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I spoke with a wildfire scientist at the Canadian Forest Service about what’s going on up north.
The skies over New York City turned orange, and everyone knew why. “BLAME CANADA,” yelled the New York Post on its June 8 cover, one day after the worst day for wildfire pollution in U.S. history.
To be clear: We shouldn’t blame Canada. The wildfires choking the United States are also choking Canada, and it’s Canadian communities that are at the most risk of being destroyed by those fires. Even as the skies over New York start to clear, the fires remain a very real threat to those communities — and they’re an indication that the tools we used to control nature in the past are quickly becoming outdated.
“The basic principle of fire suppression is pretty simple: You’re trying to control the fire, usually with a fire line,” Steve Taylor, a wildfire scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, told me. “You have to build the fire line faster than the fire is building its perimeter. So it’s a bit of whack-a-mole.”
It’s whack-a-mole right now, in particular, because of the sheer number of fires Canadian officials are dealing with. As of this writing there are more than 400 active wildfires across the country, more than 130 of which are in Quebec, which has seen a total of 446 fires this year alone. The still active fires in Quebec are the ones that have been most closely linked to the smoke that’s been making headlines this week.
This year’s fire season, Taylor told me, is especially bad, and there are a few reasons why. The first is because of the weather: Canada had a hot, dry spring, which made forests particularly susceptible to fire. The fires started in Alberta and British Columbia in late April, possibly because of accidental sparks from human activity, and displaced more than 30,000 people. Then they spread to Nova Scotia, Ontario, and, finally, Quebec, where a series of lightning strikes sparked the fires we’re seeing now. (Side note: there’s a small conspiracy theory going around, which I won’t be linking to, that claims the Quebec fires started too close to each other to be a coincidence; Taylor told me the clustered nature of those sparks is typical of a lightning storm, which is corroborated by lightning strike maps.)
Canada’s fire suppression apparatus works differently from the United States. In the U.S., fire suppression is mostly managed by federal agencies, which work with state-level agencies to put fires out. In Canada, fire suppression is handled on a provincial level, and the provinces share resources to put fires out across the country.
Historically, this has worked fine. But there’s one problem: “You depend on not having fire all across the country for that sharing model to work,” Taylor said. “But there has been enough [fire] activity in the other provinces that there are fewer resources available for, say, Quebec.”
Hundreds of firefighters from other countries have already deployed to Canada to help, and on Thursday Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said twice as many American firefighters should be sent to help. The Canadian Armed Forces have also been deployed, and The New York Timesreports there are renewed calls for a national firefighting service within Canada, though Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has so far avoided addressing them.
“Realistically, we need some rain,” Taylor told me. “Even an inch could rain them out, but less than that would be helpful in just slowing the fire growth.”
Rain has been predicted in parts of Quebec for Monday, which could bring much-needed relief to the region, and Quebec Premier François Legault said on Thursday that the situation is starting to stabilize, in part thanks to reinforcements from abroad. In the meantime, the more than 13,000 residents of Quebec who have been evacuated because of the fires will have to live with some degree of uncertainty.
Attributing events like these wildfires to climate change is always a tricky subject, and these are only the latest in a long line of Canadian wildfires to darken the United States. As far back as 1780, there were mentions of a “Dark Day” blanketing the north. But, Taylor pointed out, previous studies have linked past wildfires in British Columbia to climate change, and wildfire smoke has its own impacts on our climate — a recent study linked the Australian wildfires of 2019 and 2020 to the La Niña that ruled our atmospheric currents for the past few years. What’s happening this year, Taylor told me, is a sign of what’s to come.
“Lots of modeling over the last 30 years suggests there would be increases in burn areas, but you kind of expect that to come gradually,” Taylor said. “So it shouldn’t have been surprising to me. But I guess this was a warning. The question is if this is something we can see in the future.”
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Let’s talk more about Denali ... that is, Mt. McKinley.
President Donald Trump signed 46 presidential actions during his first 12 hours in office, including overturning 78 of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders. Between Trump’s moves with major ramifications (like ending all wind permits) and those that seem to represent more personal grievances (like free-flowing showerheads), there has been much confusion over what they all mean.
Some would argue that is the entire point: “The more bizarreness Trump generates,” the journalist Edward Luce wrote last year for The Financial Times, “the less people notice.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during his rise to power in 2015 and 2016, memorably described this as a deliberate technique of “flood[ing] the zone with shit.”
