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A conversation with Manjula Martin about her new book The Last Fire Season.
When Manjula Martin was growing up in Northern California in the 1980s, wildfires weren’t something she thought about much. She knew about disaster — the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, which killed 63 people and injured thousands, hit when she was a teenager — but fire, she thought, was just something that happened up in the mountains in the summer.
Things are different now. In 2017, Martin left the high prices of San Francisco for the redwoods of Sonoma County. The night of their housewarming party, a firestorm swept through Santa Rosa and Sonoma and Napa counties. The next year — 5 years ago this week — the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive fire in the state’s history, destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.
In her new book, The Last Fire Season (out on January 16 next year), Martin writes about the fires that swept through California in 2020, weaving her personal story with that of fire in California writ large. It’s a beautiful book, and I called her up to talk about her relationship with fire and how we can learn to live with the changing world. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The book opens in 2020, which was a year of multiple fire complexes. Was that the first time fire made itself known in the immediate vicinity of your home?
No, it wasn’t. But it was the first time that I realized that it wasn’t an anomaly.
We had horrible fires near my area in 2017. In 2018, the Camp Fire happened in Northern California, which was like a four-hour drive away, but the smoke from that fire lingered in the Bay Area for weeks. And then in 2019, the Kincade fire was a huge fire up here in Sonoma, and the entire west of the county was evacuated in basically the course of a night, including ourselves.
Then in 2020, the Lightning Complex fires happened in late August, which is what the book starts with. And that was the moment where I personally was like, “oh, this is going to keep happening.”
Before that a natural disaster to me felt like a thing that happened once and then that’s it, right? It wasn’t connected to larger things for me. But the fact is that the new wildfires that we’re having are bigger and hotter and far more destructive than the previous wildfires we’ve had, and 2020, which is probably far too late, was the year that I personally put that all together under the name of climate change. It wasn’t the first year I knew about fire, but it was the moment I realized that I was going to be living with fire for the rest of my life.
I was struck by your description of the 2020 fires and the ways that COVID complicated your experience of them. It reminded me of the concept of cascading events; it was striking to read about how your go bag was filled with these N95 masks that were there for the sake of the fires, but also, of course, turned out to have utility for this other thing that you’re dealing with at the same time.
That was one of the reasons why I chose to center the book around 2020. I think that was a moment where it became clear for a lot of people that disasters don’t take their turn. When it was happening, I felt it was a historic moment.
You named your book The Last Fire Season. But, of course, it wasn’t the last.
Unfortunately not. The book began as an essay, and since I was writing it in 2021 I thought I was writing about the last fire season I had experienced. But then I realized that it was actually a really great title for a book. It’s pretty commonly acknowledged now that in the North American West, fire season isn’t really a thing anymore. Now fire authorities talk about having a fire year.
That is directly linked to the changing of the weather and the climate. But for me, the deeper meaning of it is this idea that fire being seasonal also sort of implies that it’s temporary, and that it’s going to go away. But really it’s not seasonal, it’s part of this land. And we’re going to be living with it forever.
There’s a point in your book where you write that the California ecosystem was fire-adapted, but also that fire is changing. What do you mean by that?
Since time immemorial, California’s ecosystems — from oak woodlands to redwood forests to grasslands and chaparral — evolved with fire as part of their natural cycle. Fire is actually something that helps the cycle of the landscape reset and continue.
And this was something that Indigenous people knew and really sort of harnessed and used in the way that they tended the lands. But the genocide of Indigenous people in California really sort of stopped that cycle, as is the case with colonialism in most places.
Right, you have a chapter about the Indigenous history of fire in California and the suppression of fire both through violence against Indigenous communities and also a long history of policies against fire.
Yeah, the colonial policies of managing the land in California had been what they call ”total fire exclusion,” which is basically the idea that all fire is bad and we need to extinguish fires right away. There was a policy in place called the 10 AM policy that actually said every new forest fire needs to be extinguished by 10 AM the next morning. And, you know, there are a lot of reasons why that happened, including profits and fear and prioritizing human habitat and recreation over the landscape. But the result is that the landscapes here are actually neglected at this point, 150 years after colonization.
You wrote at one point about going to prescribed burns and there was a section that really stood out to me:
Fire is exuberant. It’s joyous. It dances. I can see why people joke that all firefighters are secret pyros. It’s so much fun.
I fully relate to this feeling. Has going to prescribed burns changed your own relationship with fire?
Good fire and cultural fire, which is generally the term we use when we’re talking about Indigenous use of fire, have radically changed my feelings about fire. Humans have evolved with fire, and the more I engage with fire, the more I learn about it, the more I understand its role in both the land and the history of this place, the less afraid I feel.
