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“I pulled the data for the past 18 years, and it’s almost off the charts.”
Air pollution in New York and across the eastern United States, driven by an outbreak of wildfires across Quebec and Nova Scotia, has reached the worst level since 2005, when modern records began, according to a Stanford economist.
“I pulled the data for the past 18 years, and it’s almost off the charts,” Marshall Burke, an economist who specializes in climate change and an associate professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, told me.
Surveying the dangerous haze that stretched across the country on Tuesday, he said it could conceivably be one of the worst days for air pollution even before the 2000s. Rarely have so many people been exposed to so much particulate matter, or PM2.5, a toxic haze of microscopic soot and ash that is linked to early death and can penetrate the blood-brain barrier. (It’s called PM2.5 because it measures 2.5 or fewer microns across.)
New York City’s air pollution index — which spiked to more than 200 on Tuesday, a level considered “very unhealthy” for all groups — was comparable to a “pretty bad event that we’d get on the West Coast,” he said. But it is unheard of for such toxic air to afflict such a densely populated part of the country. In the late evening, New York briefly had the worst air quality of any city on Earth, beating Delhi, India, and Doha, Qatar.
Burke has published widely on climate change’s costs, studying how rising temperatures might affect crop yields, suicide, and the outbreak of wars. But on Tuesday evening, he said that the economic impacts of wildfires — and their voluminous smoke output — might be one of the biggest unknown dangers of climate. Our conversation also touched on the heinous health effects of wildfire smoke, especially for women and children. It has been edited and condensed for clarity and readability.
That’s a great question. We’ll have to see how long it lasts. A lot of the West in 2020 — really, in California — basically had what you guys are having but for a month. Sometimes it wasn’t quite as acute, but often we got days and days of stuff about as bad as what you guys are having. So I think it’s a hopefully very short-run vision of what some of the rest of the country has dealt with.
But the important part here is the number of people getting exposed. You get days in the West where, like, Missoula, Montana, is hit pretty hard. Or in the 2020 event, we had parts of California get hit pretty hard for weeks. But today we’re talking about the most populated parts of the country just getting hammered. So in that sense, it’s pretty anomalous — it’s different from the Western events where you have unpopulated areas getting dosed.
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People have been studying the health impacts of wildfire smoke for a while — and it’s interesting. You would think we would have a pretty precise answer, but we still don't have a great one.
That’s mainly because these levels of air pollution are so high they induce some weird behaviors. So people actually notice the smoke, and they respond in a way that shapes health outcomes.
So you see some things you would expect. Respiratory hospitalizations or emergency department visits go way up — that’s been shown by a lot of groups. And that’s caused by asthma, that’s COPD, that’s bad stuff.
But other stuff changes — car wrecks go down, there are fewer fractures, people don’t break their legs playing soccer. Basically, what economists would call avoidance behavior pushes back in the other direction pretty substantially. So on really bad days, it’s this funny mix of worsened respiratory outcomes and declines in other, “non-smoke-related” visits.
That said, there are demonstrable negative health impacts for vulnerable groups. And all the research suggests we should draw the circle wider and wider in terms of what we call “vulnerable groups.”
Any pregnant moms — if my wife or anyone I knew was pregnant right now — I would be texting them to stay inside and sit by an air filter. We see very large impacts on preterm birth for moms who are exposed while their kids were in utero. Like I said, my daughter has asthma, so on days like this, she gets to blow it out on the iPad sitting next to the air filter.
So part of the story is not nuanced. If you’re a vulnerable group, it’s a good time to protect yourself.
There is also an ongoing debate about whether wildfire-sourced PM2.5 is better, worse, or the same as PM2.5 from fossil fuel combustion. Some early evidence suggests it’s maybe a lot worse for respiratory function — I’m not fully convinced myself but it could be true. We see a lot of nasty stuff in wildfire smoke. We see heavy metals that get aerosolized, all this stuff that’s in your sink when houses burn, that gets aerosolized. But I think broadly, the PM2.5 literature is a good guide for what’s happening.
