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With the ongoing disaster approaching its second week, here’s where things stand.
A week ago, forecasters in Southern California warned residents of Los Angeles that conditions would be dry, windy, and conducive to wildfires. How bad things have gotten, though, has taken everyone by surprise. As of Monday morning, almost 40,000 acres of Los Angeles County have burned in six separate fires, the biggest of which, Palisades and Eaton, have yet to be fully contained. The latest red flag warning, indicating fire weather, won’t expire until Wednesday.
Many have questions about how the second-biggest city in the country is facing such unbelievable devastation (some of these questions, perhaps, being more politically motivated than others). Below, we’ve tried to collect as many answers as possible — including a bit of good news about what lies ahead.
A second Santa Ana wind event is due to set in Monday afternoon. “We’re expecting moderate Santa Ana winds over the next few days, generally in the 20 to 30 [mile per hour] range, gusting to 50, across the mountains and through the canyons,” Eric Drewitz, a meteorologist with the Forest Service, told me on Sunday. Drewitz noted that the winds will be less severe than last week’s, when the fires flared up, but he also anticipates they’ll be “more easterly,” which could blow the fires into new areas. A new red flag warning has been issued through Wednesday, signaling increased fire potential due to low humidity and high winds for several days yet.
If firefighters can prevent new flare-ups and hold back the fires through that wind event, they might be in good shape. By Friday of this week, “it looks like we could have some moderate onshore flow,” Drewitz said, when wet ocean air blows inland, which would help “build back the marine layer” and increase the relative humidity in the region, decreasing the chances of more fires. Information about the Santa Anas at that time is still uncertain — the models have been changing, and the wind is tricky to predict the strength of so far out — but an increase in humidity will at least offer some relief for the battered Ventura and Orange Counties.
The Palisades Fire, the biggest in L.A., ripped through the hilly and affluent area between Santa Monica and Malibu, including the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the second-most expensive zip code in Los Angeles and home to many celebrities. Structures in Big Rock, a neighborhood in Malibu, have also burned. The fire has also encroached on the I-405 and the Getty Villa, and destroyed at least two homes in Mandeville Canyon, a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar homes. Students at nearby University of California, Los Angeles, were told on Friday to prepare for a possible evacuation.
The Eaton Fire, the second biggest blaze in the area, has killed 16 people in Altadena, a neighborhood near Pasadena, according to the Los Angeles Times, making it one of the deadliest fires in the modern history of California.
The 1,000-acre Kenneth fire is 100% contained but still burning near Calabasas and the gated community of Hidden Hills. The Hurst Fire has burned nearly 800 acres and is 89% contained and is still burning near Sylmar, the northernmost neighborhood in L.A. Though there are no evacuation notices for either the Kenneth or the Hurst fires, residents in the L.A. area should monitor the current conditions as the situation continues to be fluid and develop.
The 43-acre Sunset Fire, which triggered evacuations last week in Hollywood and Hollywood Hills, burned no homes and is 100% contained.
The Lidia Fire, which ignited in a remote area south of Acton, California, on Wednesday afternoon, burned 350 acres of brush and is 100% contained.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire, and investigations typically don’t begin until after the fire is under control and the area is safe to reenter, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo. He also noted, however, that urban fires are typically easier to pinpoint the cause of than wildland fires due to the availability of witnesses and surveillance footage.
The vast majority of wildfires, 85%, are caused by humans.So far, investigators have ruled out lightning — another common fire-starter — because there were no electrical storms in the area when the fires started. In the case of the Palisades Fire, there were no power lines in the area of the ignition, though investigators are now looking into an electrical transmission tower in Eaton Canyon as the possible cause of the deadly fire in Altadena. There have been rumors that arsonists started the fires, but investigators say that scenario is also pretty unlikely due to the spread of the fires and how remote the ignition areas are.
Officially, 24 people have died, but that tally is likely to rise. California Governor Gavin Newsom said Sunday that he expects “a lot more” deaths will be added to the total in the coming days as search efforts continue.