You write about your own experience with getting a hysterectomy and how that affected your life afterwards, and I thought that was an interesting choice. You could have written a book that was just about fire, and we could have never learned about your hysterectomy. But you chose to include it. Can you tell me a little bit about how that came to happen?
I could have written a straight journalistic look at wildfire right now or at the 2020 fire season specifically. And that was something I toyed with. But I ultimately realized, in thinking about this idea of cascading disasters, that they’re all happening while people are living their lives. Climate change, wars, economic ruin are all happening on top of whatever else is going on in your life. So I thought this part of my life was worth including.
The hysterectomy, and many associated health crises, led me to having chronic pain. And one of the only things that helped me with that was gardening. For me, the physical act of literally touching the land, being in this dialogue with the environment and the ecosystem around me, was the thing that helped me recover from this health crisis. I wasn’t quite well. And more importantly, nature wasn’t quite well. And gardening in this environment is what really made it click for me that this environment is going through a crisis as well.
That garden was partly how you knew about the oncoming fires in 2020, right?
Yeah, when the Lightning Complex fires started, I was out in my garden watering the roses. I saw this little black object on the ground, and when I leaned down and picked it up I saw it was a leaf of a California bay laurel tree. And it was burned black, but it was still whole. It had been blown on the wind and landed in my garden. It was sort of like a messenger, telling me that a few miles away these trees were burning.
Bay trees are a natural part of the forest understory here, but they are highly flammable. They’re basically made of oil, and they serve as what’s called a ladder fuel; if fire gets in that tree, it will shoot up it and then can get into the crowns of taller trees like redwoods or oaks that would normally be more fire resistant. It’s literally a fire spreader. Anyone who lives in the area will tell you that when there’s a fire nearby it rains burnt leaves.
Parts of the book are unexpectedly written in the past tense. You write, for example, that “Northern California was a very large place,” but the depictions of events in the past or future are written in the present tense. Was that intentional? Did you mean to contract the idea of Northern California?
I absolutely did. The convention in nonfiction is to write events in the past tense, but to phrase facts, or things that are still true, in the present tense. I felt like it was important to acknowledge that the things we take as granted, these truths about the way the environment works, might not always remain that way. It was also partly a pragmatic decision, because I didn’t know what would happen before the book came out. What if my house burned down before that, or if I have to move? Things are just so chaotic right now.
The other time I break with convention is when I write about Indigenous nations and Indigenous management practices. I intentionally used the present tense there as a way to push back against the trope of a lot of non-Indigenous writers portraying Indigenous people and worldviews as extinct when in fact they’re very, very alive.
Throughout the book you’re constantly talking to your partner about whether to stay in your home or move away to a “safer” area. I think it can be really hard for people who don’t live in areas under threat to grasp just how hard the concept of migrating really is.
Right, that’s such a common binary: to stay or go. And the reality is actually a lot messier. I’m fortunate to even have the choice of whether to stay or go; I am a person who has a lot of different privileges. I have resources, I have friends, I’m educated, I’m white.
Most people don’t willingly leave their homes unless things are really bad. But it’s never really all bad: Sometimes there’s extreme weather and disasters, and then there isn’t. It’s up and down. There’s a lot of talk around what the perfect solution is, where the safe places are. And the truth is that nowhere is safe because of climate change.
For me, the point of living at this moment on this planet is that it’s messy. It’s full of grief, it’s full of joy and beauty, and it’s also dangerous. There may be a time when I leave this place, for a variety of reasons. But I think the idea that you can run away from climate change is false.
Something I’ve learned a lot from talking with people who are deeply connected to the land here and who work with fire is that you have a responsibility to the place where you live. If I love this place so much, what do I owe it? The idea of tending a place for its overall health, not just for my personal survival, is very powerful.
Right, at one point you write about you and your partner thinking about doing prescribed burns in the woods near you to help reduce the risk of more fires.
We have thought a lot about the idea of reintroducing good fire where we live. Our neighborhood has been getting together and doing work days where we clear fuels from the forest floor together. And it’s really proof of how much work is needed, because you can clear brush and cut dead limbs off trees for a day with a group of 15 people, and then you look at this tiny quarter acre that you’ve worked on, and it still needs so much more work.
Stewardship is a constant act.
Absolutely. And it might not be perfect, and honestly it might not make a difference. These woods might still burn. But if and when they do burn, they are going to be healthier afterwards because the fire is going to be healthier.
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Rob talks Ford and GM with BloombergNEF’s Corey Cantor. Plus, Rob and Jesse dig into the Trump transition.