Whatever way you frame it, though, where there’s Trump, there’s noises, which means news can fall through the cracks. Here’s our list of what you might have missed during Trump’s first hours as president and what might happen next.
In one of his first actions in office, Trump repealed almost seven-dozen Biden-era executive orders, including Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”
Signed on Biden’s Inauguration Day, the policy called for the government to take a “comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” That meant that the Environmental Protection Agency considered things like race and socioeconomic status — given the historic burdens put on frontline communities — during its permitting processes. Trump also signed a new executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which limits government agencies from considering the impacts on disadvantaged communities. The administration has reportedly gone as far as to warn government employees that they could face consequences for failing to report on colleagues whose diversity and inclusion efforts might slip past its notice.
As Dan Farber writes for Legal Planet, however, to carry out this anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive order, “agencies will have to eliminate their own environmental justice regulations. At that point, the door will be open to judicial review. I think agencies will have a hard time justifying the repeals.”
Trump further overturned Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” another first-week Biden policy. In addition to declaring climate change a national security risk, the order also created the Justice40 initiative, directing 40% of federal climate spending to disadvantaged communities.
Jillian Blanchard, the Climate Change and Environmental Justice Program director at Lawyers for Good Government, told me this was also legally dubious. “There’s already existing infrastructure and policies in place that can’t be undone by an executive order,” she said — for example, grants for ongoing efforts to install EV chargers in disadvantaged communities, or clean-up projects in coal mining communities in Appalachia. “I think it’s important to take a minute and say, okay, what does this mean in practice?”
Blanchard added that, in particular, Trump’s moves on environmental justice “make me question what this administration plans to do with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” which prohibits race-based discrimination in programs that receive federal funding. “There’s really important questions here that are being raised that everyone should be paying attention to.”
Trump also repealed Executive Order 14030, “Climate-Related Financial Risk,” signed by Biden in May 2021. The executive order called for government-wide assessment and disclosure of climate-related financial risks to U.S. programs, and ordered the Secretary of Labor to submit a report on actions to protect U.S. workers’ savings and pensions from those same threats. Executive Order 14030 also established the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which called for government agencies to be more conservative when siting projects that could face sea-level rise or flood threats.
In addition to government agencies no longer being required to consider how extreme weather and climate risks might threaten their operations, Trump’s executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” also takes aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices, or the “social” aspect of ESG.
Though you’ve probably already heard about Trump’s attempt to spangle the Gulf of Mexico with a new name, the “ Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” executive order also calls for reverting the name of North America’s highest peak, Denali, back to Mt. McKinley.
The political effort to change the mountain’s name to Denali, backed by the state’s Republican politicians, dates back to the 1970s. (It took until 2015 for the name to be changed to the Alaskan Athabaskan word meaning “the high one” because of the Ohio delegation’s insistence on honoring its native president.) Trump’s decision to restore the mountain’s colonial name is a pointed brush-off of Alaskan Natives and represents a troubling precedent by his administration of undermining promises made to Indigenous partners by the federal government.
Tribal partners have historically assisted the U.S. government on issues of land use, resource management, and climate resiliency, and can prove formidable opponents to projects that lack their support. By disregarding Alaskan Natives’ support of the name Denali, Trump risks alienating the greater Indigenous community and starting off on a contentious footing with one of the government’s most valuable allies.
When the Los Angeles County fires began earlier this month, Trump launched a renewed crusade against the “essentially worthless” Delta smelt, a nearly extinct two-inch-long fish. Per the then-president-elect, California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom had supposedly refused to sign a “water restoration declaration” that would have “allowed millions of gallons of water … from the North to flow daily into many parts of California,” where it allegedly could have helped to fight the devastating fires.
Only, there was no “water restoration declaration.” The vast majority of Los Angeles’ water doesn’t come from northern California, and the smelt have nothing to do with the water shortages some fire crews faced. That didn’t prevent Trump from issuing a memorandum to “stop radical environmentalism” and put “people over fish.” Still, it is so vague that it appears to be more of a nod to the Trump-supporting farmers in California’s Central Valley, who occasionally face water restrictions during droughts to protect the smelt.
