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Few aspects of Biden’s climate law have spurred more controversy than the “three pillars” — a set of rules proposed by the Treasury Department for how to claim a lucrative new tax credit for producing clean hydrogen. Now, it appears, the pillars may be poised to fall.
The Treasury has been under immense pressure from Congress, energy companies, and even leaders at the Department of Energy to relax the rules since before it even published the proposal in December. The pillars, criteria designed to prevent the program from subsidizing projects that increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions rather than reduce them, are too expensive and complicated to comply with, detractors argue, and would sink the prospects for a domestic clean hydrogen industry.
But lately, the campaign to dismantle the pillars has gotten both more forceful and more threatening. There’s the politically challenging hurdle that leaders of another federally-funded hydrogen program — the regional clean hydrogen hubs — have spoken out against the rules, arguing they threaten investment in hub projects and therefore job creation and economic development around the country. Then there’s the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn the precedent known as Chevron deference, which weakened agencies’ ability to defend their own rules and thereby emboldens any aggrieved parties to sue the Treasury if it keeps the pillars in place. Last week, 13 Democratic Senators, 11 of whom hail from states involved in the hubs, sent a letter calling on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to dramatically revise the rules or risk having them challenged in court.
The consequences of losing the three pillars can only be guessed at using models, which are built on assumptions and can’t predict the future with certainty. But proponents say the stakes couldn’t be higher. In their view, the pillars don’t just prevent carbon emissions. They mitigate the risks of rising electricity costs for everyday Americans. And without them, one of the most generous energy credits the government offers could become incredibly easy to claim, ballooning the federal budget.
The clean hydrogen tax credit was created by the Inflation Reduction Act, and offers up to $3 per kilogram of hydrogen produced, with the top dollar amount reserved for fuel that is essentially zero-emissions. The hope was that this would be enough to bring down the cost of hydrogen made from electricity to parity with hydrogen made from natural gas. If made cleanly, hydrogen could help decarbonize other carbon-intensive industries, like steelmaking and shipping.
At first, excitement for the tax credit ran high and companies quickly began making plans for new factories. Announcements of new hydrogen production capacity more than tripled from 2 million tons per year in 2021 to 7.7 million by the end of the following year, with another 6 million announced in 2023, according to the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
Then, after the Treasury’s proposal dropped last December, everything stopped. Under the three pillars, hydrogen companies that get electricity from the grid, which is still largely powered by fossil fuels, would be required to buy clean energy credits with specific attributes in order to mitigate their emissions and render their hydrogen “clean.” The credits must come from power plants located in the same region as the hydrogen production — the first pillar — that were built no more than 3 years before the hydrogen plant — the second pillar — and be purchased for every hour the plant is operating — the third pillar.
The three provisions work together to ensure that new clean power plants are brought online to meet hydrogen’s energy demand. But finding clean energy credits with these features is not easy — there aren’t many systems in place to do this yet. The Treasury took more than a year to publish its initial proposal, and leading up to it, companies lobbied aggressively for a more lenient version. There was so much money on the line that some businesses flooded the public with ads in newspapers and on streaming and podcast services delivering a cryptic warning that “additionality” — the requirement to buy energy from new power plants — was threatening to “set America back.”
Until businesses have clarity on whether the three pillars will stay or go, the industry is on ice. Several previously announced projects have been delayed. Few companies have reached offtake agreements, even provisional ones, for their hydrogen. Almost none have received a final investment decision or started construction.
“They’re losing advantage over other parts of the world,” Hector Arreola, a principal analyst for hydrogen and emerging technologies at Wood Mackenzie, told me. Momentum to develop hydrogen projects has started to shift back to Europe, which has already finalized its own definition of what constitutes clean hydrogen, he said.
It’s hard to imagine a path forward for the Treasury to keep the three pillars intact. Last week’s letter outlined the current state of play in stark terms. “Without significant changes to the draft guidance,” it said, “one of the most powerful job creation and emission reduction tools in the IRA will likely be hamstrung by future court challenges, congressional opposition, and unfulfilled private sector investment.”
Indeed, at least one company, Constellation Energy, has already suggested it would draw on the loss of Chevron deference to sue the agency if it didn’t remove the second pillar — the requirement to buy clean energy credits from recently-built power plants. (Constellation owns a fleet of nuclear power plants and is developing hydrogen projects powered by them.) In comments to the Treasury, Constellation wrote that the requirements for purchasing clean electricity “have no basis” in the law.
