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A conversation with the author of The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade
It was questionable if we needed a second season of Tiger King — or, let’s be honest, a first season. Regardless, if Netflix ever decides it’s interested in a story that features surprisingly charming criminals, IWT violations, and yes, even possibly murder (but without the tabloid tone and mullets), producers might look in the future to Jared D. Margulies’ delightful debut, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade.
Wait, illicit succulent trade? you might be wondering. Oh yes.
From the cliffs of California and the deserts of Brazil to the markets of Seoul and the private greenhouses of Czechia, Margulies follows the extraction and relocation of plants so rare that they might only exist in one valley or mountainside in the world. Weaving in ample philosophy and research about what drives these sorts of obsessions — as well as his personal reflections as he, in turn, is captivated by the lovable, spiky plants — The Cactus Hunters is just the right balance of edgy and academic.
Last week, I caught up with Margulies about the process of researching the book, being mistaken for an undercover cop by his subjects, and the lie that is “the green thumb,” among other topics. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You open The Cactus Hunters with a story about how you were going to study the illegal trade of tiger bones when you came across a story about saguaro cactus rustling that piqued your interest and sent you on this journey. What most stands out to you as the differences between the illegal trade of animals and animal products and the world of illegal cactus trading?
To clarify, I never actually got around to studying the illegal trade in tiger bones. I had encountered it a little bit in my past research on human-wildlife conflicts.
But there are a lot of important differences: One of the things that made the illegal plant trade so interesting to study, compared to illegal trade in animals, is that it receives a lot less attention, so there was just a lot more to learn that people hadn’t already researched. But also, the way that this material and these plants can move around the world — there are so many more options available because of the nature of plants. So if what you’re after is the genetics of the plant, to be able to grow them somewhere else in the world, there’s not just the one plant but there’s the cacti propagate, for instance. Pups. Their seeds. You can make cuttings of plants. None of these things are really available to people interested in illegal trade and animals. That affects supply chains and how these things can move around the world.
Also, because of the lack of attention to illegal plant trade compared to animal trade, the subject is a lot less criminalized. I would argue that my access to informants and research participants was a lot better because it did happen that, every now and then, people thought I was a cop. Or maybe, like, an undercover detective. But usually within pretty short order, they realized that wasn’t the case and I was generally interested in trying to understand their perspectives. I think that it would be a lot harder to develop trust within certain trades that are a lot more heavily criminalized.
Over the course of the book, you encounter the Indiana Jones of plants and the Robin Hood of cacti, among others. Can you talk a little about why these enthusiasts, who clearly care deeply about conservation, sometimes break the law by smuggling seeds or entire cacti out of the places where they naturally grow?
One of the fascinating things that really gripped me was this seeming contradiction, where you have people who are made out as conservation villains by certain actors seeing themselves as unsung conservation heroes. The reason for that is, for a lot of these collectors, they saw their community as really passionate people who wanted to get access to the plants that become objects of their desires. By and large, the people who want these plants aren’t trying to do harm to the species in the world, and they care a lot about them. But they also recognize that in their desire is something fairly insatiable and that people are going to go to lengths to get the plant that they have to go to.
For a lot of these collectors, they might see engaging in a kind of illegal activity as still a socially acceptable behavior, if it meant it got material out into the world in a way that people might want it. And the goal there, the long-term goal, is to try to reduce demand on wild harvesting of plants and wild populations. If you get a little bit of material out into the communities that delight in these plants, then you can start grafting them, propagating them, growing them from seed, and, in theory, get that material out into the world.
I wanted to take that perspective seriously. It’s a hard thing to study empirically and so it was important for me to try to be open to a really diverse set of opinions about the right way to do conservation.
You leave most of the sources in the book, including those working within the law, anonymous. Why did you make that decision?
The really short answer is, I was part of a larger research project called BIOSEC, which was run by Professor Rosaleen Duffy at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Politics and International Relations, and we were using a fairly symmetrical ethics approval process, or what in the U.S. we would call an institutional review board approval. Because a number of us were studying illicit economies, in order to ensure research-subject protection and anonymity and security, we were required to make all of our sources anonymous.
But this caused some issues because, on the one hand, it meant that everyone in the book is anonymous, even if they’re people who are law enforcement officials or botanists who would have probably really enjoyed having their names in the book. I regret that.
