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Current conditions: Tropical Storm Ernesto has left hundreds of thousands of people without power in Puerto Rico • Drought from El Niño created a 3 million ton corn deficit in southern Africa • Greece remains on high alert for fires through tomorrow as temperatures top 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
THE TOP FIVE
1. IRA has helped create more than 334,000 new jobs
Ahead of the upcoming two-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, the nonprofit Climate Power released a new report analyzing the economic impact of the clean energy investments made possible by the legislation. The topline takeaway: Since August 2022, 646 clean energy projects have been either announced or advanced, creating 334,565 new jobs. Battery manufacturing projects account for the largest share of the new projects, followed by solar projects and EV facilities.
Climate Power
Most of the new projects are located in five states (Michigan, Texas, Georgia, California, and South Carolina) and in congressional districts represented by Republicans in the House of Representatives. These districts alone have seen the creation of 190,727 new jobs and more than $286 billion in clean-energy investment. Projects in low-income communities have brought $114 billion in investment to those areas and created more than 134,000 jobs. The report notes that clean energy jobs tend to pay more, and that most of them do not require a four-year degree, “meaning they’re accessible to all Americans.” Aside from highlighting the “clean energy boom,” the report warns that a second Trump presidency could halt the progress.
2. Vineyard Wind can resume ‘limited activites’ at wind farm, but no power generation
Just a little update on the situation at the Vineyard Wind 1 site off the coast of Massachusetts, where activity has been paused since July because of a broken turbine blade: Following a safety consultation, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has told Vineyard Wind it can resume some limited activities, like installing turbine towers and nacelles (the container at the top of the tower where the generator, gearbox, and other key components are located). But it cannot install any new turbine blades, or resume power production. Vineyard Wind and the blade’s manufacturer, GE Vernova, this week did some “controlled cutting” on the damaged turbine to prevent more debris from falling into the ocean. Now they’re looking ahead to next steps, like removing the blade root and figuring out what to do with the big pieces of debris that fell to the seabed. Before the incident, the partially-constructed commercial offshore wind farm was already sending power to the grid.
3. Climate change is making forest fires worse
Climate change is making forest fires more frequent and more destructive, according to the World Resources Institute. By examining data provided by researchers at the University of Maryland, the WRI concluded that the area consumed by fire annually has grown by 5.4% each year since 2001, and “record-setting forest fires are becoming the norm.” In 2023 alone, the amount of land affected by forest fires was 23% larger than the previous record year. Most of the tree cover loss due to fires is happening in the boreal forests, which is worrying because these forests store between 30% and 40% of the world’s terrestrial carbon.
WRI
The growing number of fires is creating a climate feedback loop: More burning releases more carbon dioxide which creates hotter and drier conditions that are conducive to more fires, and on and on it goes. Aside from emphasizing the need to rapidly curb greenhouse gas emissions, the report calls for ending deforestation, and better wildfire risk management.
4. DOE to put additional $54.4 million toward carbon-capture innovations
The Department of Energy yesterday announced it will put an additional $54.4 million toward developing carbon-capture technologies. This could include innovations that capture the emissions from power plants, industrial facilities, or the atmosphere directly, but also new ways to transport and transfer the CO2 once it has been captured. The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management is accepting applications now through October 14.
5. Scientists say rate of global warming is expected to slow
In a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, scientists say the rate of global warming – that is how quickly the planet is heating up – looks like it will slow in the coming decades. In 2025, the rate of warming is expected to be about .38 degrees Fahrenheit each decade, but this will fall to an increase of .27 degrees Fahrenheit per decade by 2050. Those estimates are based on current mitigation policies, and the researchers say the rate could slow even more if we curb fossil fuel emissions more aggressively. There are a lot of caveats and moving parts here, and the researchers are upfront about this, noting that factors like El Niño, fluctuations in aerosol emissions, and the fact that “climate damage may show a non-linear response to amounts of climate change” could render their projections inaccurate. Nonetheless, “various analyses suggest that under current mitigation policies we are at or near a time of peak anthropogenic carbon emissions.”
