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How Team Biden learned to stop worrying and love carbon removal.
What does the new American climate policy look like?
Last week, we got a better sense. On Friday, the Biden administration unveiled a massive investment — more than $1.2 billion — that aims to create a new industry in the United States out of whole cloth that will specialize in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
As President Joe Biden’s climate law hits its one-year anniversary, the investment shows the audacity, the potential, and — ultimately — the risks of his approach to climate and economic policy.
If successful, the investment will establish a new sector of the American economy and remake another one, while providing the world with an important tool to fight climate change. If unsuccessful, then the investment could set back an important climate technology and forever link it to the fossil-fuel industry.
The investment’s centerpiece is two large industrial facilities in Louisiana and Texas that will remove more than 1 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. But the program is much broader than those hubs, encompassing more advanced and experimental approaches to carbon removal, or CDR, than the government has previously funded. The government has unleashed old industrial policy tools, such as advanced market guarantees, toward the nascent field.
Although Biden is implementing this policy, the approach will almost certainly outlive his administration. America’s support for carbon removal is strongly, perhaps surprisingly, bipartisan. The new hubs and the other policies announced last week were funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law or by other bipartisan legislation.
Given all that, it’s worth it to spend some time on these investments to better understand how they work and what they might mean for the future of the American economy.
Let’s start here: Yes, we will probably need carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, to meet the world’s and the country’s climate goals.
This wasn’t always clear. When I started as a climate reporter in 2015, carbon removal was taboo, something that only climate deniers and other folks who wanted to delay decarbonization brought up. An influential Princeton study from earlier in the decade had concluded that carbon removal — especially capturing carbon in the ambient air, a strategy called direct air capture, or DAC — would never pencil out financially and that it would always be cheaper to reduce fossil-fuel use rather than suck carbon out of the sky.
But in 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made a startling announcement: So much carbon dioxide had accumulated in the atmosphere that it would be virtually impossible to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius without carbon removal.
The IPCC studied global energy models and found that even in optimistic scenarios, humanity would release too much carbon by the middle of the century to keep temperatures from briefly rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. But if we began removing carbon from the atmosphere, then we could avoid locking in that spike in temperatures for the long term. That is, in order to hit the 1.5-degree goal by 2100, humanity must spend much of the 21st century removing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it for thousands of years.
We need carbon removal, in other words, not so we can keep burning fossil fuels, but to deal with the fossil-fuel pollution that is already in the atmosphere.
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This change was only possible because CDR’s costs were falling. A few months earlier, a company called Carbon Engineering had announced that it would soon cut direct air capture’s cost to $230 a ton. (DAC was once thought to cost $600 a ton.) This suggested that in a handful of cases — a small handful — it might make financial sense to use DAC instead of decarbonizing a particular activity.
Even so, the numbers involved in this effort are mind-boggling. This year, several thousands tons of carbon will be removed from the atmosphere worldwide, at a cost of $200 to $2,000 a ton, according to one industry expert. Perhaps 100,000 tons of carbon have ever been removed from the atmosphere by a human-run process, according to CDR.fyi, a community-run database.
But by 2050, in order to hit the IPCC’s targets, humanity must remove about 5 billion tons a year at a cost of roughly $100 a ton.
For context, the global shipping industry moves about 11 billion tons of material each year.
In other words, in the next three decades, humanity must perfect the technology of CDR, find a way to pay for it, and massively scale it up to the degree that it captures roughly half of the amount of material that travels via oceanborne trade today. And it must do this while decarbonizing the rest of the energy system — because if we fail to bring fossil-fuel use nearly to zero during this period, then all of this will be for naught.
Q: Well, if we have to store all this carbon for a very long time, why don’t we plant a lot of trees?
A: For a few years in the mid 2010s, trees did seem like the cheapest way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
But the scale of the carbon problem exceeds what biology alone can fix. Since 1850, humanity has pumped 2.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is nearly twice the total biomass of all life on Earth. Only geology can deal with such a massive (literally) problem. To truly undo climate change, we must put carbon back into geological storage. Plus, even if you sopped up a lot of carbon with trees, they might burn down. Then you’d be back where you started.