Most interesting, though, were the number of collectors who were mad at me because they’re also anonymous. One of the reasons for that was they saw anonymity as being suggestive of wrongdoing and for a lot of these people, they don’t feel like what they’re doing is wrong, necessarily, even if it’s against the law. They wanted their story told. I think one of the reasons I had good access to the kinds of interlocutors I had was because they felt like I was providing a space for them to get their version of the story out into the world.
You were asked to be an expert witness in a case against a South Korean smuggler who took thousands of plants from the California coast. How do you navigate moments like this, when your position as an illicit trade researcher is perhaps in tension with your own ethical code?
This was a really difficult decision for me, and I write about this. I went back and forth about whether or not to serve as an expert witness, which in this case just required writing a statement. I never had to go to court or, you know, be on a witness stand — thank goodness. But I go back and forth about if I would do it again.
I think that in the end, I chose to do it because I realized that my testimony would only serve to probably reduce the sentence that this person was facing. And I don’t say that because I think that what they were doing was okay. It was really bad and really harmful to this species of plant. I just don’t think that criminalization and incarceration actually do rehabilitative work or serve much function. It costs us a lot of money as taxpayers and causes harm.
It was complicated; I guess that’s how I would leave it. I debated whether or not to include [the story] in the book but I felt like, in the end, it would be wrong not to include it. I think that if people eventually found out I had served in that capacity, they might felt like I was trying to not disclose something. But yeah, I have some ambiguous feelings about it. In the end, what I was asked to actually do was very limited: I was just asked to put a value on these plants. But as I wrote in my letter to the judge, that value in monetary terms is such an arbitrary thing. The price of those plants has declined precipitously since I wrote that, and it had already gone down a lot since the person who sold them stole them. How interesting, though, that the court of law — at least in the United States — in order to assess the damage done to the state, it had to be valued in monetary terms.
I really liked the inclusion of the story. It’s interesting for a researcher of illicit and illegal trade to all of a sudden be dragged into the concrete legal system, and have it, you know, ask something of you.
Sometimes academics are hard on ourselves in that we think we put in all this work and do all this writing and no one actually reads it. And that’s not true. People do read your work when you publish it and you should think about who those people might be. They might be district attorneys for the state of California. People will use your work, and you should think from the outset about what the social implications of that might be. It was a big lesson for me.
At the end of the book, you write that your experiences in the cactus and succulent community have left you with hope that meaningful change is possible “not through the repressions of desire but through its celebration.” After spending so much time among people that some might call poachers, what makes you optimistic?
We have so many examples from other illicit economies where prohibition doesn’t work. I am concerned by a tendency to move in that direction. Given that we’re talking about plants — you know, as far as we know, this conversation could be different in 50 years — but we’re not having to really think about the welfare issues of, say, illegal trade in animals. There are pragmatic solutions to these problems. This material could get out into the world so that people who want these plants can get it in a way that doesn’t harm wild-growing species.
There’s still a ways to go in working through regulatory conventions to support those efforts. And importantly, in doing so, supporting the people who should have the most support, which I would argue are the communities in places in the world that have lived with these plants the longest.
I see hopeful promise in this, and I saw a whole lot of love. I really did. I saw a lot of love between people and plants, and what that can do for people in moving into developing more careful relations with plants and other species. I don’t have a large collection of cacti and succulents, but I do have some, and I have like a cactus right now that’s in flower. Do you want to see it?
Yes!
This is where I think it’s fun, to think about what plants can teach us—
Oh, it’s gorgeous!
This is a Mammillaria laui. Named for Alfred Lau, who I write about in one of the chapters of the book — a German who lived in Mexico, who has a lot of different species named after him. This is Mammillaria laui, subspecies subducta. It’s got this gorgeous crown of pink flowers.
I love having these plants. Specifically, I’ve started a small collection of plants that are associated with particular people that I wrote about, or that I thought about. Bringing some of that social history to our plants, I think, is a really nice thing that people can do. Learn about where our plants come from and the histories of how they got to where we are.
That’s kind of what set me off on this whole journey, anyway. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for thinking thoughtfully about the place of these plants in the world and how they travel and maybe, hopefully, that can help move us towards a more ethical kind of relation.
Are you worried now that once you collect all of the plants that are connected to your book, you’ll throw your whole collection out?
