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A social scientist explains how people react to disasters like what’s unfolding on the East Coast.
How do people respond to wildfire smoke? This has become an increasingly pressing question for social scientists, with massive wildfires in California in recent years and much of the East Coast this week engulfed in smoke from fires in Canada.
To better understand the issue, I called up social scientist Francisca Santana, who will be take up a role as an assistant professor of environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington this fall. She studies how people respond and adapt to extreme weather and environmental change, including wildfires. Part of that research was a paper written with David J.X. Gonzalez and Gabrielle Wong-Parodi based on interviews with people in Northern California who were exposed to large fires from 2018 to 2020.
While New York City was engulfed by smoke on Wednesday, I asked Santana about how people gather information about wildfires, how the torrent of digital data affects how people respond, and how masking evolved from a wildfire response to a COVID-19 response. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and readability.
My research has mostly focused on folks in the West in California. In the early days of catastrophic wildfires, there weren’t a lot of formal sources of information. We observed that people were really relying on one another, relying on their social contacts, their friends and family to kind of process this risk and understand what to do next.
In recent years, there are now more and more resources out there: more reporting in the media and more official sources from the states and EPA. It gives people guidance on how to behave, how to protect themselves from wildfire smoke.
It’s probably a mix of both using those sources that provide an Air Quality Index, or AQI, and using those social contexts to then translate, “Okay, well, what does that really mean for my life? The AQi is over 150. I’m noticing a lot of people in my neighborhood aren't going out for runs. So maybe I won’t do that either.”
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There’s a pre-COVID and post-COVID story. Before COVID, wildfires and wildfire smoke were quite severe in some places in the West. We observed and talked to folks who were using masks, sometimes N95 masks, to protect their lungs from wildfire smoke.
After the outbreak of the pandemic, some people found the transition to wearing a mask during COVID quite easy, because they had already been wearing them for wildfires. As wildfire smoke continues to be an issue, they may continue to mask. It’s sort of like getting into the habit or having the resources to wear a mask and feeling comfortable with that behavior.
Whereas I think for other folks there is a little bit of a backlash. Wearing masks during COVID was an experience that some people were very ready to stop doing. There may be a little bit of resistance to wearing a mask for wildfire smoke.
[Wildfire smoke] is very disruptive to one’s daily life and routine, especially if a person has habits related to going outside: going on walks, recreating in certain ways. And that can, over time, have a really negative toll on a person’s ability to cope with stress. It removes that regular outlet. A lot of folks have to exercise and socialize with friends and family.
A lot of folks talked about cabin fever, being isolated and cooped up. And that for some time really did overlap and intersect with the pandemic and the inability that folks had to socialize indoors. If they were, you know, abiding by social distancing maybe they weren’t getting together with friends and family in their homes and then wildfire smoke created a situation where they were unable to do that outdoors.
I would say it has that effect on one’s daily life and ability to cope. And I would say there’s also a component that I’ve observed with some folks who have also lived in areas where there are frequent wildfires. So if you live in a wildfire risky area and also have been exposed to smoke, smoke can trigger memories of a fire being nearby.
The smoke can really interfere with one’s ability to cope. It really adds that extra stressor into into your day. There’s a set of concerns and worries that you have to make decisions about that are often very precise. I’ve observed a lot of people will check the air quality multiple times a day. The idea is that they’re trying to decide exactly what moments they can go outside and do the thing they’ve been waiting to do. That kind of hyper vigilance is another layer of stress.
The upsides are pretty major. If someone in your neighborhood has an outdoor air quality monitor, a Purple air monitor, you can have a very real time sense of exactly what the air quality is in your neighborhood. A lot of folks use that to determine what time they may walk their dogs, for example. I think that’s really good, because there can be pretty dramatic shifts throughout the day based on wind and the patterns of the smoke moving. So that’s a huge upside.
Also people use that information to find places to go to “escape the smoke.” If you look at the whole map of California, you might see, “oh, there’s an area by the coast that is not inundated with smoke.” So that could be a good place to go for the afternoon on a Saturday. I think that really provides an outlet for folks who might be feeling very trapped by the smoke, and who also have real health concerns related to asthma and respiratory issues looking for a place to temporarily evacuate to.