“People can always sue today to challenge regulations,” Keith Martin, a renewable energy tax lawyer at the firm Norton Rose Fulbright, told me. “It’s just that the odds of success have increased.” The Supreme Court’s ruling undermines regulatory agencies’ authority to interpret federal statute.
Another hydrogen company that has been fighting the three pillars, Plug Power, has already claimed victory: It put out a press release last month declaring that it anticipates receiving the tax credit, despite the fact that the rules are still not final and its projects would likely not qualify under Treasury’s proposal. The CEO, Andy Marsh, told a hydrogen trade publication that he’s “certain” the rules will be loosened. (Plug Power didn’t respond to a request for clarification by publish time.)
In their letter, the 13 Democratic senators propose that hydrogen producers should be able to purchase clean energy from existing power plants that are already supplying the grid if they are located in a state that has a clean energy standard, or as long as the power plant doesn’t reallocate more than 10% of its power to hydrogen production. They recommend losing the hourly matching requirement altogether and replacing it with annual or monthly matching, depending on when plants start construction. The senators also suggest allowing projects built in areas with “insufficient clean energy sources,” meaning places with suboptimal sun, wind, water, or geothermal energy, to source their power from farther outside the region.
Beth Deane, the chief legal officer for Electric Hydrogen, a company that has historically supported the three pillars, told me in an interview she thought these proposals represented a good compromise. “Bottom-line, the effectiveness of green hydrogen as a decarbonization tool is being artificially held back,” she said later in an email. “We need to give up perfection on both sides of the three-pillar debate and find the ‘good enough’ solution that lets early mover projects move forward with less stringent requirements.”
But other proponents told me the letter carves out so many loopholes that the pillars would remain in name only. Rachel Fakhry, the policy director for emerging technologies at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me the letter was “outrageous” and “a giveaway buffet.” Daniel Esposito, a manager in the electricity program at the think tank Energy Innovation, told me he can’t imagine any scenario where these exceptions don’t result in an emissions boost rather than a reduction.
That’s because the electrolyzers used to produce clean hydrogen consume a lot of power and are expected to cause fossil fuel plants — which are more flexible than renewables — to run more often and stay open longer than they otherwise would. Without a requirement to buy power from new clean sources and a prescription to match operations with clean energy throughout the day, there will be no demand signals to bring (often more expensive) clean resources onto the grid that can, for example, produce power at night when solar panels aren’t generating. Power system models from Energy Innovation, Princeton University researchers, the Rhodium Group, and the Electric Power Research Institute have all found that there could be significant emissions consequences if the three pillars were relaxed in ways suggested in the letter.
“This effectively unlocks more than 10 million metric tons of dirty electrolytic hydrogen,” Esposito said, based on some back-of-the-envelope estimates. That would cost something like $30 billion per year. Put another way, he said, every $300 paid out by this program could subsidize one ton of CO2 emissions. Put a third way, he added, it could set the U.S. back two to three percentage points on its commitment under the Paris Agreement to reduce emissions 50% to 52% by 2030 — and we’re already off track.
The authors of the letter say they’re “confident” these fears are overblown. They cite a competing analysis published last year by the consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics and paid for by the trade group the American Council on Renewable Energy, which found that requiring companies to match their operations with clean energy on an hourly basis, rather than an annual basis, does not ensure lower greenhouse gas emissions. They also cite research by an energy modeling group at Carnegie Mellon and North Carolina State University, which found that the difference in cumulative emissions between scenarios with less stringent requirements and the full three pillars comes out to less than 1% by 2039.
Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon who worked on that research, told me the three pillars add a level of regulatory complexity to hydrogen production that is not worth the cost in terms of the emissions savings. In general, she said, she saw no need for the rules, and that the Treasury should subsidize electrolytic hydrogen regardless of where the electricity comes from. “We need to deploy this infrastructure,” Jaramillo told me. “We need to deploy it now so it’s available later.”
The other camp of researchers disputed Jaramillo’s group’s findings, chalking them up to a series of differences in assumptions and approach. They also call the industry’s bluff on the claim that the three pillars are too hard and expensive to comply with. Esposito pointed out that a small group of hydrogen companies has already told the Treasury that if the rules were finalized as-is, they planned to build enough capacity to produce more than 6 million tons of hydrogen per year.