THE KICKER
“No Republicans voted for the IRA, but they know their constituents are receiving the benefits.” –White House senior climate adviser John Podesta speaking yesterday at an event hosted by think-tank Third Way.
For more than four years, California has had a law on the books meant to protect homes and buildings during an urban firestorm like the Palisade and Eaton fires. But it’s never gone into effect.
In theory, the policy was simple. It directed state officials to develop new rules for buildings in areas with high fire risk, which would govern what people were allowed to put within the five-foot perimeter immediately surrounding their homes. A large body of evidence shows that clearing this area, known in the fire mitigation world as “zone zero,” of combustible materials can be the difference between a building that alights during a wildfire and one that can weather the blaze.
The new rules — essentially just a list of items allowed in that five-foot zone — were due two years ago, by January 1, 2023. But the California Natural Resources Agency, which is drafting the rules for the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to consider, has yet to even present a proposal. Ask anyone who’s been following this thread what’s taking so long, and they’ll almost certainly point to one thing: politics.
“There’s a ton of science about what to do, but the science has run into challenges with social acceptance, and therefore political acceptance,” Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, told me. People do not want to be told how they can or can’t landscape or furnish or otherwise adorn the outside of their homes. Inevitably, when the rules do come out, you’ll hear about Gavin Newsom coming to take away people’s decks and policing gardens.
No one thinks that zone zero rules, if enacted and adhered to, could have prevented fires in the Pacific Palisades or Altadena or saved every structure in the recent fires’ path. But alongside other fire mitigation strategies, zone zero design can significantly lower the chances of a given building burning, and therefore the chances that a fire will spread to neighboring buildings, and ultimately reduce the risk of fires becoming compounding, devastating disasters. Wara likened it to car safety rules like seatbelts and airbags — people still die in car accidents, but far fewer than would otherwise.
The question now is whether the record-breaking destruction in Los Angeles will be enough to convince people that zone zero rules are effective and worthwhile. Past experience shows the answer is not an obvious yes.
Why homes burn
There are three ways buildings ignite during a wildfire, Yana Valachovic, a forest scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network who specializes in community resilience and the built environment, told me. They are either exposed to burning embers, direct flames, or radiant heat, though most often a combination.
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Embers — hot, hard debris of burned material from a fire — can be carried miles away from their origin by the wind and create new spot fires next to homes. “What happens with those embers is they get thrown at the building, they hit the walls, the siding, and then drop to the base and collect at the base,” Valachovic said, “so you can have not just one, but thousands of embers at the base of our structures.”
Embers can also penetrate buildings through open windows and ventilation systems. If radiant heat from nearby burning structures causes windows to shatter or fall out, that can also create new vectors for embers to enter the home. “Embers find their way,” Valachovic said.
Fire mitigation experts promote two strategies for reducing vulnerability, and they go hand in hand. The first is home hardening, which could mean building with fire-resistant materials but also includes smaller but effective actions like covering air vents with fine mesh screens and sealing gaps to try to block embers. The second is creating so-called “defensible space,” or a buffer around the building, where any vegetation is carefully selected and managed to slow the spread of fire to and from the building. California divides defensible space into three different zones: Zone one extends from 5 feet away from the structure to 30 feet, and zone two goes out to 100 feet away. Then, of course, there’s zone zero.
The state has had regulations on the books to require at least 30 feet of defensible space in high-risk areas since 1965, and it updated the standards to establish a two-zone system in 2006. In both cases, the rules were “really framed around, how do you interrupt flames running at the building?” said Valachovic. The regulations included thinning trees and removing lower branches, clearing some trees that were closer to homes, clearing dead wood and litter, and pruning branches that hang over buildings. But they still allowed for vegetation right up against the house.
Since then, wildfire post-mortems have found that this scenario of flames burning a path to a building is not a primary driver of structure loss. “It was missing the point,” Valachovic told me of the previous rule structure. “What we’ve seen now for the last decade is that embers are really driving our home loss issue, and so we’re basically allowing all this vegetation and combustible material to be present in the zone that is really very vulnerable.”