“It’s all political posturing — it’s all an attempt to shock and awe,” Blanchard told me of the executive orders taken in sum. She added that “it’s going to be really important for people to take a deep breath and recognize that many of these things are not legal and challenges will be put in place.”
“Don’t become too distracted by fear and uncertainty,” she went on, “because that is one of their main goals.”
With plenty more to come.
A conversation with Bob Moczulewski, tax director for law firm Baker Tilly’s federal credits and incentives practice
Given the Trump administration’s new pause on grants under the Inflation Reduction Act, this week’s conversation is with Bob Moczulewski, tax director for law firm Baker Tilly’s federal credits and incentives practice. We asked him to explain this 90-day pause via executive order, because if anyone’s going to cut the nonsense and tell you what actually matters here, it’ll be a tax attorney.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity.
Does Trump’s executive order actually impact the IRA’s tax credits?
The IRA had several components to it, most of which – the biggest things – are tax credits. Those are written into tax law. They are a legally binding ability for developers and users, creators of renewable energy that are allowed within the law – wind, solar, geothermal, battery storage, biogas – those are laws.
[The order] has a stop on those items that were more discretionary that had the control of the administration to delegate out: its grants, loans, and contracts. That has no impact on the tax credits, where the bulk of the IRA sits right now. A lot of that stuff was in anticipation of being heavily pushed through and sent out before January 20. There’s actual impact there. But tax credits are not appropriated funds.
This is not holding back the tax credits that are there.
You’ve said it is unclear if this covers all prospective funding, like direct pay?
If you’re a municipality and you put up a solar project that is eligible for tax credits and direct pay, that is the part with this potential slow play that could be done here. We really don’t know what the executive branch can do to hold back the payment of those direct payments. If you’re a business, you put up a solar, it’s a $10,000 tax credit, you can use it to reduce your taxable income. None of these orders impact that.
Now if you’re a municipality and you’re requesting a direct payment for those tax credits that are legally binding in tax law, I could see the possibility that an executive branch could have pressure on the Treasury Department, which has pressure on the IRS, to slow play those payments. But that’s only speculation. The law is stated, this is supposed to be paid out. This is in a realm of, y’know, almost a conspiracy theory-type of thing that could be done.
With respect to how a pause like this can impact the bankability of IRA, are you seeing it affect executives’ views on the durability of the law?
I would say there’s just a lot of caution as to [the] next steps around it. These are laws. Until the laws are repealed, if they are repealed, that would be the only way you’d know for certain.
As I’ve explained many times over, the history of tax credit laws is once they’re repealed or altered, those changes are prospective as to the time the law is changed. If I have a half a billion dollar solar project underway, I’ve met or begun a construction criteria. There has been no prior passing of tax laws that would revoke the ability to claim credits on that.
What are you watching for next for clarity?
There’s two things I’m looking for in the future. Where pundits around this really feel this is truly going. And the other part is to see if there’s any actual traction to repeal the tax credits that exist right now.
There’s a whole new realm of credits that begin in 2025 and continue through 2032. Will there be incentive to repeal those credits?
I have clients that are engaging in multi billions of dollars of projects that are in the heart of the southern tier of the United States of America, that would impact thousands of jobs. Those groups have strong ties to a lot of senators and congresspeople along the way. Just enough of a push and turn on this and all it takes is a few senators to not go along with it.
And more of the week's news in renewable energy fights.
1. Magic Valley, Idaho – It’s never a dull day for the Lava Ridge wind project.
2. Multiple counties, Ohio – Regulators in Ohio issued final decisions for two contested solar projects, clearing the way for one while all but stopping another.
3. Pender County, North Carolina – A solar project that was rejected late last year by the North Carolina Court of Appeals will be reconsidered by the same court, after the Democrat vote that decided the case was replaced by a Republican.
4. Lancaster County, Nebraska – in We have good news for solar in Nebraska, where county commissioners have approved a massive NextEra solar project.
5. Montgomery County, Alabama – Another solar project – Silicon Ranch – also got approval this past week from the local Board of Adjustments, meaning a Meta data center is now poised to receive renewable energy.
Here’s what else we’re watching ...
In Kansas, landowners are suing to stop a NextEra solar project in Jackson County.
In Oklahoma, a Woodside-backed hydrogen project has been paused citing the Trump administration’s changes in policy.
In Nevada, the Bureau of Land Management cleared the way for the Rough Hat solar project days before Joe Biden left office.