Yet CDR isn’t just a logistical problem.
Fossil fuel companies have long used the rhetoric of carbon removal — and its relative, carbon capture and storage, which sucks up climate pollution from a smokestack or industrial process — as an excuse to keep drilling for oil and gas. At the same time, they’ve resisted any federal regulation that would require them to actually capture carbon when they burn fossil fuels.
What’s more, the infrastructure and the expertise best-suited for carbon removal is largely in the same places that have fossil-fuel industries today. (Think of the Gulf Coast or North Dakota.) Some people who live in those places want to see decarbonization end the fossil-fuel industry forever — not transform it into something different, like a carbon management industry.
And although the technology to inject captured carbon dioxide into the ground is decades-old, concentrated CO2 can be dangerous if mishandled.
It’s not hard to imagine a world where the promise of CDR allows oil and gas companies to keep drilling and polluting, but where a lack of any binding regulation — and local pushback whenever a CDR facility is announced — means that very little carbon actually gets removed from the atmosphere. In that world, no matter how powerful CDR is technologically, the politics of CDR would make climate change worse.
Which brings us to the Biden administration’s strategy for scaling up the CDR industry. It has three components:
1. Build massive direct air capture facilities around the country.
2. A slew of new programs to boost alternative (and maybe less energy-intensive) approaches to CDR.
3. A new “Responsible Carbon Management” guideline.
In short, the administration is seeking to scale up the most straightforward carbon-removal technology, financially support other promising approaches, and then ensure it all happens in an above-board way.
The marquee announcement here are the carbon capture hubs, which were widely covered last week. The Energy Department will spend $1.2 billion on large-scale facilities in Louisiana and Texas that will use industrial processes to cleanse carbon from the ambient air. Each will remove about one million tons of carbon a year when complete.
Project Cypress, the Louisiana hub, will be run by the federal contractor Battelle in conjunction with Climeworks, a Swiss DAC company, and Heirloom, which stores carbon dioxide in concrete.
The boringly named South Texas DAC Hub will be run by Occidental Petroleum, an oil company, in conjunction with the DAC company Carbon Engineering and Worley, an engineering firm.
These are going to be the charismatic megaprojects of the CDR industry. They are meant to create clusters of expertise and infrastructure, concentrated in a geographic core, that will give rise to more innovation. You can think of them as little Silicon Valleys — or, more pointedly, little Shenzens — of carbon removal.
As goes these hubs, so goes CDR. If the hubs have an accident, or take too long to build, then the industry will struggle; if they succeed, it will have a running start. Therefore, the Energy Department has made a big fuss about how these projects should help local residents: When selecting these projects, it took the unusual step of ranking these projects’ “community benefits” as highly as their more technical aspects.
Last week, an Energy Department official was quick to point out to me that these projects have merely been selected and that neither has received any money yet. Next, the department and these hubs will negotiate binding contracts that will seek to lock in community benefits for locals. Only then will the funds flow.
What’s more interesting, though, is what’s not here. In the infrastructure law, Congress required that the Energy Department establish four DAC hubs. Only two have been announced. That’s because officials realized last year that fewer than four places nationwide had the expertise and understanding of DAC necessary to erect a massive million-ton facility on demand.
So the department set up a kind of starter DAC hub program — a series of grants that will allow cities, nonprofits, universities and companies to study the feasibility of establishing a DAC hub in their town. It gave out more than a dozen of these grants last week to companies and universities in Utah, California, Illinois, Kentucky, and more.
Officials clearly hope that these starter grants may produce more than two full-fledged DAC hub projects, which Congress can then fund at the same level as the Texas and Louisiana facilities.
Even those starter projects will specialize in DAC, though, which means that each approach will use industrial machinery to capture carbon from the ambient air and inject it underground.
But removing carbon doesn’t necessarily require DAC. It may be possible to remove carbon passively by using certain kinds of rock, for instance, or by growing lots and lots of algae. These approaches will probably use less energy than DAC, and they may even remove more carbon than DAC, but they will be harder to measure and verify, and there will be more uncertainty about exactly how much carbon you’re taking out of the atmosphere.