Incoming President Donald Trump slammed the response to the L.A. fires in a Truth Social post on Sunday morning: “This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country,” he wrote. “They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?”
Though there is much blame going around — not all of it founded in reality — the challenges facing firefighters are immense. Last week, because of strong Santa Ana winds, fire crews could not drop suppressants like water or chemical retardant on the initial blazes. (In strong winds, water and retardant will blow away before they reach the flames on the ground.)
Fighting a fire in an urban or suburban area is also different from fighting one in a remote, wild area. In a true wildfire, crews don’t use much water; firefighters typically contain the blazes by creating breaks — areas cleared of vegetation that starve a fire of fuel and keep it from spreading. In an urban or suburban event, however, firefighters can’t simply hack through a neighborhood, and typically have to use water to fight structure fires. Their priority also shifts from stopping the fire to evacuating and saving people, which means putting out the fire itself has to wait.
What’s more, the L.A. area faced dangerous fire weather going into last week — with wind gusts up to 100 miles per hour and dry air — and the persistence of the Santa Ana winds during firefighting operations through the weekend made it extremely difficult for emergency managers to gain a foothold.
Trump and others have criticized Los Angeles for being unprepared for the fires, given reports that some fire hydrants ran dry or had low pressure during operations in Pacific Palisades. According to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, about 20% of hydrants were affected, mostly at higher elevations.
The problem isn’t a lack of preparation, however. It’s that the L.A. wildfires are so large and widespread, the county’s preparations were quickly overwhelmed. “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quiñones said in a news conference last week. When houses burn down, water mains can break open. Civilians also put a strain on the system when they use hoses or sprinkler systems to try to protect their homes.
On Sunday, Judy Chu, the Democratic lawmaker representing Altadena, confirmed that fire officials had told her there was enough water to continue the battle in the days ahead. “I believe that we're in a good place right now,” she told reporters. Newsom, meanwhile, has responded to criticism over the water failure by ordering an investigation into the weak or dry hydrants.
So-called “super soaker” planes have had no problem with water access; they’re scooping directly from the ocean.
Yes. Although aerial support was grounded in the early stages of the wildfires due to severe Santa Ana winds, flights resumed during lulls in the storms last week.
There is a misconception, though, that water and retardant drops “put out” fires; they don’t. Instead, aerial support suppresses a fire so crews can get in close and use traditional methods, like cutting a fire break or spraying water. “All that up in the air, all that’s doing is allowing the firefighters [on the ground] a chance to get in,” Bobbie Scopa, a veteran firefighter and author of the memoir Both Sides of the Fire Line, told me last week.
With winds expected to pick up early this week, aerial firefighting operations may be grounded again. “If you have erratic, unpredictable winds to where you’ve got a gust spread of like 20 to 30 knots,” i.e. 23 to 35 miles per hour, “that becomes dangerous,” Dan Reese, a veteran firefighter and the founder and president of the International Wildfire Consulting Group, told me on Friday.
Because of the direction of the Santa Ana winds, wildfire smoke should mostly blow out to sea. But as winds shift, unhealthy air can blow into populated areas, affecting the health of residents.
Wildfire smoke is unhealthy, period, but urban and suburban smoke like that from the L.A. fires can be particularly detrimental. It’s not just trees and brush immolating in an urban fire, it’s also cars, and batteries, and gas tanks, and plastics, and insulation, and other nasty, chemical-filled things catching fire and sending fumes into the air. PM2.5, the inhalable particulates from wildfire smoke, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the U.S.
You can read Heatmap’s guide to staying safe during extreme smoke events here.
“The bad news is, I’m not seeing any rain chances,” Drewitz, the Forest Service meteorologist, told me on Sunday. Though the marine layer will bring wetter air to the Los Angeles area on Friday, his models showed it’ll be unlikely to form precipitation.
Though some forecasters have signaled potential rain at the end of next week, the general consensus is that the odds for that are low, and that any rain there may be will be too light or short-lived to contribute meaningfully to extinguishing the fires.