In August 2020, after Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in California due to an explosion of wildfires, the state legislature passed AB 3074, which finally sought to bridge the gap by creating a new, “ember-resistant zone” — zone zero. Had the rules been implemented under the timeline mandated by the law, new homes would have had to comply beginning in 2023, and existing homes would have had to comply beginning in 2024. Like the earlier defensible space rules, they would have applied to homes located in parts of the state designated as Fire Hazard Severity Zones. These are generally areas that you might think of as the “wildland-urban interface,” where homes abut wildland vegetation like forests or scrublands, but others extend into more urban areas. Almost all of the burned area in the Pacific Palisades, for instance, would have been subject to the rules, while only a small portion of the homes in Altadena are in the zone.
Why “zone zero” is political
When I reached out to the California Natural Resources Agency to ask if there was an updated timeline for the regulations, one of the first things that Tony Andersen, the Deputy Secretary for Communications, told me, was not about the timeline but about the ultimate cost of compliance.
“We recognize there are costs associated with doing this work around homes and structures,” Andersen told me via email, “and we are focused on identifying options for financial assistance as well as education and outreach to help owners prepare and prioritize mitigations.” He then noted that the rulemaking was a “complex process” that the agency wanted to get right, and said it aimed to present a draft proposal to the Board “as soon as is feasible, most likely in the coming months.”
Andersen’s response illustrates one of several tensions that have made it difficult to write the zone zero rules — and will ultimately make them difficult to implement. If the rules say you can’t have a wooden deck, for example, or you can’t have a fence that touches the building, homeowners could face costly retrofits. And despite witnessing the horror of destructive wildfires, many homeowners don’t want to switch their wooden fence for a metal one, or replace their bushes with gravel.
Five feet might sound like a negligible amount of space, but people are attached to the aesthetics of this zone. Homeowners have become used to “softening” the line where the walls meet the ground by filling it in with vegetation, Valachovic told me. “We really developed this idea that we don’t visually want to see our foundations,” she said. “From a fire defense perspective, this idea that we have combustible material basically ringing our houses and our structures, that is problematic.”
Several people I interviewed for this story asked if I had seen a documentary about the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California called Bring Your Own Brigade. The film captures a series of city council meetings in 2019, when officials were considering updating local building standards. They weigh a number of ideas that would reduce the risk of embers collecting on top of, inside, or next to homes, including eliminating gutters and requiring roof overhangs and a five-foot setback for any combustible material.
At the time, the Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history, killing 85 people, displacing more than 50,000, and destroying more than 18,000 structures. But during a public hearing, community members lashed out at the potential cost, warned that new standards would prevent displaced residents from moving back, and decried the aesthetic implications.
“Paradise is an individualistic town,” one person says. “That’s part of the charm and the quirkiness. We don’t need consistency and uniformity.”
In another scene, a city councilmember asks Paradise Fire Chief John Messina to narrow down the list to just one rule that would make the community more fire resistant. “That five-foot barrier around your house is extremely important,” he replies. “That would be the No. 1 thing out of all of this that I would say would defend your home the best and have the most impact.” Shortly after, the council votes down the measure.
Michael Wara, who recalled the scene to me over the phone, said a similar thing happened when the fire chief in his community in Mill Valley tried to get the city council to adopt zone zero rules. “The word got out in the community that this crazy fire chief was going to make us rip up our front yards,” he said. When the council convened for a vote, more than a thousand people showed up to oppose it. The council ended up passing it as a voluntary measure.
To Wara, part of the problem is the language used to communicate these ideas with the public. “Zone zero” and “hardening” conjure a bunker mentality, he said. “I do not want my family to live in a bunker that is hardened to attack. I want my family to live in a home that is welcoming.”
He also thinks the state can reach a compromise, like allowing succulents and other fire-resistant greenery in zone zero. The rules don’t have to turn these areas into gravel and concrete wastelands to be effective.
Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department
The Los Angeles County Fire Department recently included photos in a notice to homeowners about defensible space rules and the upcoming zone zero regulations that illustrate how landscapes might strike that balance. The images feature stone walkways immediately next to homes, followed by raised beds made of metal and concrete containing attractive landscaping. Not quite “quirky” and “charming,” but far from a barren dystopia.