It’s been a news-filled few weeks — so it’s time for a roundup. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about what Trump’s cabinet selections might mean for his climate policy and whether permitting reform could still happen. Then Rob chats with Corey Cantor, senior EV analyst at BloombergNEF, about promising Q3 sales for U.S. automakers, General Motors’ turnaround, and how much the Trump administration might dent America’s EV uptake.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: How are you thinking about Ford and GM right now? Because they have basically totally reversed their position since the first time we started talking.
Corey Cantor: I hope I’m not too corny today, but I was thinking Missy Elliott — another New Jerseyan — “flip it and reverse it,” in terms of how people feel about Ford and GM. I think GM’s approach … don’t forget this is their second platform at the rodeo here, meaning GM had the Bolt and the Chevy Volt before it, and a good amount of experience with EVs. And really, what they were trying to do with Ultium was to build a battery and EV platform that could work with a variety of different vehicles.
And so the struggle, as we’ve outlined before, and many publications have outlined was they just couldn’t get the battery production working. They had issues with automation. They had issues with ensuring that they were setting up the necessary suppliers. And I’d say, about maybe nine months ago or so, a favorite EV journalist of mine, John Voelcker wrote in, I believe, InsideEVs, around this idea that GM had finally cracked Ultium and were finally kind of … He had got the head of Ultium at the time on record saying that they had resolved a lot of the issues, and really, you’ve seen it in the sales volume, as well as the fact that EVs like the Cadillac Lyric continue to sell pretty consistently.
Then GM ran into a software issue with the Blazer, and fixed that software issue, and that had slowed things down. And then since, really, June of this year has been off to the races. And so we’ll see how the fourth quarter goes, right? I think you don’t want to get too high on any kind of automaker, but GM is clearly in a better spot because they’re approaching making a profit on each of the EVs sold.
Now, I’ll caveat that with, we don’t know if the EV tax credit itself, you know, at the federal level, plays a role in the fact that they’ll be gross margin profitable, but that is a pretty big turning point. Because at that point, you’re no longer losing money on those EVs, and so you are kind of geared to go more high-volume. Where if you look at Ford, Ford has been losing thousands of dollars on every electric vehicle, really had not been building a platform for the current sales of the Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning, hoping to kind of just price them where they’d be losing little enough on each that they can make their bridge to that next platform.
And then earlier this fall, Ford basically announced pushing back those EV models to 2027, along with the new platform. So Ford kind of runs into the issue that we discussed on the previous conversation with Tesla, in that they’re going to have only really two EVs in the U.S. market for the next couple of years. So GM will have the Bolt back next year and some other Cadillacs. There’s a lot of exciting things on the way for GM.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
And for his energy czar, Doug Burgum.
When Trump enters the Oval Office again in January, there are some climate change-related programs he could roll back or revise immediately, some that could take years to dismantle, and some that may well be beyond his reach. And then there’s carbon capture and storage.
For all the new regulations and funding the Biden administration issued to reduce emissions and advance the clean energy economy over the past four years, it did little to update the regulatory environment for carbon capture and storage. The Treasury Department never clarified how the changes to the 45Q tax credit for carbon capture under the Inflation Reduction Act affect eligibility. The Department of Transportation has not published its proposal for new safety rules for pipelines that transport carbon dioxide. And the Environmental Protection Agency has yet to determine whether it will give Texas permission to regulate its own carbon dioxide storage wells, a scenario that some of the state’s own representatives advise against.
That means, as the BloombergNEF policy associate Derrick Flakoll put it in an analysis published prior to the election, “the next administration and Congress will encounter a blank canvas of carbon capture infrastructure rules they can shape freely.”
Carbon capture is unique among climate technologies because it is, in most cases, a pure cost with no monetizable benefit. That means the policy environment — that great big blank canvas — is essential to determining which projects actually get built and whether the ones that do are actually useful for fighting climate change.
The next administration may or may not decide to take an interest in carbon capture, of course, but there’s reason to expect it will. Doug Burgum, Trump’s pick for the Department of the Interior who will also head up a new National Energy Council, has been a vocal supporter of carbon capture projects in his home state of North Dakota. Although Trump’s team will be looking for subsidies to cut in order to offset the tax breaks he has promised, his deep-pocketed supporters in the oil and gas industry who have made major investments in carbon capture based, in part, on the 45Q tax credit, will not want to see it on the chopping block. And carbon capture typically enjoys bipartisan support in Congress.