The chaparral shrublands around Los Angeles are supposed to burn every 30 to 130 years. “There are high concentrations of terpenes — very flammable oils — in that vegetation; it’s made to burn,” Scopa, the veteran firefighter, told me.
What isn’t normal, though, is the amount of rain Los Angeles got ahead of this past spring — 52.46 inches in the preceding two years, the wettest period in the city’s history since the late 1800s — which was followed by a blisteringly hot summer and a delayed start to this year’s rainy season. Since October, parts of Southern California have received just 10% of their normal rainfall
This “weather whiplash” is caused by a warmer atmosphere, which means that plants will grow explosively due to the influx of rain and then dry out when the drought returns, leaving lots of dry fuels ready and waiting for a spark. “This is really, I would argue, a signature of climate change that is going to be experienced almost everywhere people actually live on Earth,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who authored a new study on the pattern, told The Washington Post.
We know less about how climate change may affect the Santa Anas, though experts have some theories.
At least 12,000 structures have burned so far in the fires, which is already exacerbating the strain on the Los Angeles housing market — one of the country’s tightest even before the fires — as thousands of displaced people look for new places to live. “Dozens and dozens of people are going after the same properties,” one real estate agent told the Los Angeles Times. The city has reminded businesses that price gouging — including raising rental prices more than 10% — during an emergency is against the law.
Los Angeles had a shortage of about 370,000 homes before the fires, and between 2021 and 2023, the county added fewer than 30,000 new units per year. Recovery grants and federal aid can lag, and it often takes more than two years for even the first Housing and Urban Development Disaster Recovery Grants’ expenditures to go out.
My colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote for Heatmap that the economic impact of the Los Angeles fire is already much higher than that of other fires, such as the 2018 Camp fire, partly because of the value of the Pacific Palisades real estate.
The wildfires may “deal a devastating blow to [California’s] fragile home insurance market,” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last week. In recent years, home insurers have left California or declined to write new policies, at least partially due to the increased risk of wildfires in the state.
Depending on the extent of the damage from the fires, the coffers of California’s FAIR Plan — which insures homeowners who can’t get insurance otherwise, including many in Pacific Palisades and Altadena — could empty, causing it to seek money from insurers, according to the state’s regulations. As Zeitlin writes, “This would mean that Californians who were able to buy private insurance — because they don’t live in a region of the state that insurers have abandoned — could be on the hook for massive wildfire losses.”
First and foremost, sign up for all relevant emergency alerts. Make sure to turn on the sound on your phone and keep it near you in case of a change in conditions. Pack a “go bag” with essentials and consider filling your gas tank now so that you can evacuate at a moment’s notice if needed. Read our guide on what to do if you get a pre-evacuation or an evacuation notice ahead of time so that you’re not scrambling for information if you get an alert.
The free Watch Duty app has become a go-to resource for people affected by the fires, including friends and family of Angelenos who may themselves be thousands of miles away. The app provides information on fire perimeters, evacuation notices, and power outages. Its employees pull information directly from emergency responders’ radio broadcasts and sometimes beat official sources to disseminating it. If you need an endorsement: Emergency responders rely on the app, too.
There are many scams in the wake of disasters as crooks look to take advantage of desperate people — and those who want to help them. To play it safe, you can use a hub like the one established by GoFundMe, which is actively vetting campaigns related to the L.A. fires. If you’re looking to volunteer your time, make a donation of clothing or food, or if you’re able to foster animals the fire has displaced, you can use this handy database from the Mutual Aid Network L.A. There are also many national organizations, such as the Red Cross, that you can connect with if you want to help.
The City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Fire Department have asked that do-gooders not bring donations directly to fire stations or shelters; such actions can interfere with emergency operations. Their website provides more information about how you can help — productively — on their website.
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Chris Wright and Doug Burgum started their reign this week by amplifying the president and beating back Biden-era policies.
The Trump administration’s two most senior energy officials, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, are both confirmed and in office as of this week, and they have started to lay out their vision for how their agencies will carry out Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.