Where insurance fits in
Despite the delay in implementing zone zero, California has tried to pitch it as part of a strategy to solve the state’s insurance crisis. In 2022, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara enacted new rules requiring insurance companies to provide discounts to homeowners who do home hardening retrofits and create defensible space.
“That’s terrific,” Dave Jones, the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lara’s predecessor as insurance commissioner, told me. “But you don’t get the discount if they won’t write you the insurance.”
Jones said the bigger issue is that the models insurance companies use to decide whether or not to write a policy do not account for fire mitigation efforts. A homeowner could take every action on the list for home hardening, create a zone zero, live in a community that’s investing in aggressive fuels reduction, and so on, and insurance companies could still deny them coverage. Last year, Jones wrote a bill that would have required companies to change the models they use to determine coverage to account for mitigation. Several insurance industry trade groups opposed the bill, arguing that it was “premature and impossible to implement given the real-world data constraints,” and that it was “inconsistent” with the state’s efforts to “restore a healthy and competitive insurance market.” It didn’t pass.
If following zone zero guidelines meant having a shot at getting insurance, maybe people would be more open to doing it, Jones argued to me. But as things stand, that’s not the case. “I don’t think the failure is so much in the state developing the standards as it is in the lack of political courage to stand up to the insurance industry and say, hey, look, enough is enough. We’re going to pass a law to require your models to account for this.”
This past year, the California legislature passed a law giving existing homes three years, instead of just one, to comply with zone zero rules once they are finalized, whenever that is. And if the regulations are finalized this year, it’s possible that some of the rebuilt structures in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena will have to meet them.
Ultimately, Valachovic sees hope in fire mitigation work. The narrative that climate change is driving these destructive wildfires can make people feel helpless. But there are so many low-cost, simple things people can do to reduce their exposure. “I just feel like we have a moral imperative to share practical, reasonable actions that people can take to make a difference, and to know that with that, the odds improve substantially.”
The first veto of Joe Biden’s presidency, in March 2023, came on a bill that would have overturned a Department of Labor rule allowing retirement funds to consider environment, social, and governance factors — commonly known as ESG — when making investment decisions. At the time, it seemed like a good representation of where the issue stood: Though there was a conservative backlash against ESG investing, much of which revolves around whether companies are incorporating climate risks into their planning, the backlash was more bark than bite. ESG not only seemed here to stay, it was gaining in prominence as more investors and Wall Street firms realized they could no longer ignore the effects of climate change on the economic prospects of the companies they were funding.
Less than two years later, the picture looks rather different — at least politically. There is still over $3 trillion invested in ESG funds worldwide, the vast majority of it in Europe. But here in the U.S., the backlash has only grown stronger, and with Donald Trump’s election, there has been a Wall Street stampede away from public commitments to assess climate risk as a key component of investment decisions. There’s no way to know how much long-term effect this change will have on emissions, but the reversal in the public stance of the financial sector has been swift and intense.
Let’s begin with the banks. In the space of a month, the six largest banks in the United States — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan — all pulled out of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, an international United Nations-sponsored group under which member banks commit to pursuing net-zero carbon emissions from their lending and investments by 2050.
While Trump’s election may have been the tipping point, it comes after an organized campaign waged at the state level over the past couple of years, as Republican attorneys general have pressured and threatened the finance industry into abandoning its efforts to contribute to the mitigation of climate change.
In the spring of 2023, 23 Republican AGs threatened the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (like the NZBA, a UN-sponsored group) with antitrust action, saying it was pursuing “an activist climate agenda.” Companies began leaving, and a year later, the group disbanded. The effort against the banking alliance followed a similar pattern: Threats of legal action from Republican attorneys general, followed by a pullback from the banks.