I don’t think I have a strong collector tendency, per se. I have been accused of being a low-key hoarder before. I’m excited to think about how I’m going to slowly develop a collection over time. Yeah, but your reference — the worst thing that can happen to a collector is completing a collection. Freud wrote about this in the context of completing his collection of statues and dying days later. This one collector who I went to see, I thought I was going to see a giant greenhouse of cacti, but I found a bunch of Mexican chili plants. Because he’d just tossed [the cacti collection] off, he was done with it. I don’t see myself going down that road but one never knows.
For someone reading this interview who might be interested in collecting, where would you say to start?
We need to get over this idea that cacti and succulent plants are great house plants because they don’t require any care. It’s not true. Everyone I know who’s had a succulent has killed it very quickly.
I killed mine.
Yeah, if you just throw a succulent on, like, a north-facing windowsill, it’s not going to do well, especially if you ignore it.
Also, get over the idea that there are natural people in the world with a green thumb — I think that is also nonsense. We just need to spend time learning about what these plants need. One of the ways you can do that is by paying attention to them.
In terms of obtaining material — you know, so much plant material can also just be found for free, gifted from friends or colleagues or the community. A lot of collector clubs, like, say, the Cactus and Succulent Society of America here in the U.S., I believe may even send you free seeds of cacti, and stuff like that.
The thing that I want to start doing is trying to grow cacti from seed. They’re slow-growing plants but I think it’d be really fun to actually watch that process unfold. And it’s quite easy to obtain seeds for a lot of these plants. Just, you know, be careful where you’re buying stuff from. Reputable nurseries are a good source. But be wary of buying from unknown people on the internet. That might be where people start to get into trouble.
Is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to let me know about your book or your experience writing it before I let you go?
I’m not too prescriptive at the end of the book about what I think the answer is. Some people may find that frustrating, like, “Oh, but you didn’t tell us like what should we do” or “What’s the right response?” One of the reasons for that was I just wanted to let people develop some of their own thoughts about this. But also it’s because the work isn’t done.
I’m developing some work right now dealing with illegal succulent trade in South Africa with some colleagues, both in South Korea but also in South Africa. I’m doing a new project on illicit Venus flytrap harvesting and the carnivorous plant trade. I’m trying to continue the process of thinking and learning with plants. But the work continues.
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California passed a new fire safety law more than four years ago. It still isn’t in force.
For more than four years, California has had a law on the books meant to protect homes and buildings during an urban firestorm like the Palisade and Eaton fires. But it’s never gone into effect.
In theory, the policy was simple. It directed state officials to develop new rules for buildings in areas with high fire risk, which would govern what people were allowed to put within the five-foot perimeter immediately surrounding their homes. A large body of evidence shows that clearing this area, known in the fire mitigation world as “zone zero,” of combustible materials can be the difference between a building that alights during a wildfire and one that can weather the blaze.
The new rules — essentially just a list of items allowed in that five-foot zone — were due two years ago, by January 1, 2023. But the California Natural Resources Agency, which is drafting the rules for the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to consider, has yet to even present a proposal. Ask anyone who’s been following this thread what’s taking so long, and they’ll almost certainly point to one thing: politics.
“There’s a ton of science about what to do, but the science has run into challenges with social acceptance, and therefore political acceptance,” Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, told me. People do not want to be told how they can or can’t landscape or furnish or otherwise adorn the outside of their homes. Inevitably, when the rules do come out, you’ll hear about Gavin Newsom coming to take away people’s decks and policing gardens.
No one thinks that zone zero rules, if enacted and adhered to, could have prevented fires in the Pacific Palisades or Altadena or saved every structure in the recent fires’ path. But alongside other fire mitigation strategies, zone zero design can significantly lower the chances of a given building burning, and therefore the chances that a fire will spread to neighboring buildings, and ultimately reduce the risk of fires becoming compounding, devastating disasters. Wara likened it to car safety rules like seatbelts and airbags — people still die in car accidents, but far fewer than would otherwise.
The question now is whether the record-breaking destruction in Los Angeles will be enough to convince people that zone zero rules are effective and worthwhile. Past experience shows the answer is not an obvious yes.
There are three ways buildings ignite during a wildfire, Yana Valachovic, a forest scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network who specializes in community resilience and the built environment, told me. They are either exposed to burning embers, direct flames, or radiant heat, though most often a combination.
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Embers — hot, hard debris of burned material from a fire — can be carried miles away from their origin by the wind and create new spot fires next to homes. “What happens with those embers is they get thrown at the building, they hit the walls, the siding, and then drop to the base and collect at the base,” Valachovic said, “so you can have not just one, but thousands of embers at the base of our structures.”