Fakhry argued that we are already seeing the risks of losing the three pillars play out in real time as power-hungry industries like bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence grow. Bitcoin mines have driven up emissions and energy costs around the country. Utilities in Pennsylvania are sounding the alarm that an Amazon data center seeking to divert power from an existing nuclear power plant could shift up to $140 million in costs to other electricity customers. As I wrote in Heatmap last year, this debate is not just about hydrogen — think of all the other energy-intensive industries that will have to electrify before we can reach net zero.
Plenty of stakeholders still believe that the Treasury can find a middle ground by making the three pillars more flexible. The American Clean Power Association, which represents a wide range of energy companies, has proposed loosening the hourly matching aspect for projects that start construction before 2028. Fakhry acknowledged the need for flexibility, but her recommendations are much more narrow than the senators’. For example, she would allow hydrogen producers to buy power from existing nuclear plants, but only if they are at risk of retirement and the purchase would help keep them open. Esposito said Energy Innovation would support power procurement from existing clean resources that are curtailed, meaning they produce power that currently goes unutilized.
Both Fakry and Esposito also downplayed the threat of lawsuits, arguing that Treasury did exactly what it was instructed to do by the law. The IRA specifically says that hydrogen emissions should be calculated per a section of the Clean Air Act that says any accounting should include “significant indirect emissions.” Treasury has interpreted this to include the induced emissions caused by a hydrogen plant, and received letters of support from the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy backing this interpretation.
However, as Martin, the tax lawyer, told me, by overturning Chevron deference, the Supreme Court has just given “677 federal district court judges greater latitude to substitute their own judgment for subject matter experts at the federal agencies.”
Asked for comment on the Senators’ letter, a Treasury spokesperson told me the agency is still considering the many thousands of comments the agency received on the proposed rules. “The Biden Administration is committed to ensuring that progress continues and that the IRA’s investments continue to create good-paying jobs, lower energy costs, and strengthen energy security.”
Even if Yellen heeds the Senators’ advice, the department may not be able to avoid a lawsuit. “We will use every tool available to us — including the courts — to either defend a strong final rule or challenge an unlawful one that reflects the asks in the letter,” Fakhry told me.
There’s also a realpolitik argument here that the industry might want this all to be over more than it wants to kill the three pillars. “The number one thing people want is business certainty,” Esposito told me. “I don’t think people want this to drag on for another two years.”
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On exemptions, lots of new EVs, and Cyclone Alfred
Current conditions: A smattering of rainfall did little to contain a massive wildfire raging in Japan • Indonesia is using cloud seeding to try to stop torrential rains that have displaced thousands • At least 22 tornadoes have been confirmed this week across southern states.
The Trump administration said yesterday that automakers will be exempt from the new 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada – but just for a month. The announcement followed a meeting between administration officials and the heads of Stellantis, GM, and Ford – oh, to be a fly on the wall. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained, the tariffs are expected to spike new car prices by $4,000 to $10,000, and could hit internal combustion cars even worse than EVs, and prompt layoffs at Ford and GM. “At the request of the companies associated with [the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement], the president is giving them an exemption for one month so they are not at an economic disadvantage,” Trump said in a statement. Stellantis thanked Trump for the reprieve and said the company “share[s] the president’s objective to build more American cars and create lasting American jobs.” Around 40% of Stellantis cars currently sold in the U.S. are imported from Canada and Mexico.
The Supreme Court has rejected President Trump’s request to withhold roughly $2 billion in congressionally-approved payments to the U.S. Agency for International Development for foreign aid work that has already been completed. On his first day back in office, Trump ordered a 90-day pause on all foreign aid so programs could be reviewed to ensure they align with his agenda. The administration then eliminated funding for the majority of USAID’s contracts, including at least 130 that related to climate and/or clean energy. This week’s SCOTUS decision was “a welcome but confusing development for humanitarian and development organizations around the world,” The New York Timesreported, “as they waited to see if thousands of canceled contracts would be restarted.”
Speaking of cars, there has been a lot of EV news in the last few days:
Rivian announced plans to expand internationally. CFO Claire McDonough also said the company is working “around the clock” to roll out the new R2, R3, and R3X models, with production for the R2 set to start early next year. She said international expansion plans would kick off after the R2 production ramps up.