Congress first created the carbon capture tax credit in 2008, under the auspices of cleaning up the image of coal plants. Lawmakers updated the credit in 2018, and then again in 2022 with the Inflation Reduction Act, each iteration increasing the credit amount and expanding the types of projects that are eligible. Companies can now get up to $85 for every ton of CO2 captured from an industrial plant and sequestered underground, and $180 for every ton captured directly from the air. Combined with grants and loans in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the changes have driven a surge in carbon capture and storage projects in the United States. More than 150 projects have been announced since the start of 2022, according to a database maintained by the International Energy Agency, compared to fewer than 100 over the four years prior.
Many of these projects are notably different from what has been proposed and tried in the past. Historically in the U.S., carbon capture has been used on coal-fired power plants, ethanol refineries, and at natural gas processing facilities, and almost all of the captured gas has been pumped into aging oil fields to help push more fuel out of the ground. But the new policy environment spurred at least some proposals in industries with few other options to decarbonize, including cement, hydrogen, and steel production. It also catalyzed projects that suck carbon directly from the air, versus capturing emissions at the source. Most developers now say they plan to sequester captured carbon underground rather than use it to drill for oil.
Only a handful of projects are actually under construction, however, and the prospects for others reaching that point are far from guaranteed. Inflation has eroded the value of the 45Q tax credit, Madelyn Morrison, the government affairs director for the Carbon Capture Coalition, told me. “Coupled with that, project deployment costs have really skyrocketed over the past several years. Some folks have said that equipment costs have gone up upwards of 50%,” she said.
Others aren’t sure whether they’ll even qualify, Flakoll told me. “There is a sort of shadow struggle going on over how permissive the credit is going to be in practice,” he said. For example, the IRA says that power plants have to capture 75% of their baseline emissions to be eligible, but it doesn’t specify how to calculate those baseline emissions. The Treasury solicited input on these questions and others shortly after the IRA passed. Comments raised concerns about how projects that share pipeline infrastructure should track and report their carbon sequestration claims. Environmental groups sought updates to the reporting and verification requirements to prevent taxpayer money from funding false or inflated claims. A 2020 investigation by the inspector general for tax administration found that during the first decade of the program, nearly $900 billion in tax credits were claimed for projects that did not comply with EPA reporting requirements. But the Treasury never followed up its request for comment with a proposed rule.
Permitting for carbon sequestration sites has also lagged. The Environmental Protection Agency has issued final permits for just one carbon sequestration project over the past four years, with a total of two wells. Fifty-five applications are currently under review.
Carbon dioxide pipeline projects have also faced opposition from local governments and landowners. In California, where lawmakers have generally supported the use of carbon capture for achieving state climate goals, and where more than a dozen projects have been announced, the legislature placed a moratorium on CO2 pipeline development until the federal government updates its safety regulations.
The incoming Congress and presidential administration could clear away some of these hurdles. Congress is already expected to get rid of or rewrite many of the IRA’s tax credit programs when it opens the tax code to address other provisions that expire next year. The Carbon Capture Coalition and other proponents are advocating for another increase to the value of the 45Q tax credit to adjust it for inflation. Trump’s Treasury department will have free rein to issue rules that make the credit as cheap and easy as possible to claim. The EPA, under new leadership, could also speed up carbon storage permitting or, perhaps more likely, grant primacy over permitting to the states.
But other Trump administration priorities could end up hurting carbon capture development. The projects with the surest path forward are the ones with the lowest cost of capture and multiple pathways for revenue generation, Rohan Dighe, a research analyst at Wood Mackenzie told me. For example, ethanol plants emit a relatively pure stream of CO2 that’s easy to capture, and doing so enables producers to access low-carbon fuel markets in California and Washington. Carbon capture at a steel plant or power plant is much more difficult, by contrast, as the flue gas contains a mix of pollutants.
On those facilities, the 45Q tax credit is too low to justify the cost, Dighe said, and other sources of revenue such as price premiums for green products are uncertain. “The Trump administration's been pretty clear in terms of wanting to deregulate, broadly speaking,” Dighe said, pointing to plans to axe the EPA’s power plant rules and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate disclosure requirements. “So those sorts of drivers for some of these projects moving forward are going to be removed.”
That means projects will depend more on voluntary corporate sustainability initiatives to justify investment. Does Amazon want to build a data center in West Texas? Is it willing to pay a premium for clean electricity from a natural gas plant that captures and stores its carbon?
But the regulatory environment still matters. Flakoll will be watching to see whether lax monitoring and reporting rules for carbon capture, if enacted, will hurt trust and acceptance of carbon capture projects to the point that companies find it difficult to find buyers for their products or insurance companies to underwrite them.
“There will be a more of a policy push for [CCS] to enter the market,” Flakoll said. “But it takes two to tango, and there's a question of how much the private sector will respond to that.”
