get the funds out.
Then Trump took office and ordered his agency heads to pause and review all funding for Inflation Reduction Act programs.
In early March, buoyed by a covert video of a former EPA employee making an unfortunate and widely misunderstood comparison of the effort to award the funding to “throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic, Zeldin notified the recipients that he was terminating their grant agreements. He cited “substantial concerns” regarding “program integrity, the award process, programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse, and misalignment with agency’s priorities.”
In court proceedings over the decision, the government has yet to cite any specific acts of fraud, waste, or abuse that justified the termination — a fact that the initial judge overseeing the case pointed out in mid-April when she ordered a preliminary injunction blocking the EPA from canceling the grants. But the EPA quickly appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, which stayed the lower court’s injunction. The money remains frozen at Citibank, which had been overseeing its disbursement, as the parties await the appeals court’s decision.
As all of this was playing out, Congress wrote and passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The new law rescinds the “unobligated” funding — money that hasn’t yet been spent or contracted out — from nearly 50 Inflation Reduction Act programs, including the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. According to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, the remaining balance in the fund was just $19 million.
The Trump administration, however, is arguing in court that the OBBBA doesn’t just recoup that $19 million, but also the billions in awards at issue in the lawsuit. Congress has rescinded “the appropriated funds that plaintiffs sought to reinstate through this action,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yaakov Roth wrote in his July 3 letter, implying that the awards were no longer officially “obligated” and that all of the money would have to be returned. Therefore, “it is more clear than ever that the district court’s preliminary injunction must be reversed,” he wrote.
Roth cited a statement that Shelley Moore Capito, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, made on the floor of the Senate in June. She said she agreed with Zeldin’s decision to cancel the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, and that it was Congress’ intent to rescind the funds that “had been obligated but were subsequently de-obligated” — about $17 billion in total. She did not acknowledge that Zeldin’s decision was being actively litigated in court.
On Monday, attorneys for the plaintiffs fired back with a message to the court that the reconciliation bill does not, in fact, change anything about the case. They argued that the EPA broke the law by canceling the grants, and that the OBBBA can’t retroactively absolve the agency. They also served up a conflicting statement that Capito made about the fund to Politico in November. “We’re not gonna go claw back money,” she said. “That’s a ridiculous thought.”
Capito’s colleague Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, offered additional evidence on the floor of the Senate Wednesday. He cited the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the repeal of the program of $19 million, noting that it was the amount “EPA had remaining to oversee the program” and that “at no point in our discussions with the majority, directly or in our several conversations with the Parliamentarian, was this score disputed.” Whitehouse also called up a previous statement made by Republican Representative Morgan Griffith, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, during a markup of the bill. “I just want to point out that these provisions that we are talking about only apply as far, as this bill is concerned, to the unobligated balances,” Griffith said.
Regardless, it will be up to the D.C. Circuit Court as to whether the lower court’s injunction was warranted. If it agrees, the nonprofit awardees may still, in fact, be able to get the money flowing for clean energy projects.
“Wishful thinking on the part of DOJ does not moot the ongoing litigation,” Whitehouse said.
A renewable energy project can only start construction if it can get connected to the grid.
The clock is ticking for clean energy developers. With the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar developers have to start construction (whatever that means) in the next 12 months and be operating no later than the end of 2027 to qualify for federal tax credits.
But projects can only get built if they can get connected to the grid. Those decisions are often out of the hands of state, local, or even federal policymakers, and are instead left up to utilities, independent system operators, or regional transmission organizations, which then have to study things like the transmission infrastructure needed for the project before they can grant a project permission to link up.
This process, from requesting interconnection to commercial operation, used to take two years on average as of 2008; by 2023, it took almost five years, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This creates what we call the interconnection queue, where likely thousands of gigawatts of proposed projects are languishing, unable to start construction. The inability to quickly process these requests adds to the already hefty burden of state, local, and federal permitting and siting — and could mean that developers will be locked out of tax credits regardless of how quickly they move.
There’s no better example of the tension between clean energy goals and the process of getting projects into service than the Mid-Atlantic, home to the 13-state electricity market known as PJM Interconnection. Many states in the region have mandates to substantially decarbonize their electricity systems, whereas PJM is actively seeking to bring new gas-fired generation onto the grid in order to meet its skyrocketing projections of future demand.
This mismatch between current supply and present-and-future demand has led to the price for “capacity” in PJM — i.e. what the grid operator has greed to pay in exchange for the ability to call on generators when they’re most needed — jumping by over $10 billion, leading to utility bill hikes across the system.
“There is definitely tension,” Abe Silverman, a senior research scholar at Johns Hopkins University and former general counsel for New Jersey’s utility regulator, told me.
While Silverman doesn’t think that PJM is “philosophically” opposed to adding new resources, including renewables, to the grid, “they don’t have urgency you might want them to have. It’s a banal problem of administrative competency rather than an agenda to stymie new resources coming on the grid.”