Like insurance companies and banks, investment firms are clearly feeling the pressure. BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, recently pulled out of the Net-Zero Asset Managers Initiative, a group similar to those for insurers and banks, citing “legal inquiries from various public officials.” That included a lawsuit filed by Texas and 10 other Republican states, alleging that BlackRock and other firms were unfairly harming the fossil fuel industry with their investment decisions. This week, the NZAMI released a statement saying that in response to “different regulatory and client expectations,” it is launching an internal review, and meanwhile “suspending activities to track signatory implementation and reporting” of climate goals.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have been issuing reports and press releases condemning the “woke ESG cartel,” which they claim consists of “left-wing activists and major financial institutions that collude to impose radical environmental, social, and governance goals on American companies.” After the election, those Republicans now control both houses of Congress, as well as the White House.
So it’s a good bet that the pressure on the finance industry from Washington will only increase, especially with a new administration that combines dismissal of climate change with an eagerness to bring corporations to heel. In many cases, key administration positions will be staffed by former employees of the very fossil fuel companies that oppose real climate action, or at least by their allies. One vivid example: Lee Zeldin, Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, revealed in disclosure forms that he was paid tens of thousands of dollars to pen op-eds attacking ESG investing. His forms list only the PR firms that paid him, not the clients on whose behalf they did so.
These pullbacks from climate pledges are clearly motivated by fear, and may even be taken with regret by some of the CEOs making the decisions. If that is the case, however, it is not a universal sentiment. The Financial Timesreports that “Some Wall Streeters also feel able to embrace making money openly, without nodding to any broader social goals. ‘Most of us don’t have to kiss ass because, like Trump, we love America and capitalism,’ one said.”
Here’s the kicker: These alliances that are now wavering began with few requirements in order to bring in as many participants as possible; only later would companies have to meet more reporting and emissions goals. But “as accountability mechanisms started to come into play, at the same time we started to see the conservative backlash against it,” Tensie Whelan, founding director of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, told me. Now, “they’re all running scared.”
Though some critics charge that ESG is mostly about greenwashing, many financial actors — banks, asset managers, investors — have embraced greener investing because it is both good for the planet and good for business. If a company is exposed to climate risk but fails to account for it in its long-term strategy, that company is probably a bad investment. Investments incorporating sustainability considerations tend to perform as well or better than ordinary investment vehicles — the S&P 500 ESG Index, for instance, has outperformed the standard S&P 500. And a study by HIP Investor showed that public pension funds in blue states that incorporated ESG factors have generated higher returns than red-state funds that eschewed them.
“I would hope and assume that at some point there will be some class-action suits” against states that have turned away from ESG investing, and in so doing cost taxpayers money, Whelan said. In 2024, 17 Republican-run states passed bills restricting ESG investments with state funds, while eight Democratic states passed pro-ESG bills.
When banks or investment firms abandon climate alliances or pull back from climate goals in other ways, they nearly always put out statements reiterating their commitment to reducing emissions. While those might be sincere, the most important message is that the threats and pressure are effective. And that’s what has become so clear: Conservatives are energized and emboldened to roll back corporate efforts to address climate change, and are using every tool they have — legislation, litigation, threats, public pressure campaigns — to destroy those initiatives.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of room for pressure from the other side. Whelan notes that blue states “are very adamant about having key sustainability criteria” in their investments, and as younger generations accumulate more wealth, they are more likely to demand sustainability where they put their money. As for Wall Street responding to political pressure by backing away from its climate goals, “this retrenchment is unfortunate,” Whelan told me, but “I do think it’s temporary, and I think they know that. Because they’re not stupid.”
Current conditions:Nearly 10 million people are under alert today for fire weather conditions in southern California • The coastal waters off China hit their highest average temperature, 70.7 degrees Fahrenheit, since record-keeping began • A blast of cold air will bring freezing temperatures to an estimated 80% of Americans in the next week.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Los Angeles to face its ‘most dangerous day’
High winds returned to Los Angeles on Monday night and will peak on Tuesday, the “most dangerous” day of the week for the city still battling severe and deadly fires. In anticipation of the dry Santa Ana winds, the National Weather Service issued its highest fire weather warning, citing a “particularly dangerous situation” in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties for the first time since December 2020.