What he wants them to do is one thing. What they’ll actually do is far less certain.
Donald Trump believes that tariffs have almost magical power to bring prosperity; as he said last month, “To me, the world’s most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariffs. It’s my favorite word.” In case anyone doubted his sincerity, before Thanksgiving he announced his intention to impose 25% tariffs on everything coming from Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods.
This is just the beginning. If the trade war he launched in his first term was haphazard and accomplished very little except costing Americans money, in his second term he plans to go much further. And the effects of these on clean energy and climate change will be anything but straightforward.
The theory behind tariffs is that by raising the price of an imported good, they give a stronger footing in the market; eventually, the domestic producer may no longer need the tariff to be competitive. Imposing a tariff means we’ve decided that a particular industry is important enough that it needs this kind of support — or as some might call it, protection — even if it means higher prices for a while.
The problem with across-the-board tariffs of the kind Trump proposes is that they create higher prices even for goods that are not being produced domestically and probably never will be. If tariffs raise the price of a six-pack of tube socks at Target from $9.99 to $14.99, it won’t mean we’ll start making tube socks in America again. It just means you’ll pay more. The same is often true for domestic industries that use foreign parts in their manufacturing: If no one is producing those parts domestically, their costs will unavoidably rise.
The U.S. imported over $3 trillion worth of goods in 2023, and $426 billion from China alone, so Trump’s proposed tariffs would represent hundreds of billions of dollars of increased costs. That’s before we account for the inevitable retaliatory tariffs, which is what we saw in Trump’s first term: He imposed tariffs on China, which responded by choking off its imports of American agricultural goods. In the end, the revenue collected from Trump’s tariffs went almost entirely to bailing out farmers whose export income disappeared.
The past almost-four years under Joe Biden have seen a series of back-and-forth moves in which new tariffs were announced, other tariffs were increased, exemptions were removed and reinstated. For instance, this May Biden increased the tariff on Chinese electric vehicles to over 100% while adding tariffs on certain EV batteries. But some of the provisions didn’t take effect right away, and only certain products were affected, so the net economic impact was minimal. And there’s been nothing like an across-the-board tariff.
It’s reasonable to criticize Biden’s tariff policies related to climate. But his administration was trying to navigate a dilemma, serving two goals at once: reducing emissions and promoting the development of domestic clean energy technology. Those goals are not always in alignment, at least in the short run, which we can see in the conflict within the solar industry. Companies that sell and install solar equipment benefit from cheap Chinese imports and therefore oppose tariffs, while domestic manufacturers want the tariffs to continue so they can be more competitive. The administration has attempted to accommodate both interests with a combination of subsidies to manufacturers and tariffs on certain kinds of imports — with exemptions peppered here and there. It’s been a difficult balancing act.
Then there are electric vehicles. The world’s largest EV manufacturer is Chinese company BYD, but if you haven’t seen any of their cars on the road, it’s because existing tariffs make it virtually impossible to import Chinese EVs to the United States. That will continue to be the case under Trump, and it would have been the case if Kamala Harris had been elected.
On one hand, it’s important for America to have the strongest possible green industries to insulate us from future supply shocks and create as many jobs-of-the-future as possible. On the other hand, that isn’t necessarily the fastest route to emissions reductions. In a world where we’ve eliminated all tariffs on EVs, the U.S. market would be flooded with inexpensive, high-quality Chinese EVs. That would dramatically accelerate adoption, which would be good for the climate.
But that would also deal a crushing blow to the American car industry, which is why neither party will allow it. What may happen, though, is that Chinese car companies may build factories in Mexico, or even here in the U.S., just as many European and Japanese companies have, so that their cars wouldn’t be subject to tariffs. That will take time.
Of course, whatever happens will depend on Trump following through with his tariff promise. We’ve seen before how he declares victory even when he only does part of what he promised, which could happen here. Once he begins implementing his tariffs, his administration will be immediately besieged by a thousand industries demanding exemptions, carve-outs, and delays in the tariffs that affect them. Many will have powerful advocates — members of Congress, big donors, and large groups of constituents — behind them. It’s easy to imagine how “across-the-board” tariffs could, in practice, turn into Swiss cheese.
There’s no way to know yet which parts of the energy transition will be in the cheese, and which parts will be in the holes. The manufacturers can say that helping them will stick it to China; the installers may not get as friendly an audience with Trump and his team. And the EV tariffs certainly aren’t going anywhere.
There’s a great deal of uncertainty, but one thing is clear: This is a fight that will continue for the entirety of Trump’s term, and beyond.