Where the Biden administration sought to advance traditional Democratic policy around public lands (namely, to expand, conserve, and preserve them) while also boosting the development of renewable energy, Burgum and Wright have laid out something of the inverse approach: Maximize the production of domestic energy and minerals, with a focus on fossil fuels, and to the extent non-fossil fuels are a priority, they should be “baseload” or “firm” power sources like nuclear, hydropower, or geothermal.
If Michael Pollan’s basic dietary guidance is “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” then the Burgum-Wright energy policy might be, “produce energy, as much as you can, mostly fossil fuels.”
Burgum and Wright each laid out his philosophy in the form of secretarial orders, the agency equivalent of an executive order.
“Our focus must be on advancing innovation to improve energy and critical minerals identification, permitting, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, distribution, exporting, and generation capacity of the United States to provide a reliable, diversified, growing, and affordable supply of energy for our Nation,” reads Burgum’s “Unleashing American Energy” order.
“The Department will bring a renewed focus to growing baseload and dispatchable generation to reliably meet growing demand,”reads Wright’s first secretarial order.
Burgum’s orders are largely Interior-specific elaborations of Trump’s early round of executive orders. In “Addressing the National Energy Emergency,” Burgum echoes Trump’s executive order declaring — you guessed it — a national energy emergency, calling for the department to “identify the emergency authorities available to them, as well as all other legal authorities, to facilitate the identification, permitting, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, distribution, exporting, and generation of domestic energy resources and critical minerals.” He also criticizes the Biden administration for having “driven our Nation into a national emergency, where a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid, require swift and decisive action.”
In another order, “Unleashing American Energy,” which follows a similarly titled executive order, Burgum cites the Trump administration’s call for deregulation to allow more extraction of energy commodities and energy production: “By removing such regulations, America's natural resources can be unleashed to restore American prosperity. Our focus must be on advancing innovation to improve energy and critical minerals identification, permitting, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, distribution, exporting, and generation capacity of the United States to provide a reliable, diversified, growing, and affordable supply of energy for our Nation.”
The order calls for the Interior department to examine a number of Biden-era guidelines and rules, including 2024’s public lands rule, formally known as Conservation and Landscape Health, which went into effect last June. The rule put landscape preservation on a similar plane to energy development, mining, logging, or grazing among uses for public lands, and was opposed by a number of interest groups, including the ranching and energy industries.
It’s not just public lands that will be more open to fossil fuel exploration and extraction, it’s also the seas. Burgum issued an order following on Trump’s attempt to roll back restrictions on offshore drilling, notifying the department that “all Biden [outer continental shelf] withdrawals of the OCS for oil and gas leasing have been revoked.”
Two other orders were primarily deregulatory. One implemented the Trump guideline that “for each new regulation that they propose to promulgate, they shall identify at least 10 existing Department regulations to be eliminated.” And the other followed on Trump’s order opening up Alaska to more mining and energy extraction, which, among other actions, revoked a 2021 order cancelling oil and gas leases in the Alaska National Wildfire Reserve and reinstated a Secretary’s Order issued by then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinkein 2017 opening up Alaska for more oil activity, which itself reversed a 2013 order limiting oil and gas development.
While Burgum’s orders focus on the energy potential beneath the ground and the sea, Wright’s first secretarial order is a celebration of energy writ large, consistent with his often articulated views on the subject. “Energy is the essential ingredient that enables everything we do. A highly energized society can bring health, wealth, and opportunity for all,” he writes.
The document starts by talking down net-zero goals, saying that “net-zero policies raise energy costs for American families and businesses, threaten the reliability of our energy system, and undermine our energy and national security.”
“Going forward,” it says, “the Department’s goal will be to unleash the great abundance of American energy required to power modern life and to achieve a durable state of American energy dominance.”
In Wright’s version of the “energy emergency” order, he commits the department to “identify[ing] and exercise[ing] all lawful authorities to strengthen the nation’s grid, including the backbone of the grid, our transmission system,” in order to deal with the “current and anticipated load growth on our nation’s electric utilities.” He also says the department will focus on “baseload and dispatchable generation to reliably meet growing demand” — i.e. natural gas, along with some geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear.