Volkswagen unveiled the ID. EVERY1. The concept-car version of its ultra-affordable EV “will be the first to roll out with software and architecture from Rivian,” TechCrunchreported. Production is slated for 2027, and the car will start at around 20,000 euros (or $21,500). No word on a U.S. release, though.
The ID. EVERY1Volkswagen
Volvo showed off the ES90. What is it? Good question. “Some might say it is a sedan,” the company said in its press release. “Others will see a fastback, or even hints of an SUV. We’ll let you be the final judge – all we know is that the new, fully electric Volvo ES90 carves out a new space for itself by eliminating the compromises between those three segments, which puts it in a class of its own.” InsideEVscalled it the company’s “most advanced EV to date,” because it can charge for 186 miles of range in 10 minutes on a fast charger.
Cadillac introduced a very long electric SUV. The electric Escalade IQL will go into production this year. With an overall length of 228.5 inches, it will be the longest SUV, uh, ever. It’ll start at $132,695.
On a related note, Tesla sales continue to plummet worldwide. They were down 76% last month in Germany, with sharp declines across other European countries, too. In Australia, sales were down 72%.
Global sea ice levels were at an all-time low last month, according to researchers at the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Arctic sea ice cover was 8% below average in February, the lowest since records began in 1979, and “the third consecutive month in which the sea ice extent has set a record for the corresponding month.” Antarctic sea ice cover was 26% below average. “One of the consequences of a warmer world is melting sea ice, and the record or near-record low sea ice cover at both poles has pushed global sea ice cover to an all-time minimum,” said Samantha Burgess at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Melting sea ice contributes to sea level rise and ocean acidification, harms polar ecosystems, and creates a global-warming feedback loop by reducing albedo, which is the Earth’s ability to reflect sunlight back to space.
C3S
Forecasters are growing increasingly concerned about Cyclone Alfred, which is swirling off the coast of eastern Australia and is expected to arrive Friday or Saturday as a category 2 storm, or perhaps even a category 3. Alfred will be the first cyclone in 50 years to make landfall in this part of Australia. The storm has slowed as it approaches land, which means it will spend more time over very warm waters, soaking up even more moisture to dump on land. “The northeastern Coral Sea, where Cyclone Alfred formed, experienced the fourth-hottest temperatures on record for February and the hottest on record for January,” a group of climate change researchers wrote at The Conversation. Residents in and around Brisbane have been told to prepare to evacuate.
American drivers spent more time on the road last year than ever before, logging a record 3.28 trillion miles.
On boasts and brags, clean power installations, and dirty air
Current conditions: Strong winds helped spark dozens of fires across parched Texas • India’s Himalayan state of Uttarakhand experienced a 600% rise in precipitation over 24 hours, which triggered a deadly avalanche • The world’s biggest iceberg, which has been drifting across the Southern Ocean for 5 years, has run aground.
President Trump addressed Congress last night in a wide-ranging speech boasting about the actions taken during his first five weeks in office. There were some familiar themes: He claimed to have “ended all of [former President] Biden’s environmental restrictions” (false) and the “insane electric vehicle mandate” (also false — no such thing has ever existed), and bragged about withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement (true). He also doubled down on his plan to boost U.S. fossil fuel production while spouting false statements about the Biden administration’s energy policies, and suggested that Japan and South Korea want to team up with the U.S. to build a “gigantic” natural gas pipeline in Alaska.
On the same day as the speech, new tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China came into effect, triggering retaliatory duties and causing stock markets to plunge. Experts are busy trying to figure out what it all means for American businesses and consumers. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained, the tariffs are likely to make electricity prices go up, raise construction costs, make gas more expensive at the pump, and make new cars costlier. Fossil fuel firms aren’t thrilled. The American Gas Association said the 10% tariff on Canadian natural gas “indicates potential impacts totaling at least $1.1 billion in additional costs to American consumers per year.” Chet Thompson, CEO of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, said that “imposing tariffs on energy, refined products, and petrochemical imports will not make us more energy secure or lower costs for consumers.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has implied Trump might lift these tariffs as soon as today, but TBD.
The Trump administration has ended a program that monitored the air quality at more than 80 U.S. embassies and consulates around the world, citing “budget constraints.” The program started in 2008 with the U.S. embassy in Beijing and expanded from there. The data collected, which was posted on the AirNow website, has been used in academic studies and credited with helping reduce pollution levels in the host countries, leading to better health outcomes. This move “puts the health of foreign service officers at risk” and could hinder research and policy, Dan Westervelt, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, toldThe New York Times.