But federal policy has a strong pro-DAC bias. That’s not only because of the DAC hubs, but also because of the Inflation Reduction Act: Biden’s climate law pays companies $180 for each ton of carbon that they remove from the atmosphere, but it is written such that it can essentially only be used for DAC.
The department is trying to diversify away from DAC within the bounds that Congress has given. Last week, it announced that it would soon sponsor small pilot programs that use alternative technologies, including rock mineralization, biomass, and ocean-based processes. It will also fund efforts to measure and verify those techniques so as to make sure they remove a dependable amount of carbon from the atmosphere.
The Energy Department also announced that it will create a new pilot purchase program for carbon removal efforts, providing an “early market commitment” to carbon-removal companies in the same way that it provided one to COVID vaccine makers. This program, which will have an initial budget of $35 million, will use federal expertise to identify which CDR techniques are the most viable and promising, allowing a DOE purchase contract to function as a de facto stamp of approval. (Heatmap first covered the existence of this program earlier this month.)
Finally, the department will launch a separate prize for commercial DAC providers with the goal of cutting its costs down to $100 a ton.
These programs have the unfortunate name “Carbon Negative Shot,” which is meant to evoke a “moonshot” but sounds more like an overpriced product for deer hunters. We will not dwell on it any longer.
All these efforts will turn the Department of Energy into the world’s biggest public buyer and supporter of carbon removal. That lays the groundwork for the final aspect of its strategy that launched last week: a “Responsible Carbon Management Initiative.”
This is a nonbinding list of principles that any carbon-management project will have to follow: These include engaging respectfully with communities before setting up a project, consulting with local tribes, developing the local workforce and ensuring good jobs, and monitoring local air and water quality. (The department is seeking public comment on what, exactly, these principles should be.)
Eventually, the Energy Department hopes to use these principles to provide “technical assistance” to projects that meet the guidelines. It will also recognize developers that have demonstrated they meet the principles.
In other words, the initiative could, over time, become a kind of soft standards-setting body for the industry — a way to distinguish good carbon-removal projects from the bad (and hopefully eliminate the bad in the first place). It will help that the same department publishing these guidelines will also be where all the funding is coming from.
Will all this work? I don’t know. But the scale of the effort is meaningful in itself, because it shows how the Biden administration approaches the task of erecting an industry de novo. If there’s such a thing as Bidenomics, this is what it looks like: a place-based development strategy that admires industrial clustering, supports domestic supply and demand, and applies an optimistic approach to regulation.
You can also see the risk of Biden’s approach. Decarbonization requires technical expertise and real-world know-how; in America, most of that expertise resides in the private sector. Occidental, an oil company that describes itself (optimistically) as a carbon management company, will operate one of the DAC hubs. Although it is prohibited by law from doing anything really egregious — like using the carbon that it’s capturing to drill for more oil — the Biden team cannot ensure that its heart or actions will remain pure. Occidental will be a good carbon-removal team player only so long as it benefits its bottom line.
Yet I don’t want to overstate the importance of this investment either. The vast majority of the Biden administration’s climate investment is going to cutting emissions: If anything, the Biden administration is spending too little on carbon removal, not too much. By my estimate, these programs, including the DAC hubs, will amount for 2% of the roughly $173 billion that the bipartisan infrastructure law devotes to climate or environmental projects. And when you include the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate spending — which is where most federal climate spending is in the first place — the programs discussed here drop to perhaps one percent of total climate spending, although that will depend on how many facilities use the DAC tax credit.
That is a small price for a big prize. If this funding “works,” then these investments will represent the beginning of a new industry — a carbon management industry capable of pulling millions of tons of pollution out of the sky. But even if they fail, then we’ll have learned something too: that carbon removal — and especially DAC — may in fact be unworkable, and that we should not comfort ourselves in the years to come with the hope of cleaning up the atmosphere.
“Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand,” the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote. A couple billion seems a worthy price for learning if that hand is free or not.