PJM is in the midst of a multiyear project to overhaul its interconnection queue. According to a spokesperson, there are around 44,500 megawatts of proposed projects that have interconnection agreements and could move on to construction. Of these, I calculated that about 39,000 megawatts are solar, wind, or storage. Another 63,000 megawatts of projects are in the interconnection queue without an agreement, and will be processed by the end of next year, the spokesperson said, likely making it impossible for wind and solar projects to be “placed in service” by 2028.
Even among the projects with agreements, “there probably will be some winnowing of that down,” Mark Repsher, a partner at PA Consulting Group, told me. “My guess is, of that 44,000 megawatts that have interconnection agreements, they may have other challenges getting online in the next two years.”
PJM has attempted to place the blame for project delays largely at the feet of siting, permitting, and operations challenges.
“Some [projects] are moving to construction, but others are feeling the headwinds of siting and permitting challenges and supply chain backlogs,” PJM’s executive vice president of operations, planning, and security Aftab Khan said in a June statement giving an update on interconnection reforms.
And on high prices, PJM has been increasingly open about blaming “premature” retirements of fossil fuel power plants.
In May, PJM said in a statement in response to a Department of Energy order to keep a dual-fuel oil and natural gas plant in Pennsylvania open that it “has repeatedly documented and voiced its concerns over the growing risk of a supply and demand imbalance driven by the confluence of generator retirements and demand growth. Such an imbalance could have serious ramifications for reliability and affordability for consumers.”
Just days earlier, in a statement ahead of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission conference, PJM CEO Manu Asthana had fretted about “growing resource adequacy concerns” based on demand growth, the cost of building new generation, and, in a direct shot at federal and state policies that encouraged renewables and discouraged fossil fuels, “premature, primarily policy-driven retirements of resources continue to outpace the development of new generation.”
The Trump administration has echoed these worries for the whole nation’s electrical grid, writing in a report issued this week that “if current retirement schedules and incremental additions remain unchanged, most regions will face unacceptable reliability risks.” So has the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which argued in a 2024 report that most of the U.S. and Canada “faces mounting resource adequacy challenges over the next 10 years as surging demand growth continues and thermal generators announce plans for retirement.”
State officials and clean energy advocates have instead placed the blame for higher costs and impending reliability gaps on PJM’s struggles to connect projects, how the electricity market is designed, and the operator’s perceived coolness towards renewables.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro told The New York Times in June that the state should “re-examine” its membership in PJM following last year’s steep price hikes. In February, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin wrote a letter calling for Asthana to be fired. (He will leave the transmission organization by the end of the year, although PJM says the decision was made before Youngkin’s letter.)
That conflict will likely only escalate as developers rush to start projects — which they can only do if they can get an interconnection services agreement from PJM.
In contrast to Silverman, Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program, told me that “PJM, internally and operationally, believes that renewables are a drag on the grid and that dispatchable generation, particularly fossil fuels and nuclear, are essential.”
In May, for instance, PJM announced that it had selected 51 projects for its “Reliability Resource Initiative,” a one-time special process for adding generation to the grid over the next five to six years. The winning bids overwhelmingly involved expanding existing gas-fired plants or building new ones.
The main barrier to getting the projects built that have already worked their way through the queue, Repsher told me, is “primarily permitting.” But even with new barriers thrown up by the OBBBA, “there’s going to be appetite for these projects,” thanks to high demand, Repsher said. “It’s really just navigating all the logistical hurdles.”
Some leaders of PJM states are working on the permitting and deployment side of the equation while also criticizing the electricity market. Pennsylvania’s Shapiro has proposed legislation that would set up a centralized state entity to handle siting for energy projects. Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed legislation in May that would accelerate permitting for energy projects, including preempting local regulations for siting solar.
New Jersey, on the other hand, is procuring storage projects directly.
The state has a mandate stemming from its Clean Energy Act of 2018 to add 2,000 megawatts of energy storage by 2030. In June, New Jersey’s utility regulator started a process to procure at least half of that through utility-scale projects, funded through an existing utility-bill-surcharge.
New Jersey regulators described energy storage as “the most significant source of near-term capacity,” citing specifically the fact that storage makes up the “bulk” of proposed energy capacity in New Jersey with interconnection approval from PJM.
While the regulator issued its order before OBBBA passed, the focus on storage ended up being advantageous. The bill treats energy storage far more generously than wind and solar, meaning that New Jersey could potentially expand its generation capacity with projects that are more likely to pencil due to continued access to tax credits. The state is also explicitly working around the interconnection queue, not raging against it: “PJM interconnection delays do not pose a significant obstacle to a Phase 1 transmission-scale storage procurement target of 1,000 MW,” the order said.
In the end, PJM and the states may be stuck together, and their best hope could be finding some way to work together — and they may not have any other choice.