Embers can also penetrate buildings through open windows and ventilation systems. If radiant heat from nearby burning structures causes windows to shatter or fall out, that can also create new vectors for embers to enter the home. “Embers find their way,” Valachovic said.
Fire mitigation experts promote two strategies for reducing vulnerability, and they go hand in hand. The first is home hardening, which could mean building with fire-resistant materials but also includes smaller but effective actions like covering air vents with fine mesh screens and sealing gaps to try to block embers. The second is creating so-called “defensible space,” or a buffer around the building, where any vegetation is carefully selected and managed to slow the spread of fire to and from the building. California divides defensible space into three different zones: Zone one extends from 5 feet away from the structure to 30 feet, and zone two goes out to 100 feet away. Then, of course, there’s zone zero.
The state has had regulations on the books to require at least 30 feet of defensible space in high-risk areas since 1965, and it updated the standards to establish a two-zone system in 2006. In both cases, the rules were “really framed around, how do you interrupt flames running at the building?” said Valachovic. The regulations included thinning trees and removing lower branches, clearing some trees that were closer to homes, clearing dead wood and litter, and pruning branches that hang over buildings. But they still allowed for vegetation right up against the house.
Since then, wildfire post-mortems have found that this scenario of flames burning a path to a building is not a primary driver of structure loss. “It was missing the point,” Valachovic told me of the previous rule structure. “What we’ve seen now for the last decade is that embers are really driving our home loss issue, and so we’re basically allowing all this vegetation and combustible material to be present in the zone that is really very vulnerable.”
In August 2020, after Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in California due to an explosion of wildfires, the state legislature passed AB 3074, which finally sought to bridge the gap by creating a new, “ember-resistant zone” — zone zero. Had the rules been implemented under the timeline mandated by the law, new homes would have had to comply beginning in 2023, and existing homes would have had to comply beginning in 2024. Like the earlier defensible space rules, they would have applied to homes located in parts of the state designated as Fire Hazard Severity Zones. These are generally areas that you might think of as the “wildland-urban interface,” where homes abut wildland vegetation like forests or scrublands, but others extend into more urban areas. Almost all of the burned area in the Pacific Palisades, for instance, would have been subject to the rules, while only a small portion of the homes in Altadena are in the zone.
When I reached out to the California Natural Resources Agency to ask if there was an updated timeline for the regulations, one of the first things that Tony Andersen, the Deputy Secretary for Communications, told me, was not about the timeline but about the ultimate cost of compliance.
“We recognize there are costs associated with doing this work around homes and structures,” Andersen told me via email, “and we are focused on identifying options for financial assistance as well as education and outreach to help owners prepare and prioritize mitigations.” He then noted that the rulemaking was a “complex process” that the agency wanted to get right, and said it aimed to present a draft proposal to the Board “as soon as is feasible, most likely in the coming months.”
Andersen’s response illustrates one of several tensions that have made it difficult to write the zone zero rules — and will ultimately make them difficult to implement. If the rules say you can’t have a wooden deck, for example, or you can’t have a fence that touches the building, homeowners could face costly retrofits. And despite witnessing the horror of destructive wildfires, many homeowners don’t want to switch their wooden fence for a metal one, or replace their bushes with gravel.
Five feet might sound like a negligible amount of space, but people are attached to the aesthetics of this zone. Homeowners have become used to “softening” the line where the walls meet the ground by filling it in with vegetation, Valachovic told me. “We really developed this idea that we don’t visually want to see our foundations,” she said. “From a fire defense perspective, this idea that we have combustible material basically ringing our houses and our structures, that is problematic.”
Several people I interviewed for this story asked if I had seen a documentary about the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California called Bring Your Own Brigade. The film captures a series of city council meetings in 2019, when officials were considering updating local building standards. They weigh a number of ideas that would reduce the risk of embers collecting on top of, inside, or next to homes, including eliminating gutters and requiring roof overhangs and a five-foot setback for any combustible material.
At the time, the Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history, killing 85 people, displacing more than 50,000, and destroying more than 18,000 structures. But during a public hearing, community members lashed out at the potential cost, warned that new standards would prevent displaced residents from moving back, and decried the aesthetic implications.
“Paradise is an individualistic town,” one person says. “That’s part of the charm and the quirkiness. We don’t need consistency and uniformity.”