In keeping with the president’s hostility or indifference toward the most widespread forms of renewable energy generation, Wright writes that the DOE will focus its substantial research and development efforts on “affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including fossil fuels, advanced nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower,” and specifically calls out the Department’s fusion research for focus: “The Department must also prioritize true technological breakthroughs — such as nuclear fusion, high-performance computing, quantum computing.”
Wright refers to the energy department’s considerable research on renewables through its network of national laboratories only via implication, with an eye toward containing the funding demands of such work. “The Department will comprehensively review its R&D portfolio,” the order says. “As part of that review, the Department will rigorously enforce project milestones to ensure that taxpayer resources are allocated appropriately and cost-effectively consistent with the law.” Not mentioned at all was the department’s Loan Programs Office, which the Biden administration fortified by means of the Inflation Reduction Act. Bloomberg News reported that the department is looking to roll back some of the office’s loan guarantees to ensure that its funding awards “are consistent with President Trump’s executive orders and priorities.”
One area where there may be consistency between the Biden and Trump energy departments is in support for nuclear power.
Throughout the order, nuclear energy gets called out for praise and attention, while other forms of non-carbon-emitting energy go unmentioned. “The long-awaited American nuclear renaissance must launch during President Trump’s administration. As global energy demand continues to grow, America must lead the commercialization of affordable and abundant nuclear energy. As such, the Department will work diligently and creatively to enable the rapid deployment and export of next-generation nuclear technology,” Wright writes.
Like Burgum, Wright takes a dim view of Biden-era regulatory initiatives, committing the department to reviewing proposals for liquefied natural gas terminals and promising a “comprehensive review of the DOE Appliance Standards Program.” Scrapping or overhauling appliance efficiency rules, like other envisioned Trump policies, would also help bolster demand for energy writ large.
The orders, while consistent with Trump’s broad directives on energy policy, do not match the vitriol and dismissiveness towards renewables that Trump himself employs. But that may be cold comfort to climate advocates and renewables developers. In Burgum’s and Wright’s philosophy, renewables have been given pride of place in government policies, effectively holding down fossil fuel resources — and that is going to change.
In one order, Burgum directs the department to ensure that its policies do not “bias government or private-sector decision making in favor of renewable energy projects as compared to oil, gas, or other mineral resource projects.” And neither he nor Wright appears to see little role for the fastest growing sources of generation — solar — in American “energy dominance.”
That is also in keeping with what Trump has been doing to achieve his energy priorities, as opposed to what he’s been saying about “unleashing American energy.” During the chaotic first few weeks of this administration, federal officials do not appear to have been treating fossil fuel and renewables equally so much as they have been scrambling to comply with executive orders by obstructing renewable permitting and then reversing themselves (unless, of course, it’s offshore wind).
As Trump’s energy policy finds its feet, we’ll find out if energy dominance is really just fossil fuel dominance.
On changes at the EPA, New York’s climate superfund, and a failed merger
Current conditions: Winter storm Garnett could drop up to 9 inches of snow on parts of New England this weekend • A blast of warm air is breaking temperature records in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado • Two people were killed in Tennessee by a possible tornado. If confirmed, this would be the first deadly tornado of 2025.
The Federal Highway Administration issued a letter to state Departments of Transportation on Thursday declaring that states were no longer authorized to spend billions of dollars previously approved for electric vehicle charging networks. The decree pertains to the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, or NEVI, a program created in 2021 under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which allocated $5 billion to states to strategically build electric vehicle charging networks along major roads. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains, advocates believed the NEVI program was untouchable because money that’s already been allocated can’t be recalled, but the FHWA apparently thinks it has found a workaround. Under NEVI, states are each allocated a certain amount of money every year for five years, and they have to submit an annual plan for how they intend to use the funds. Those plans must align with overall program guidance published by the secretary of transportation. The new leadership at the Department of Transportation has decided to rescind the previously issued guidance. That means the state plans that were previously approved are no longer valid. The letter says states will still be able to get reimbursed for expenses related to previously awarded projects, “in order to not disrupt current financial commitments.” But the more than $2.6 billion that has not been awarded will be frozen.