Clean power installations soared in the fourth quarter of 2024, sending total operational capacity above and beyond the 300 gigawatt mark, according to a new report from the American Clean Power Association. “It took more than 20 years for the U.S. to install the first 100 GW of clean power, five years to install the next 100 GW, and three years to install the most recent 100 GW,” the report says. Here are some takeaways:
ACPA
China plans to ramp up its efforts to rein in emissions, expanding its emissions trading system beyond power plants to to include industries such as steel, aluminum, and cement, Premier Li Qiang said in a report this week. “Li also confirmed China intends to continue to play a key role in diplomacy on emissions reduction, as the U.S. retreats from international cooperation,” Bloombergreported. The country plans to roll out major climate projects such as offshore wind farms, “new energy bases” across its deserts, with a goal of reaching peak emissions before 2030. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and while it has been rapidly expanding renewable power generation, it also struggles to wean itself off coal.
The Supreme Court yesterday watered down the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate water pollution, siding with the city of San Francisco in an unusual lawsuit pitting the liberal hub against the environmental authority. In a 5-4 decision, the justices said the agency had overstepped its authority under the Clean Water Act when it issued permitting for a San Francisco wastewater treatment plant that empties into the Pacific. The permit included provisions that would have made San Francisco authorities responsible for ensuring the water quality in the Pacific met EPA standards. Justice Samuel Alito essentially wrote that the permitting rules were too vague. “When a permit contains such requirements, a permittee that punctiliously follows every specific requirement in its permit may nevertheless face crushing penalties if the quality of the water in its receiving waters falls below the applicable standards,” Alito wrote. The ruling will make it harder for the EPA to limit water pollution. Next up on the SCOTUS docket: nuclear waste!
Bernard Looney, the former CEO of oil giant BP, is the new boss of an AI startup that tells businesses how to cut their emissions.
A conversation with Resources for the Future’s David Wear on the fires in the Carolinas and how the political environment could affect the future of forecasting.
The Wikipedia article for “wildfire” has 22 photographs, including those of incidents in Arizona, Utah, Washington, and California. But there is not a single picture of a fire in the American Southeast, despite researchers warning that the lower righthand quadrant of the country will face a “perfect storm” of fire conditions over the next 50 years.
In what is perhaps a grim premonition of what is to come, several major fires are burning across the Southeast now — including the nearly 600-acre Melrose Fire in Polk County, North Carolina, a little over 80 miles to the west of Charlotte, and the more than 2,000-acre Carolina Forest fire in Horry County, South Carolina. The region is also battling hundreds of smaller brush fires, the smoke from which David Wear — the land use, forestry, and agriculture program director at Resources for the Future — could see out his Raleigh-area window.
Wear is also the co-author of a study by RFF and the U.S. Forest Service that came out in late 2024 and singled out the Southeast as facing a “particularly worrisome” rise in wildfire risk over the next half-century. I spoke with him this week to learn more about why the Carolinas are burning and what the future of fire looks like for the region. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
When discussing fires in the American West, we often talk about how historic suppression efforts are responsible for the megafires we see today. What was the historic fire regime like in the Southeast? What’s going on to make it a hot spot for wildfires?
First, there are the similarities. Both Western and Southeastern forests, especially pine forests, are fire-adapted systems; they need regular fires to maintain health. Anything that takes those forests out of balance is a problem, and fire suppression is an issue in the East and the West, and especially in the Southeast. But forests in the Southeast are the most heavily managed forests in the country — perhaps in the world. In many cases, they’re regularly burned; the South does more prescribed burning than the rest of the country combined. It’s a very, very common practice in this part of the world.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that there is fire in Southeastern forests. There have been big, episodic fires in the South, though they’re not as common. There was the fire in 2016 in East Tennessee, from the Smokies into Gatlinburg, with a number of fatalities and lots of structures damaged or destroyed. There have been big fire years in east and west Texas. And there have been big fire seasons in Florida, though it’s been a while.
How is population growth in the Southeast adding to the strain?
We’re accustomed to talking about the wildland-urban interface in the West, but it’s also a big issue in the Southeast. Some of our urban growth centers in the Southeast include the Raleigh-Durham area, where I live, and Atlanta, Nashville, and Florida. These are generally flat landscapes, as well as very heavily forested landscapes. As the population grows out of the city centers, they go into pine and mixed-pine hardwood forests that are fire-adapted ecosystems. Then you have interspersed communities with forest vegetation, and that’s a big issue.