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Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France that were freezing last week are now experiencing record high temperatures • Forecasters are monitoring a storm system that could become Australia’s first named tropical cyclone of this season • The Colorado Rockies could get several feet of snow today and tomorrow.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, according to AccuWeather. “For perspective, this would equate to nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter. The figure accounts for long-term economic impacts including job losses, medical costs, drops in tourism, and recovery expenses. “The combination of extremely warm water temperatures, a shift toward a La Niña pattern and favorable conditions for development created the perfect storm for what AccuWeather experts called ‘a supercharged hurricane season,’” said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This was an exceptionally powerful and destructive year for hurricanes in America, despite an unusual and historic lull during the climatological peak of the season.”
AccuWeather
This year’s hurricane season produced 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes. Five hurricanes made landfall, two of which were major storms. According to NOAA, an “average” season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season comes to an end on November 30.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the $7,500 EV tax credit, California will consider reviving its Clean Vehicle Rebate Program. The CVRP ran from 2010 to 2023 and helped fund nearly 600,000 EV purchases by offering rebates that started at $5,000 and increased to $7,500. But the program as it is now would exclude Tesla’s vehicles, because it is aimed at encouraging market competition, and Tesla already has a large share of the California market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has cozied up to Trump, called California’s potential exclusion of Tesla “insane,” though he has said he’s okay with Trump nixing the federal subsidies. Newsom would need to go through the State Legislature to revive the program.
President-elect Donald Trump said yesterday he would impose steep new tariffs on all goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico on day one of his presidency in a bid to stop “drugs” and “illegal aliens” from entering the United States. Specifically, Trump threatened Canada and Mexico each with a 25% tariff, and China with a 10% hike on existing levies. Such moves against three key U.S. trade partners would have major ramifications across many sectors, including the auto industry. Many car companies import vehicles and parts from plants in Mexico. The Canadian government responded with a statement reminding everyone that “Canada is essential to U.S. domestic energy supply, and last year 60% of U.S. crude oil imports originated in Canada.” Tariffs would be paid by U.S. companies buying the imported goods, and those costs would likely trickle down to consumers.
Amazon workers across the world plan to begin striking and protesting on Black Friday “to demand justice, fairness, and accountability” from the online retail giant. The protests are organized by the UNI Global Union’s Make Amazon Pay Campaign, which calls for better working conditions for employees and a commitment to “real environmental sustainability.” Workers in more than 20 countries including the U.S. are expected to join the protests, which will continue through Cyber Monday. Amazon’s carbon emissions last year totalled 68.8 million metric tons. That’s about 3% below 2022 levels, but more than 30% above 2019 levels.
Researchers from MIT have developed an AI tool called the “Earth Intelligence Engine” that can simulate realistic satellite images to show people what an area would look like if flooded by extreme weather. “Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate,” wrote Jennifer Chu at MIT News. The team found that AI alone tended to “hallucinate,” generating images of flooding in areas that aren’t actually susceptible to a deluge. But when combined with a science-backed flood model, the tool became more accurate. “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk,” said MIT’s Björn Lütjens, who led the research. “Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.” The tool is still in development and is available online. Here is an image it generated of flooding in Texas:
Maxar Open Data Program via Gupta et al., CVPR Workshop Proceedings. Lütjens et al., IEEE TGRS
A new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris lets visitors listen to the sounds of endangered and extinct animals – along with the voice of the artist behind the piece, the one and only Björk.
How Hurricane Helene is still putting the Southeast at risk.
Less than two months after Hurricane Helene cut a historically devastating course up into the southeastern U.S. from Florida’s Big Bend, drenching a wide swath of states with 20 trillion gallons of rainfall in just five days, experts are warning of another potential threat. The National Interagency Fire Center’s forecast of fire-risk conditions for the coming months has the footprint of Helene highlighted in red, with the heightened concern stretching into the new year.
While the flip from intense precipitation to wildfire warnings might seem strange, experts say it speaks to the weather whiplash we’re now seeing regularly. “What we expect from climate change is this layering of weather extremes creating really dangerous situations,” Robert Scheller, a professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, explained to me.