For me, it's so important to mention the backdrop, which is just this remarkable policy success in improving air quality. And it was driven by bipartisan public policy that was really good and really worked. You can look at papers on this: You just don’t get bad air-pollution days anymore on the East Coast. They’re gone. They just don’t exist.
Yeah, the Clean Air Act, exactly. And that is being so quickly undone in the West by wildfires. Less so in the East — we saw fingerprints of it last year — but this is going to be a big event, and it’s going to change our estimates a lot. So this really nice progress that we had made is just being rapidly eroded now, and I thought that was just a West Coast story, but maybe now it’s happening in the East too.
Now, I don’t think this is going to happen every year for you guys on the East Coast. I don’t think the data suggests that yet. But it’s not going to happen never — it’s going to be more common.
They were never going to originate in the East Coast, almost surely. Wildfire smoke might affect the East Coast, but it was going to come from somewhere else.
Exactly. And I think honestly that’s what you should still expect. Although the forecast for the next couple of days suggests there’s pretty high fire risk across a bunch of the Northeast, so it’s not out of the question. We could see some starts in the Northeast that could contribute to the smoke, but certainly that's not the case right now.
I think that the modal case is going to be one that looks a lot more like what we’re seeing today, where you get big Canadian fires blowing in. But that just makes the air-pollution problem harder, because now we have a transboundary problem.
So what do we do? Do we sue the Canadians? Do we buy them off?
The way I think about it is that the Clean Air Act was built on one main fact, which is that local pollution concentrations depend on local emissions. So if you regulate local emissions, you improve local air quality. And that worked really well for a while.
But that logic no longer holds. Look at the Canadian fires — number one, it's not a point source, and number two, it doesn't stay locally. We’re not equipped to deal with this, and we have dug ourselves a massive hole in terms of a century of putting out fires that have just made this problem a monster.
My pitch for a while on the West Coast has been that wildfire smoke is going to be one of the main — if not the main way — we encounter climate change viscerally. I'm sure it’s going to get hot, but these episodic events that sit with us and really disrupt our activity, this is going to be one of the most widespread ways we encounter it.
But I would not have told that story for you guys on the East Coast. And this is still one very historic event, so I’m not ready to tell that story, but I’m going to draw the boundary a little wider next time I give a talk on this.
That’s exactly right. None of the existing monetized economic costs of climate change — like when we come up with the social cost of carbon or any of that stuff — wildfires are not in there at all. So this is fully un-costed in all the sort of headline climate-change cost numbers that we have.
Certainly, folks are making the links, and if you read the National Climate Assessment then wildfires are in there, but in terms of monetizing the cost, you're 100% right. We have not done that. Honestly, this is a big push in my groups to try to do it back to that, try to monetize these, and I think they're going to be really big.
When we've done back of the envelope estimates, they suggest the costs are at least as large as heat, potentially. Especially if we get more events like the one today.
The effects go beyond that too. There are all these papers now that show cognitive decline when exposed to air pollution and wildfire smoke. We can look at test-score data and in smokier years, kids do worse on tests. The effects are individually small, but you add them up across schools and across counties and they get pretty big.
The question is, is there catchup, right? In terms of learning losses, we would have to follow people for longer than we’re able to right now. But they certainly last within the year. So if I’m exposed in September, and I take a test in April, I can still see the effects of the wildfire.
We see that in our data. Now, we can’t nail the cognitive channel [as being at fault here] — like, it could be because you didn't go to school. But mostly schools don't close during smoke events, and so it’s consistent with the cognitive channel. But maybe the next year you learn what you missed and, you know, we can’t rule that out.
I think the more proven long-term outcomes is the relationship between in utero exposure and later-in-life outcomes. That’s been shown for other air pollutants, and I don’t think there’s any reason to think it’s not true for wildfire as well. In-utero exposure has this lifelong, negative imprint, including on earnings and cognitive function.
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Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world."
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images