But if you’re in a place that’s inundated with smoke, and there really aren’t many changes that are substantial, it can be a really consuming and distracting to check constantly for changes in the smoke and air quality. I certainly have heard people talk about that. When the smoke becomes bad enough checking the air quality is something they’re compelled to do every five, 10, 15 minutes. It can really affect your productivity.
I won’t speculate beyond that in terms of the psychological effects. But I think it’s akin to the other way that our phones have us hooked. I think that real-time data can give you a sense of control that isn’t really there.
I would say that that’s a finding that has repeatedly popped up across a lot of my interview-based studies. People are using a combination of information from official sources, and then also observations from their social group. And also direction from their social group. There are sometimes individuals and communities that can distribute information and they make suggestions to their friends and family and they can really encourage certain types of behavior. And I think there are other individuals who may resist that based on all sorts of things.
How do responses change over time when people are repeatedly exposed to wildfires? Are they able to accumulate expertise and habits and resources that then make it much easier for them to protect themselves? Or is repeated exposure something that people maladapt to? They might have a response when it first happens and then perceive the threat to be less over time, because it can interfere so much with daily life. That can sometimes happen with folks. They just want to move on.
I’m really interested also in how responses to wildfire smoke exposure might interact with some of the other things that happened during fire seasons. In places like California and the West, for example, there have been power shut offs.
Often the communities that are most affected by those power shut-offs are communities that are simultaneously being affected by smoke, and maybe heat. How do people manage those threats when they happen all at once? If your power is off, how does that affect how you’re able to respond to smoke if you were relying on your air conditioner or air filter? What other sorts of adaptations might people choose to make when faced with those threats, and that could include moving from the area permanently.
I’m not not a biomedical scientist. I’m not a medical researcher. But part of being a social scientist is reading some of the latest science on the health impacts of wildfire smoke, and it’s scary. It’s potentially really dangerous. It’s dangerous for children and for folks with respiratory health issues, but it really is dangerous for everyone.
The science is still evolving but it definitely made me think more about having air filters in my home. I have multiple air filters. It definitely made me think about ensuring that my parents and my other family members also understand the risk and have air filters in their home.
It definitely spurred more diligence during these sorts of events and a responsibility that I feel to make sure that folks understand that the risks are real. And that if we’re going to live in a future where there will likely continue to be fires and smoke, it’s worth it, if you’re able, to invest in some of these more comprehensive strategies like having an air filter in your home. I definitely think I’m more motivated and more aware.
Read more about the wildfire smoke engulfing the eastern United States:
The Smoke Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better
The East Coast’s Wildfire Smoke Is On Par With the West’s Worst Days
How to Prepare for Wildfire Smoke, According to Doctors at Harvard
Wildfire Smoke Is a Wheezy Throwback for New York City
The East Coast Has Been Smokier Than the West Coast This Year
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The company managed to put a positive spin on tariffs.
The residential solar company Sunrun is, like much of the rest of the clean energy business, getting hit by tariffs. The company told investors in its first quarter earnings report Tuesday that about half its supply of solar modules comes from overseas, and thus is subject to import taxes. It’s trying to secure more modules domestically “as availability increases,” Sunrun said, but “costs are higher and availability limited near-term.”
“We do not directly import any solar equipment from China, although producers in China are important for various upstream components used by our suppliers,” Sunrun chief executive Mary Powell said on the call, indicating that having an entirely-China-free supply chain is likely impossible in the renewable energy industry.
Hardware makes up about a third of the company’s costs, according to Powell. “This cost will increase from tariffs,” she said, although some advance purchasing done before the end of last year will help mitigate that. All told, tariffs could lower the company’s cash generation by $100 million to $200 million, chief financial officer Danny Abajian said.
But — and here’s where things get interesting — the company also offered a positive spin on tariffs.
In a slide presentation to investors, the company said that “sustained, severe tariffs may drive the country to a recession.” Sounds bad, right?
But no, not for Sunrun. A recession could mean “lower long term interest rates,” which, since the company relies heavily on securitizing solar leases and benefits from lower interest rates, could round in the company’s favor.