The Environmental Protection Agency put 168 employees on administrative leave yesterday evening. The workers focused on “environmental justice,” specifically addressing pollution in underserved communities. Molly Vaseliou, an EPA spokeswoman, said these employees “did not relate to the agency’s statutory duties or grant work.” As The New York Times reported, the agency cannot put employees on leave for more than 10 days in a year, so “observers said they interpret the administrative leave notices as a first step toward the eventual shuttering the office.” Meanwhile, new U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi told the Justice Department to get rid of its environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and identify basically anyone connected to these initiatives or who might have received federal funding to advance their causes.
New York is being sued by 22 other states and a handful of fossil fuel companies hoping to block its Climate Change Superfund Act, which requires major polluters to pay for their emissions. Starting in 2028, the companies would end up paying $3 billion each for 25 years – amounting to some $75 billion total – and the money would go towards climate adaptation and mitigation projects. The states challenging the law say only the federal government can regulate air quality. In other legal news, the Supreme Court yesterday denied the Trump administration’s request to pause a case weighing whether California should be able to set its own vehicle emissions standards.
Norwegian clean tech company Freyr Battery has canceled its plans to build a $2.6 billion lithium-ion battery plant in Georgia. The project was expected to bring more than 700 new jobs to the state. In a letter to the Coweta County Development Authority, Freyr said the decision “was made reluctantly, as the Company has realigned its near-term strategic goals.”
The Nissan/Honda merger is reportedly dead, and Nissan is looking for new partners. The two companies had been in talks to create the world’s third-largest automaker by sales, but the negotiations fell apart after Honda pushed for Nissan to become a subsidiary of Honda, instead of creating a joint holding company. Both companies were hoping the merger would allow them to share resources to produce electric vehicles to compete with market leaders like Tesla and BYD. Back in December, when the merger was first reported, one consultant toldThe New York Times that “if Nissan and Honda are not able to achieve this, they will not survive. Times are truly that tough.”
“The overall trend in cost reductions is so strong that nobody, not even President Trump, will be able to halt it.”
–Matthias Kimmel, head of Energy Economics at BloombergNEF. A new report from BNEF says the costs of renewables will continue to fall quickly in 2025, with production costs for new wind and solar farms already undercutting those of new fossil fuel plants.
A former head of the American Meteorological Society on whether the weather agency will wither under Trump.
There is a lot of uncertainty in the federal government right now. Some functions of critical agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers are paused, or maybe they’re not. Tariffs are on and then off again. Other government agencies are shutting down most of their operations at the direction of Elon Musk’s Efficiency Department, even if such moves are technically unconstitutional.
Amid all this uncertainty stands the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Musk’s team breached earlier this week and which Project 2025 has targeted for breakup. Per Thomas F. Gilman, who wrote the chapter on reforms for the Department of Commerce, NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” and its National Weather Service ought to be “fully commercialize[d]” since “Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by … private companies.”
Created during the Nixon administration, NOAA was designed to bring together disparate scientific agencies to release coordinated emergency weather alerts and responses. Today, it employs almost 7,000 scientists and engineers, although Musk’s team reportedly wants to cut that by 50%. In addition to hosting a trove of valuable climate science, NOAA remains responsible for issuing emergency alerts through its divisions such as the NWS and the National Hurricane Center. If you’re among the 99% of the American population who experienced some form of extreme weather last summer, you’ve likely interacted with NOAA in some small way.
To make sense of the plan to break up NOAA and what it would mean to “privatize” weather forecasting in the United States, I spoke to Keith Seitter, the former executive director of the American Meteorological Society and a current professor at the College of the Holy Cross. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
What is the argument for privatizing weather reporting? Why do folks at places like the Heritage Foundation think this is a good idea?