A new brush fire, the Auto Fire, ignited in Oxnard, Ventura County, on Monday evening. It spread 55 acres before firefighters stopped it. Meanwhile, investigators continue to look for the cause of the Palisades Fire, which ignited near a week-old burn scar, a popular partying spot, and damaged wooden utility poles, according to a New York Times analysis.
National Weather Service
2. Trump is preparing an offshore wind ban
Trump is planning an executive order banning offshore wind developments on the East Coast, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported Monday. The news came from New Jersey Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew, who said he’s working with Trump’s team to “to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
Van Drew’s press release also said that this order is “just the beginning,” and that it would be finalized “within the first few months of the administration,” a far cry from the Day One action Trump has promised. Van Drew had earlier told New Jersey reporters that the ban would last six months.
Meanwhile, in other executive order news, Biden issued an order on Tuesday directing the Energy and Defense departments to lease federal lands for “gigawatt-scale” data centers, according to E&E News, but only if they bring online enough clean energy to match their facilities’ needs.
3. Supreme Court rejects Utah lawsuit that threatened public lands
On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to hear a lawsuit brought by Utah attempting to seize control of the “unappropriated” federal lands in the state. Opponents argued that the lawsuit, if successful, would have put public lands across the West on the path to privatization since Utah and other states likely couldn’t afford to manage them and would have had to sell off much of them. However, “while the Court’s decision denying original review of Utah’s claims is welcome news for our shared public lands, we fully expect Utah’s misguided attacks to continue,” Alison Flint, the senior legal director at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.
As I reported last month, the Utah lawsuit organizers “seem prepared to make an appeal to Congress or the Trump administration if the Supreme Court doesn’t make a move in their favor,” given that “funding for the messaging for Stand for Our Land, the publicity arm of the lawsuit, has reportedly outpaced the spending on lawyers.
Also on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a fossil fuel industry argument to block states, municipalities, and other groups from seeking damages for the harms caused by climate change. The appeal by Sunoco, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and others stemmed from a high-profile lawsuit in Honolulu that seeks to hold energy companies accountable for causing “a substantial portion” of the effects of climate change. Had the Supreme Court taken up the case, similar lawsuits by California and others likely would have been paused during deliberations. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, responded to Monday’s decision by claiming activists will now “make themselves the nation’s energy regulators.”
4. New York’s congestion pricing has cut some commutes ‘in half’
A little over a week after the start of New York City’s congestion pricing, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released data showing significant decreases in the amount of time passengers spend in inbound traffic. On average, during the morning commute, traffic times have decreased by 30% to 40%; in some cases, such as during rush hour in the Holland Tunnel, travel time has been cut in half, going from over 11 minutes to under five. Due to the traffic reductions, some bus routes are up to 28% faster now than at the same time last year. “It has been a very good week here in New York,” MTA deputy chief Juliette Michaelson said in a news conference.
So far, the MTA has seen an average of 43,000 fewer drivers entering the congestion pricing zone, which begins below 60th St. and costs $9 during the day. While Gothamist notes that this is only a 7.3% reduction compared to last January, many New Yorkers say congestion pricing effects are visibly noticeable in the streets of lower Manhattan.
The Brooklyn Bridge as congestion pricing went into effect. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
5. Oil billionaire Harold Hamm plans ‘swanky’ Inauguration watch party
Oil and gas magnate Harold Hamm is throwing a “swanky party” to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump, on whose campaign he spent more than $4.3 million, according to the research group Fieldnotes and The New York Times. Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum was among the invitees, although an advisor has said he does not plan to attend; one of the party’s several major oil and gas industry sponsors, Liberty Energy, was founded by Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary.
In May, Trump met with oil and gas executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort and promised industry-friendly tax and regulatory policies and an aggressive stance against wind energy if they helped fund his White House bid. The oil and gas industry ultimately invested some $75 million in efforts to help re-elect the former president and contributed millions to his legal defense.
THE KICKER
25% — That’s the level of tariff Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said Canada should prepare for after a meeting with incoming President Trump — and not expect exceptions for its crude oil exports to the U.S., per Bloomberg’s Javier Blas.
Climate Power
WRI
Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department
National Weather Service
The Brooklyn Bridge as congestion pricing went into effect. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images