In its annual report released in February, the company mentioned that “higher rates increase our cost of capital and decrease the amount of capital available to us to finance the deployment of new solar energy systems.” On Wednesday, the company estimated that a 10% tariff, which is the baseline rate in the Trump “Liberation Day” tariffs, could be offset with a half percentage point decline in the company’s cost of capital, although it didn’t provide any further details behind the calculation.
Even in the absence of interest rate relief, a recession could still be okay for Sunrun.
“Historically, recessions have driven more demand for our products,” the company said in its presentation, arguing that because their solar systems offer savings compared to utility rates, they become more attractive when households get more money conscious.
Sunrun shares are up almost 10% today, as the company showed more growth than expected.
For what it’s worth, the much-ballyhooed decline in long-term interest rates as a result of Trump’s tariffs hasn’t actually happened, at least not yet. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday decided to keep the federal funds rate at 4.5%, the third time in a row the board of governors have chosen to maintain the status quo. The yield on 10-year treasuries, often used as a benchmark for interest rates, is up slightly since “Liberation Day” on April 2 and sits today at 4.34%, compared to 4.19% before Trump’s tariffs announcements.
On solar growth, Hornsea 4, and Rivian deliveries
Current conditions: The first cicada broods have begun to emerge in the Southeast as soil temperatures hit 64 degrees Fahrenheit• Hail and even snow are possible across parts of Spain today • Forecasters have identified a risk zone for tropical storm development in the Atlantic basin, with potential for the first named storm of the year to form by mid-May.
1. Global solar market expected to slow in 2025
The global solar market is expected to grow only 10% in 2025, down from 33% growth in 2024 and 87% growth in 2023, according to a new report by SolarPower Europe. The firm’s “most realistic scenario” accounts for the natural slowdown in development after a boom caused by high energy prices in 2022 and 2023, as well as the “uneven distribution of solar market growth” worldwide, with China accounting for 55% of the market share, lending to the dip in overall solar as it implements reforms this summer in how its renewables are priced and traded.
Speaking at the opening of the Intersolar 2025 conference in Munich on Wednesday, Abigail Ross Hopper, the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, echoed some of the uncertainty expressed in SolarPower Europe’s report. “I don’t think any of us could be in this business if we weren’t optimistic,” she said, adding, “I think we’re going to weather through this storm, but it is going to be a bit rocky for a few years.” SolarPower Europe’s report, meanwhile, anticipates “likely” growth from 2 terawatts of global installed solar capacity at the end of 2024 to 7.1 terawatts of total installed capacity by 2030, which would meet “nearly two-thirds of the 11 terawatt renewable energy target set at COP28.” Under ideal conditions, solar could even quadruple capacity to more than 8 terawatts by the decade’s end. Read the full report here.
2. Orsted cancels 2.4-gigawatt offshore wind project in the UK, citing rising costs
The Danish energy company Orsted announced this week that it is canceling its Hornsea 4 offshore wind project in the UK due to rising supply chain costs and other “adverse macroeconomic developments,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Hornsea 4 was expected to become one of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world, with a capacity of 2.4 gigawatts once it was completed. (Equinor’s recently paused Empire Wind I project, south of New York’s Long Island, would have had an 810-megawatt capacity by comparison.)
Orsted warned it would take a hit from the cancellation, with breakaway costs estimated to be between $533 million and $685 million. Nevertheless, “Orsted said the project no longer made economic sense, even with a contract to sell power at government-guaranteed prices for 15 years,” Bloomberg writes. Significantly, the canceled project will also hurt the UK’s efforts to add more renewables to its power grid.
3. ICYMI: Rivian lowered its delivery estimate by as much as 15% due to tariffs
Rivian beat Wall Street’s first quarter estimates, the automaker shared in its earnings letter to investors on Tuesday, but lowered its target for 2025 vehicle deliveries on account of tariffs, CNBC reports. Though the company builds all its electric vehicles in Illinois, “The current global economic landscape presents significant uncertainty, particularly regarding evolving trade regulation, policies, tariffs, and the overall impact these items may have on consumer sentiment and demand,” Rivian said by way of explanation. While it previously estimated it would deliver between 46,000 and 51,000 units in 2025, the revised outlook anticipates 40,000 to 46,000 deliveries. Last year, the company delivered just over 51,500 vehicles, Inside EVs notes.