I also read in your report that much of that land is privately owned, which makes management tricky.
Private ownership is about 89% of forests in the South. [Editor’s note: By comparison, only about a third of forests in the West are privately owned.] Even where you have public ownership, a lot of that is by the Department of Defense and concentrated in a couple of different areas in the Ozarks and southern Appalachians. Much of the landscape in the coastal plain and Piedmont — which is most of the South — is predominantly private ownership.
There’s a distinction to be made between commercial owners, like timber investment management companies or real estate investment trusts, who actively manage landscapes. With timber harvesting, there are a lot of risk mitigation activities and a lot of prescribed burning. But then you have over a million non-industrial private landowners with small holdings. If you’re trying to coordinate any kind of wildfire mitigation scheme using fuel treatments and the like, it requires some work.
Horry County, South Carolina, and Polk County, North Carolina, were not part of your paper’s list of counties vulnerable to wildfire. I’m curious if you think what we’re seeing now says something about the limits of the study and the data you had available, or if you have another takeaway about what’s going on.
Importantly, our study looked at long-term averages. Throughout the South, there is a fire regime, and in any given year, it is possible to have wildfires of consequence. I would point out that we were especially concerned this year because Hurricane Helene laid down an awful lot of trees and created a fuel load.
We’re also entering one of the two fire seasons in the South. Wildfire is most predominant in the spring and in the fall; it’s at those times when temperatures begin to rise but humidity remains low, and there are extended dry periods that allow the fuels to dry out. You have warm temperatures and wind in the spring, setting the stage for wildfire. Typically, that window will begin to close at the end of April because it’s pretty darn humid in the South at that point, and it’s much less likely that fuels will get dry enough to carry a fire.
The same thing happens in the fall: Temperatures may remain high, and if we don’t have a lot of precipitation and humidity — usually in October and into November — then you have the conditions right for fire. But as the climate shifts, we see the length of those seasons growing to the point where the fall is approaching the spring. Wildfires in January and February indicate that these two seasons are growing toward one another and providing a much longer season. Our paper showed that, when you account for climate change across all of those global climate models and representative concentration pathways, the windows for more wildfire activity and more intense wildfire activity are expanding.
Your paper cited wildfire risks across the Sun Belt. Today, the National Weather Service is warning of “potentially historic” fire conditions in central Texas. Can local emergency managers use your modeling to prepare for such situations?
Things like the year-to-year fire projections and the day-to-day forecasts best serve local emergency managers. Wildfire in the South is determined by the drying of fuels and temperature and humidity conditions, which vary daily. If we look over the last week, Saturday was beautiful in the Carolinas. It was sunny, in the 70s, dry, and a little windy. That was the day [hundreds of] fires started across the Southeast. And the next day, there were very few new fires. Mid-week projections of wildfire potential in the Southeast show that it’s really low, with the exception of Texas. It changes day to day, driven by fine-grain weather forecasts, and that gives emergency managers some insight into where they might want to pre-position crews or do pre-suppression activities.
What we’re doing with the modeling is asking, What is this going to look like in 50 years? The takeaway is that wildfire activity is going to remain strong and perhaps grow in the West, but the big structural change is really strong growth and active fire in the Southeast, where you have wildfire and wildlands proximal to millions of people and more vulnerable communities. It’s a fire regime that’s going to affect more people.
I also wanted to ask about the USDA Forest Service’s contributions to your paper. Do you think research like this could still happen today, given the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate anything climate-related from the federal agenda?
I came to Resources for the Future six years ago after a long career with the Forest Service, so it’s hard for me to remain a dispassionate scientist here. I think we need to see how the dust settles. It’s hard to imagine a future where the agency and federal government do not have a high level of concern regarding fire — and I don’t think you can do any kind of effective planning, or thinking about the future, or targeting of activities without understanding how climate is likely to impact these disturbance regimes.
I don’t have the crystal ball that many people are seeking right now. We’ll have to wait to see. But our research demonstrates the vital role of understanding climate dynamics, and it shows how critical weather forecasts are for people with boots on the ground who are trying to stay ahead of disaster.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that about a third of land in the West is privately owned, not publicly owned.