In another scene, a city councilmember asks Paradise Fire Chief John Messina to narrow down the list to just one rule that would make the community more fire resistant. “That five-foot barrier around your house is extremely important,” he replies. “That would be the No. 1 thing out of all of this that I would say would defend your home the best and have the most impact.” Shortly after, the council votes down the measure.
Michael Wara, who recalled the scene to me over the phone, said a similar thing happened when the fire chief in his community in Mill Valley tried to get the city council to adopt zone zero rules. “The word got out in the community that this crazy fire chief was going to make us rip up our front yards,” he said. When the council convened for a vote, more than a thousand people showed up to oppose it. The council ended up passing it as a voluntary measure.
To Wara, part of the problem is the language used to communicate these ideas with the public. “Zone zero” and “hardening” conjure a bunker mentality, he said. “I do not want my family to live in a bunker that is hardened to attack. I want my family to live in a home that is welcoming.”
He also thinks the state can reach a compromise, like allowing succulents and other fire-resistant greenery in zone zero. The rules don’t have to turn these areas into gravel and concrete wastelands to be effective.
Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department
The Los Angeles County Fire Department recently included photos in a notice to homeowners about defensible space rules and the upcoming zone zero regulations that illustrate how landscapes might strike that balance. The images feature stone walkways immediately next to homes, followed by raised beds made of metal and concrete containing attractive landscaping. Not quite “quirky” and “charming,” but far from a barren dystopia.
Despite the delay in implementing zone zero, California has tried to pitch it as part of a strategy to solve the state’s insurance crisis. In 2022, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara enacted new rules requiring insurance companies to provide discounts to homeowners who do home hardening retrofits and create defensible space.
“That’s terrific,” Dave Jones, the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lara’s predecessor as insurance commissioner, told me. “But you don’t get the discount if they won’t write you the insurance.”
Jones said the bigger issue is that the models insurance companies use to decide whether or not to write a policy do not account for fire mitigation efforts. A homeowner could take every action on the list for home hardening, create a zone zero, live in a community that’s investing in aggressive fuels reduction, and so on, and insurance companies could still deny them coverage. Last year, Jones wrote a bill that would have required companies to change the models they use to determine coverage to account for mitigation. Several insurance industry trade groups opposed the bill, arguing that it was “premature and impossible to implement given the real-world data constraints,” and that it was “inconsistent” with the state’s efforts to “restore a healthy and competitive insurance market.” It didn’t pass.
If following zone zero guidelines meant having a shot at getting insurance, maybe people would be more open to doing it, Jones argued to me. But as things stand, that’s not the case. “I don’t think the failure is so much in the state developing the standards as it is in the lack of political courage to stand up to the insurance industry and say, hey, look, enough is enough. We’re going to pass a law to require your models to account for this.”
This past year, the California legislature passed a law giving existing homes three years, instead of just one, to comply with zone zero rules once they are finalized, whenever that is. And if the regulations are finalized this year, it’s possible that some of the rebuilt structures in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena will have to meet them.
Ultimately, Valachovic sees hope in fire mitigation work. The narrative that climate change is driving these destructive wildfires can make people feel helpless. But there are so many low-cost, simple things people can do to reduce their exposure. “I just feel like we have a moral imperative to share practical, reasonable actions that people can take to make a difference, and to know that with that, the odds improve substantially.”
The first veto of Joe Biden’s presidency, in March 2023, came on a bill that would have overturned a Department of Labor rule allowing retirement funds to consider environment, social, and governance factors — commonly known as ESG — when making investment decisions. At the time, it seemed like a good representation of where the issue stood: Though there was a conservative backlash against ESG investing, much of which revolves around whether companies are incorporating climate risks into their planning, the backlash was more bark than bite. ESG not only seemed here to stay, it was gaining in prominence as more investors and Wall Street firms realized they could no longer ignore the effects of climate change on the economic prospects of the companies they were funding.
Less than two years later, the picture looks rather different — at least politically. There is still over $3 trillion invested in ESG funds worldwide, the vast majority of it in Europe. But here in the U.S., the backlash has only grown stronger, and with Donald Trump’s election, there has been a Wall Street stampede away from public commitments to assess climate risk as a key component of investment decisions. There’s no way to know how much long-term effect this change will have on emissions, but the reversal in the public stance of the financial sector has been swift and intense.