The company also said it expects to take on “a couple thousand dollars” in additional expenses per vehicle due to the trade policies, though founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe said it’s not planning to increase the $45,000 starting price of the R2 as a result. Despite the continued uncertainty, Rivian said it still expects to achieve a “modest positive gross profit” in 2025.
4. Republicans sneak sale of public lands into reconciliation bill
Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources added an eleventh-hour amendment to their portion of the budget package late Wednesday night, calling for the sale of thousands of acres of public lands in Nevada and Utah. Introduced by Representatives Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah, the provision capitalized on longtime aspirations by Republicans to privatize Bureau of Land Management acreage in the West.
As I wrote on Wednesday, the Republicans’ maneuver, “which came at nearly midnight, left many Democrats and environmental groups deeply frustrated by the lack of transparency,” and critics had little time to comb through the extent of the proposal. While early reviews of the bill estimated the sell-off of about 11,000 acres of land, much of it apparently near cities — in keeping with Republican Senator Mike Lee’s aspirations to use BLM land for suburban sprawl — the Wilderness Society informed me last night that the accounting may end up as high as 500,000 acres or more. That’s consequential not just for public land advocates, but also because “turning over public lands to states — or to private owners — could ease the way for expansive oil and gas development, especially in Utah, where there are ambitions to quadruple exports of fossil fuels from the state’s northeastern corner,” I note in my piece. Moreover, “Reducing BLM land could also limit opportunities for solar, wind, and geothermal development.”
5. Thinning forests to reduce wildfire danger could also mitigate droughts: study
Thinning forests is a favorite idea of Republicans, who’ve rebuked blue states over forestry practices they claim exacerbate the dangers of wildfires. Now, a new study from researchers at the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources at the University of Nevada, Reno looking at the hydrology of the Sierra Nevadas has found that the practice — along with prescribed fires — could also have potential upsides during drought years, including generating more mountain runoff.
According to the findings published in the journal Water Resources Research, water yields in forests thinned to densities closer to those of a century ago can be increased by 8% to 14% during drought years. That water would be “particularly valuable … to farmers and cities in central California and northern Nevada who rely on Sierra [Nevada] snowpack for much of their water supply,” according to a press release about the research. Significant flooding risks did not appear to increase with the water yields. As earlier researchers have found, however, the results of forest thinning treatments also depend on how, where, and to what extent the treatments are applied. Not all landscapes would necessarily benefit from such regimes. For example, while President Trump blamed the January fires in Los Angeles on poor forest management in California, the blazes were in chaparral, not in forests where thinning could be applied.
Riverside Clean Air Carshare
University of California, Riverside announced Wednesday that it is launching the nation’s only hydrogen-powered carshare program in a partnership with city and state agencies. Participants can rent Toyota Mirai sedans through a smartphone app and pay hourly rates competitive with Uber and Lyft fees.
Republicans Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced the measure late Tuesday night.
Late last week, the House Committee on Natural Resources released the draft text of its portion of the Republicans’ budget package. While the bill included mandates to open oil and gas leasing in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, increase logging by 25% over 2024’s harvest, and allow for mining activities upstream of Minnesota’s popular Boundary Waters recreation area, there was also a conspicuous absence in its 96 pages: an explicit plan to sell off public lands.
To many of the environmental groups that have been sounding the alarm about Republicans’ ambitions to privatize federal lands — which make up about 47% of the American West — the particular exclusion seemed almost too good to be true. And as it turned out in the bill’s markup on Tuesday, it was. In a late-night amendment, Republican Representatives Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced a provision to sell off thousands of acres in their states.
The maneuver, which came at nearly midnight, left many Democrats and environmental groups deeply frustrated by the lack of transparency. “The rushed and last-minute nature of this amendment introduction means little to no information is available,” the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said in a statement Wednesday.
While early reports had suggested the proposed sell-off would consist of around 11,000 acres of land in total between the two states, that number was arrived at in part due to the delayed release of maps, as well as an apparent malfunction with Amodei’s mic as he was discussing the parcels in Nevada, a communications adviser working with public land groups to analyze the amendment told me Thursday. It now looks as if the amendment offers up approximately 11,500 acres of land in Utah alone, based on acreage numbers included in the text.