“A well-functioning RTO is the best way to achieve both low rates for consumers and carbon emissions reductions,” Evan Vaughan, the executive director of MAREC Action, a trade group representing Mid-Atlantic solar, wind, and storage developers, told me. “I think governors in PJM understand that, and I think that they’re pushing on PJM.”
“I would characterize the passage of this bill as adding fuel to the fire that was already under states and developers — and even energy offtakers — to get more projects deployed in the region.”
On Neil Jacobs’ confirmation hearing, OBBBA costs, and Saudi Aramco
Current conditions: Temperatures are climbing toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit in central and eastern Texas, complicating recovery efforts after the floods • More than 10,000 people have been evacuated in southwestern China due to flooding from the remnants of Typhoon Danas • Mebane, North Carolina, has less than two days of drinking water left after its water treatment plant sustained damage from Tropical Storm Chantal.
Neil Jacobs, President Trump’s nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, fielded questions from the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday about how to prevent future catastrophes like the Texas floods, Politico reports. “If confirmed, I want to ensure that staffing weather service offices is a top priority,” Jacobs said, even as the administration has cut more than 2,000 staff positions this year. Jacobs also told senators that he supports the president’s 2026 budget, which would further cut $2.2 billion from NOAA, including funding for the maintenance of weather models that accurately forecast the Texas storms. During the hearing, Jacobs acknowledged that humans have an “influence” on the climate, and said he’d direct NOAA to embrace “new technologies” and partner with industry “to advance global observing systems.”
Jacobs previously served as the acting NOAA administrator from 2019 through the end of Trump’s first term, and is perhaps best remembered for his role in the “Sharpiegate” press conference, in which he modified a map of Hurricane Dorian’s storm track to match Trump’s mistaken claim that it would hit southern Alabama. The NOAA Science Council subsequently investigated Jacobs and found he had violated the organization’s scientific integrity policy.
The Republican budget reconciliation bill could increase household energy costs by $170 per year by 2035 and $353 per year by 2040, according to a new analysis by Evergreen Action, a climate policy group. “Biden-era provisions, now cut by the GOP spending plan, were making it more affordable for families to install solar panels to lower utility bills,” the report found. The law also cut building energy efficiency credits that had helped Americans reduce their bills by an estimated $1,250 per year. Instead, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase wholesale electricity prices almost 75% by 2035, as well as eliminate 760,000 jobs by the end of the decade. Separately, an analysis by the nonpartisan think tank Center for American Progress found that the OBBBA could increase average electricity costs by $110 per household as soon as next year, and up to $200 annually in some states.
EIA
Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco is in talks with Commonwealth LNG in Louisiana to buy liquified natural gas, Reuters reports. The discussion is reportedly for 2 million tons per year of the facility’s 9.4 million-ton annual export capacity, which would help “cement Aramco’s push into the global LNG market as it accelerates efforts to diversify beyond crude oil exports” and be the “strongest signal yet that Aramco intends to take a material position in the U.S. LNG sector,” OilPrice.com notes. LNG demand is expected to grow 50% globally by 2030, but as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported, President Trump’s tariffs could make it harder for LNG projects still in early development, like Commonwealth, to succeed. “For the moment, U.S. LNG is still interesting,” Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a research scholar focused on natural gas at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told Emily. “But if costs increase too much, maybe people will start to wonder.”
Ford confirmed this week that its $3 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan will still qualify for federal tax credits due to eleventh-hour tweaks to the bill’s language, The New York Times reports. Though Ford had said it would build its factory regardless of what happened to the credits, the company’s executive chairman had previously called them “crucial” to the construction of the facility and the employment of the 1,700 people expected to work there. Ford’s battery plant is located in Michigan’s Calhoun County, which Trump won by a margin of 56%. The last-minute tweaks to save the credits to the benefit of Ford “suggest that at least some Republican lawmakers were aware that cuts in the bill would strike their constituents the hardest,” the Times writes.
Italy and Spain are on track to shutter their last remaining mainland coal power plants in the next several months, marking “a major milestone in Europe’s transition to a predominantly renewables-based power system by 2035,” Beyond Fossil Fuels reported Wednesday. To date, 15 European countries now have coal-free grids following Ireland’s move away from coal in 2025.
Italy is set to complete its transition from coal by the end of the summer with the closure of its last two plants, in keeping with the government’s 2017 phase-out target of 2025. Two coal plants in Sardinia will remain operational until 2028 due to complications with an undersea grid connection cable. In Spain, the nation’s largest coal plant will be entirely converted to fossil gas by the end of the year, while two smaller plants are also on track to shut down in the immediate future. Once they do, Spain’s only coal-power plant will be in the Balearic Islands, with an expected phase-out date of 2030.
“Climate change makes this a battle with a ratchet. There are some things you just can’t come back from. The ratchet has clicked, and there is no return. So it is urgent — it is time for us all to wake up and fight.” — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in his 300th climate speech on the Senate floor Wednesday night.