Let’s begin with the banks. In the space of a month, the six largest banks in the United States — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan — all pulled out of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, an international United Nations-sponsored group under which member banks commit to pursuing net-zero carbon emissions from their lending and investments by 2050.
While Trump’s election may have been the tipping point, it comes after an organized campaign waged at the state level over the past couple of years, as Republican attorneys general have pressured and threatened the finance industry into abandoning its efforts to contribute to the mitigation of climate change.
In the spring of 2023, 23 Republican AGs threatened the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (like the NZBA, a UN-sponsored group) with antitrust action, saying it was pursuing “an activist climate agenda.” Companies began leaving, and a year later, the group disbanded. The effort against the banking alliance followed a similar pattern: Threats of legal action from Republican attorneys general, followed by a pullback from the banks.
Like insurance companies and banks, investment firms are clearly feeling the pressure. BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, recently pulled out of the Net-Zero Asset Managers Initiative, a group similar to those for insurers and banks, citing “legal inquiries from various public officials.” That included a lawsuit filed by Texas and 10 other Republican states, alleging that BlackRock and other firms were unfairly harming the fossil fuel industry with their investment decisions. This week, the NZAMI released a statement saying that in response to “different regulatory and client expectations,” it is launching an internal review, and meanwhile “suspending activities to track signatory implementation and reporting” of climate goals.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have been issuing reports and press releases condemning the “woke ESG cartel,” which they claim consists of “left-wing activists and major financial institutions that collude to impose radical environmental, social, and governance goals on American companies.” After the election, those Republicans now control both houses of Congress, as well as the White House.
So it’s a good bet that the pressure on the finance industry from Washington will only increase, especially with a new administration that combines dismissal of climate change with an eagerness to bring corporations to heel. In many cases, key administration positions will be staffed by former employees of the very fossil fuel companies that oppose real climate action, or at least by their allies. One vivid example: Lee Zeldin, Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, revealed in disclosure forms that he was paid tens of thousands of dollars to pen op-eds attacking ESG investing. His forms list only the PR firms that paid him, not the clients on whose behalf they did so.
These pullbacks from climate pledges are clearly motivated by fear, and may even be taken with regret by some of the CEOs making the decisions. If that is the case, however, it is not a universal sentiment. The Financial Timesreports that “Some Wall Streeters also feel able to embrace making money openly, without nodding to any broader social goals. ‘Most of us don’t have to kiss ass because, like Trump, we love America and capitalism,’ one said.”
Here’s the kicker: These alliances that are now wavering began with few requirements in order to bring in as many participants as possible; only later would companies have to meet more reporting and emissions goals. But “as accountability mechanisms started to come into play, at the same time we started to see the conservative backlash against it,” Tensie Whelan, founding director of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, told me. Now, “they’re all running scared.”
Though some critics charge that ESG is mostly about greenwashing, many financial actors — banks, asset managers, investors — have embraced greener investing because it is both good for the planet and good for business. If a company is exposed to climate risk but fails to account for it in its long-term strategy, that company is probably a bad investment. Investments incorporating sustainability considerations tend to perform as well or better than ordinary investment vehicles — the S&P 500 ESG Index, for instance, has outperformed the standard S&P 500. And a study by HIP Investor showed that public pension funds in blue states that incorporated ESG factors have generated higher returns than red-state funds that eschewed them.
“I would hope and assume that at some point there will be some class-action suits” against states that have turned away from ESG investing, and in so doing cost taxpayers money, Whelan said. In 2024, 17 Republican-run states passed bills restricting ESG investments with state funds, while eight Democratic states passed pro-ESG bills.
When banks or investment firms abandon climate alliances or pull back from climate goals in other ways, they nearly always put out statements reiterating their commitment to reducing emissions. While those might be sincere, the most important message is that the threats and pressure are effective. And that’s what has become so clear: Conservatives are energized and emboldened to roll back corporate efforts to address climate change, and are using every tool they have — legislation, litigation, threats, public pressure campaigns — to destroy those initiatives.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of room for pressure from the other side. Whelan notes that blue states “are very adamant about having key sustainability criteria” in their investments, and as younger generations accumulate more wealth, they are more likely to demand sustainability where they put their money. As for Wall Street responding to political pressure by backing away from its climate goals, “this retrenchment is unfortunate,” Whelan told me, but “I do think it’s temporary, and I think they know that. Because they’re not stupid.”
On executive orders, the Supreme Court, and a “particularly dangerous situation” in Los Angeles.