Nevada’s parcels don’t include firm numbers, and public land groups are basing their estimates on eyeballing the maps prepared at the request of Amodei, as well as “other bits of information.” Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto has estimated, for example, that the amendment proposes selling up to 200,000 acres of public land in Nevada’s Clark County, though some groups believe the acreage in the state could be much higher — totaling 500,000 acres across Utah and Nevada, or potentially even more.
House lawmakers appeared still to be at odds during a Wednesday morning press conference to announce the creation of a Bipartisan Public Lands Caucus. Rather than putting on the united front suggested by the working group’s name, former Secretary of the Interior and Montana Republican Ryan Zinke argued seemingly in defense of the amendment, saying, “A lot of communities are drying up because they’re looking to public land next door and they can’t use it.” Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell then took the mic to say, “I would urge all of us that the hearings — it’s not done in the dead of night, and that we have good, bipartisan discussions with everybody impacted at the table.” (Zinke later said that he told Republican leadership “I strongly don’t believe [land sales] should be in the reconciliation bill,” and that the amendment represents his red line: “It’s a no now. It will be a no later. It will be a no forever.”)
Despite the cloak-and-dagger way Republicans introduced the amendment, there are several clues as to what exactly Amodei and Maloy are up to. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah has aggressively pushed for the sell-off of public lands, including introducing the Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter (HOUSES) Act, which would “make small tracts of [Bureau of Land Management] land available to communities to address housing shortages or affordability.” Critics of the bill have called it the “McMansion Subsidy Act” and have argued — as the Center for Western Priorities’ Kate Groetzinger, does — that it would “do little to address housing issues in major metros like Salt Lake City and the fact that the current housing shortage is due largely to a lack of home construction, not land.” The Center for Western Priorities also contends that it “contains very few restrictions on what can be built on federal public lands that are sold off under the program.” Notably, Lee and Maloy have worked closely together in the past on transferring federal land in Utah to private ownership.
The land singled out in the Tuesday amendment includes BLM and Forest Service parcels in six counties in Utah and Nevada that “had already been identified for disposal by the counties,” Outdoor Life notes. While some land would be sold with “the express purpose of alleviating housing affordability,” the publication notes that “other parcels, including those in southern Utah, don’t have a designated purpose.”
One communications director at a regional environmental group pointed out to me that the amendment proposes no parcels on the Wasatch Front in and around Salt Lake City, where around 82% of the state’s population lives and where such a high-density housing case could be made. Instead, many of the parcels are located a four- to five-hour drive away in the more remote Washington County. Conspicuously, a number of the parcels abut roads, potentially teeing up highway expansions. One parcel is even adjacent to Zion National Park — a prime location for an expensive development or resort. As Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director for the Wilderness Society, warned E&E News, it’s in this way that the bill appears to set “dangerous precedent that is intended to pave the way for a much larger scale transfer of public lands.”
While many Republicans contend that states can better manage public lands in the West than the federal government can (in addition, of course, to helping raise the $15 billion of the desired $2 trillion in deficit reductions across the government to offset Trump’s tax cuts), such a move could also have significant consequences for the environment. Turning over public lands to states — or to private owners — could also ease the way for expansive oil and gas development, especially in Utah, where there are ambitions to quadruple exports of fossil fuels from the state’s northeastern corner.
Reducing BLM land could also limit opportunities for solar, wind, and geothermal development; in Utah, the agency has identified some 5 million acres of public land, in addition to 11.8 million acres in Nevada, for solar development. While there are admittedly questions about how much renewable permitting will make it through the Trump BLM, it’s also true that solar development wouldn’t necessarily be the preference of private landowners if the land were transferred.
Tuesday’s markup ultimately saw the introduction of more than 120 amendments, including a Democratic provision that would have prohibited revenue from this bill from being used to sell off public lands, but was easily struck down by Republicans. In the end, Amodei and Maloy’s amendment was the only one the committee adopted. Shortly afterward, the lawmakers voted 26-17 to advance the legislation.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect new estimates of the amount of land to be sold off.