Scheuller said North Carolina had been experiencing drought conditions early in the year, followed by intense rain leading up to Helene’s landfall. Then it went dry again — according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, much of the state was back to some level of drought condition as of mid-November. The NIFC forecast report says the same is true for much of the region, including Florida, despite its having been hit by Hurricane Milton soon after Helene.
That dryness is a particular concern due to the amount of debris left in Helene’s wake — another major risk factor for fire. The storm’s winds, which reached more than 100 miles per hour in some areas, wreaked havoc on millions of acres of forested land. In North Carolina alone, the state’s Forest Service estimates over 820,000 acres of timberland were damaged.
“When you have a catastrophic storm like [Helene], all of the stuff that was standing upright — your trees — they might be snapped off or blown over,” fire ecologist David Godwin told me. “All of a sudden, that material is now on the forest floor, and so you have a really tremendous rearrangement of the fuels and the vegetation within ecosystems that can change the dynamics of how fire behaves in those sites.”
Godwin is the director of the Southern Fire Exchange for the University of Florida, a program that connects wildland firefighters, prescribed burners, and natural resources managers across the Southeast with fire science and tools. He says the Southeast sees frequent, unplanned fires, but that active ecosystem management helps keep the fires that do spark from becoming conflagrations. But an increase like this in fallen or dead vegetation — what Godwin refers to as fire “fuel” — can take this risk to the next level, particularly as it dries out.
Godwin offered an example from another storm, 2018’s Hurricane Michael, which rapidly intensified before making landfall in Northern Florida and continuing inland, similar to Hurricane Helene. In its aftermath, there was a 10-fold increase in the amount of fuel on the ground, with 72 million tons of timber damaged in Florida. Three years later, the Bertha Swamp Road Fire filled the storm’s Florida footprint with flames, which consumed more than 30,000 acres filled with dried out forest fuel. One Florida official called the wildfire the “ghost” of Michael, nodding to the overlap of the impacted areas and speaking to the environmental threat the storm posed even years later.
Not only does this fuel increase the risk of fire, it changes the character of the fires that do ignite, Godwin said. Given ample ground fuel, flame lengths can grow longer, allowing them to burn higher into the canopy. That’s why people setting prescribed fires will take steps like raking leaf piles, which helps keep the fire intensity low.
These fires can also produce more smoke, Godwin said, which can mix with the mountainous fog in the region to deadly effect. According to the NIFC, mountainous areas incurred the most damage from Helene, not only due to downed vegetation, but also because of “washed out roads and trails” and “slope destabilization” from the winds and rain. If there is a fire in these areas, all these factors will also make it more challenging for firefighters to address it, the report adds.
In addition to the natural debris fire experts worry about, Helene caused extensive damage to the built environment, wrecking homes, businesses, and other infrastructure. Try imagining four-and-a-half football fields stacked 10 feet tall with debris — that’s what officials have removed so far just in Asheville, North Carolina. In Florida’s Treasure Island, there were piles 50 feet high of assorted scrap materials. Officials have warned that some common household items, such as the lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and electric vehicles, can be particularly flammable after exposure to floodwaters. They are also advising against burning debris as a means of managing it due to all the compounding risks.
Larry Pierson, deputy chief of the Swannanoa Fire Department in North Carolina, told Blueridge Public Radio that his department’s work has “grown exponentially since the storm.” While cooler, wetter winter weather could offer some relief, Scheuller said the area will likely see heightened fire behavior for years after the storm, particularly if the swings between particularly wet and particularly dry periods continue.
Part of the challenge moving forward, then, is to find ways to mitigate risk on this now-hazardous terrain. For homeowners, that might mean exercising caution when dealing with debris and considering wildfire risk as part of rebuilding plans, particularly in more wooded areas. On a larger forest management scale, this means prioritizing safe debris collection and finding ways to continue the practice of prescribed burns, which are utilized more in the Southeast than in any other U.S. region. Without focused mitigation efforts, Godwin told me the area’s overall fire outlook would be much different.
“We would have a really big wildfire issue,” he said, “perhaps even bigger than what we might see in parts of the West.”