Current conditions:Nearly 10 million people are under alert today for fire weather conditions in southern California • The coastal waters off China hit their highest average temperature, 70.7 degrees Fahrenheit, since record-keeping began • A blast of cold air will bring freezing temperatures to an estimated 80% of Americans in the next week.
High winds returned to Los Angeles on Monday night and will peak on Tuesday, the “most dangerous” day of the week for the city still battling severe and deadly fires. In anticipation of the dry Santa Ana winds, the National Weather Service issued its highest fire weather warning, citing a “particularly dangerous situation” in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties for the first time since December 2020.
A new brush fire, the Auto Fire, ignited in Oxnard, Ventura County, on Monday evening. It spread 55 acres before firefighters stopped it. Meanwhile, investigators continue to look for the cause of the Palisades Fire, which ignited near a week-old burn scar, a popular partying spot, and damaged wooden utility poles, according to a New York Times analysis.
National Weather Service
Trump is planning an executive order banning offshore wind developments on the East Coast, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported Monday. The news came from New Jersey Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew, who said he’s working with Trump’s team to “to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
Van Drew’s press release also said that this order is “just the beginning,” and that it would be finalized “within the first few months of the administration,” a far cry from the Day One action Trump has promised. Van Drew had earlier told New Jersey reporters that the ban would last six months.
Meanwhile, in other executive order news, Biden issued an order on Tuesday directing the Energy and Defense departments to lease federal lands for “gigawatt-scale” data centers, according to E&E News, but only if they bring online enough clean energy to match their facilities’ needs.
On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to hear a lawsuit brought by Utah attempting to seize control of the “unappropriated” federal lands in the state. Opponents argued that the lawsuit, if successful, would have put public lands across the West on the path to privatization since Utah and other states likely couldn’t afford to manage them and would have had to sell off much of them. However, “while the Court’s decision denying original review of Utah’s claims is welcome news for our shared public lands, we fully expect Utah’s misguided attacks to continue,” Alison Flint, the senior legal director at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.
As I reported last month, the Utah lawsuit organizers “seem prepared to make an appeal to Congress or the Trump administration if the Supreme Court doesn’t make a move in their favor,” given that “funding for the messaging for Stand for Our Land, the publicity arm of the lawsuit, has reportedly outpaced the spending on lawyers.
Also on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a fossil fuel industry argument to block states, municipalities, and other groups from seeking damages for the harms caused by climate change. The appeal by Sunoco, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and others stemmed from a high-profile lawsuit in Honolulu that seeks to hold energy companies accountable for causing “a substantial portion” of the effects of climate change. Had the Supreme Court taken up the case, similar lawsuits by California and others likely would have been paused during deliberations. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, responded to Monday’s decision by claiming activists will now “make themselves the nation’s energy regulators.”
A little over a week after the start of New York City’s congestion pricing, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released data showing significant decreases in the amount of time passengers spend in inbound traffic. On average, during the morning commute, traffic times have decreased by 30% to 40%; in some cases, such as during rush hour in the Holland Tunnel, travel time has been cut in half, going from over 11 minutes to under five. Due to the traffic reductions, some bus routes are up to 28% faster now than at the same time last year. “It has been a very good week here in New York,” MTA deputy chief Juliette Michaelson said in a news conference.
So far, the MTA has seen an average of 43,000 fewer drivers entering the congestion pricing zone, which begins below 60th St. and costs $9 during the day. While Gothamist notes that this is only a 7.3% reduction compared to last January, many New Yorkers say congestion pricing effects are visibly noticeable in the streets of lower Manhattan.
The Brooklyn Bridge as congestion pricing went into effect. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Oil and gas magnate Harold Hamm is throwing a “swanky party” to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump, on whose campaign he spent more than $4.3 million, according to the research group Fieldnotes and The New York Times. Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum was among the invitees, although an advisor has said he does not plan to attend; one of the party’s several major oil and gas industry sponsors, Liberty Energy, was founded by Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary.
In May, Trump met with oil and gas executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort and promised industry-friendly tax and regulatory policies and an aggressive stance against wind energy if they helped fund his White House bid. The oil and gas industry ultimately invested some $75 million in efforts to help re-elect the former president and contributed millions to his legal defense.
25% — That’s the level of tariff Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said Canada should prepare for after a meeting with incoming President Trump — and not expect exceptions for its crude oil exports to the U.S., per Bloomberg’s Javier Blas.