That’s a really good question — because it’s not. Weather services are provided to the nation through a wonderful cooperative process in which the government and the private sector work collaboratively to provide the best possible services to the people. It is all well thought out, with the National Weather Service and other parts of the government getting observations, running the numerical models, and providing warning services. Then the private sector takes the output from those government projects or processes and creates tailored, value-added forecasts and information that can be provided to commercial organizations in different sectors of the economy.
All of this is done with each component knowing what the other is doing, supporting the other, and tailoring their processes to the maximum efficiency. That’s one of the reasons that the U.S. has the best provision of weather services to the nation — and to the nation’s economy — of any country.
So the National Weather Service and NOAA are the ones with the actual monitors out there gathering the data, and then they give that information to the people who, let’s say, make the apps on your phone. What would it mean to “privatize” weather forecasting, then? What would that entail?
It’s not exactly clear what it would look like. Project 2025 suggests that the government should keep taking all the observations and essentially do nothing else. But the government is also quality-controlling its observations and assimilating them into numerical models. This process requires vast resources and must be completed before you can make the best use of that data.
You’d have to do everything the National Weather Service is doing now before the private sector could take over and tailor it for others. It’s unclear how you could move that line between what the government does and what the private sector does any further toward the private sector without impeding its ability to actually do a good job.
What would privatizing weather mean on the business side? What challenges would the private sector face in trying to make up the gap left by NOAA?
It would be very hard for them to make up that gap. There may be a few large private sector companies like The Weather Company, which has a lot of resources, and maybe AccuWeather — they could probably invest more in computer resources and do some of that stuff themselves, but it’s not an efficient way to get it done. I think the people at those companies would say that’s not the direction they want to move in. [Privatizing weather forecasting is] a solution being proposed where there isn’t a problem because almost anything you do to change the current balance will make weather forecasting less efficient and provide less service to the country.
So it’s not like private weather companies are agitating for this change?
Oh, gosh, no. They’re looking to get even more of that data and content from the government. Part of what happens is the observations and the numerical models — all those things that the government does — are provided to the country for free. The more of that information that the private sector can pull into their systems at no cost, the more products they can create and disseminate in ways that make them more money than if they had to do any of that work themselves. That cost would now fall on them. They clearly don’t want to be in a position where they have to do a lot of the [collection and data processing] that is currently being given to them for free.
What would this mean for users? Is there a risk that people will no longer receive extreme weather warnings?
The warnings are a big issue. Right now, the government is responsible for protecting life and property. The warnings from the National Weather Service are only possible because it’s doing all of the other processes of gathering the data and processing it and running forecasts.
You don’t want 10 different private companies trying to offer warnings to people and deciding who’s going to evacuate and who isn’t — that puts those companies in a position of liability if they make the decision incorrectly. It is a fundamental government responsibility to protect the people, so warnings are intrinsically something that has to come from the government. There’s no other way to get that done without incurring a lot of legal liability.
What frightens you the most about the potential for privatization of weather forecasting in the U.S.?
The loss of the balance that we have now. Almost any aspect that you mess with will make things work less well. There is also the potential for serious problems with the warnings many people depend on in life-or-death situations. We need to ensure that those are preserved and that we are doing the things that protect people and businesses.
What may seem like a way to save a few bucks in the federal government’s budget could lead to the loss of life, property, and business capacity. These could have very large downstream impacts for a relatively small amount of financial savings in the budget.
Is there anything keeping you optimistic?
The Secretary of Commerce that was approved, Howard Lutnick, said in the Senate hearings that he has no intention of breaking up NOAA, and that he’s not going to implement some of those ideas that were part of the Project 2025 handbook. I’m optimistic that as long as he lives up to what he said in those hearings, that’s a better place for us to be.
The other thing is, the nominee for the new NOAA administrator, Neil Jacobs, was the acting administrator in the first Trump administration, and he’s a very good person. He’s very knowledgeable and understands these things well; he’s a well-qualified individual to be put in charge of NOAA. If the Senate confirms him, I feel that he understands these issues and will do everything he can to ensure that NOAA lives up to its mission requirements and fulfills its goals of protecting life and property for the country.