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Here’s the climate case for the Department of Energy buying millions of barrels of oil.
This might sound like heresy from a climate-change reporter, but here goes: President Joe Biden should start buying oil soon. A lot of it.
Specifically, he should begin refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or SPR, a set of subterranean salt caverns that line the Gulf Coast and can store hundreds of millions of barrels of oil. Over the past year or so, Biden sold 180 million barrels of oil from these caverns, but now it’s time to start buying that oil back. Doing so would help Biden’s domestic agenda and allow him to execute the trade of the century, generating billions of dollars in profits for the federal government.
But it would also help the climate. And every day that goes by without refilling that oil, Biden squanders his credibility and loses his clout. It’s time for the president to seal the deal.
But let’s back up.
Last year, Biden did something that — at least according to experts — should have been impossible. He tried to lower gas prices. And then he did it.
The SPR was key to the magic trick. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, oil prices spiked. By mid-March, the U.S. benchmark price for a barrel of oil — which had lingered in the $60 range for much of 2021 — reached $110. Gas hit $4.14 a gallon.
So Biden announced that the government would sell 180 million barrels of oil from the SPR over the course of six months. Despite initially rising, oil prices eventually dropped. In October, Biden formalized the SPR strategy and promised to keep oil in a goldilocks window. When oil hit $67 to $72 a barrel, he said, the Energy Department would begin refilling the SPR. That number was chosen because it’s slightly above the “breakeven” price, the price-per-barrel that American drillers need in order to turn a profit.
This pledge virtually guaranteed that the government would profit from Biden’s trade: It sold high in 2022, then it would buy low in 2023 and beyond.
There’s only one problem: It hasn’t started buying yet.
In March, oil sank below the $72 mark for two weeks, but the Energy Department didn’t start refilling the SPR. Instead, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm offered excuses as to why the department needed more time to start repurchases. Eventually, the OPEC+ cartel — annoyed that Biden hadn’t taken action yet — cut production and brought oil prices out of the refill range.
That was a profound missed opportunity — but now the White House has another chance. Earlier this week, oil fell back into the $67 to $72 range.
Here are three reasons that Biden needs to be as good as his word and buy oil — for the climate’s sake, for the country’s, and for his own.
1. When gasoline gets too cheap, the climate suffers. When oil is inexpensive, people use more of it, and they think less of using it in the future. They let their car idle longer in the driveway, and they choose to drive places that they might otherwise walk or bike to. All of that, of course, results in more carbon pollution.
Yet the real danger happens as people integrate cheap gasoline into their plans for the future. Then consumers and businesses buy bigger, more inefficient trucks and SUVs to drive around town, or they put off buying hybrids — or electric vehicles — because the fuel savings aren’t worth it. Even if the oil price eventually goes back up, those gas-guzzling vehicles remain in the fleet for years, contributing to a higher baseline of oil demand than would otherwise exist.
That’s how persistently cheap oil could drag down Biden’s climate policy. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has argued that even though electric vehicles cost more upfront, they’re “cheaper to own” than gas cars; the Environmental Protection Agency has made a similar case about its clean-cars proposal, which aims for EVs to make up two-thirds of new car sales by 2032. Those calculations are true right now, but they depend on oil prices remaining in a certain window: If gas gets too cheap, then all bets are off about EV affordability — especially if the price of lithium or another important mineral spikes, as some analysts expect.
I should add: This argument is, like, the opposite of counterintuitive. Virtually every climate-policy proposal from across the political spectrum — whether it’s implementing a carbon tax or blowing up pipelines — aims to make fossil fuels more expensive. Because if fossil fuels are more expensive, fewer people will use them. That’s the whole idea.
And refilling the SPR would certainly raise oil prices, in the same way emptying it lowered them. Which brings me to:
2. The federal government is squandering a rare moment to assert its authority in the global energy market. Since 2010, fracking and the shale revolution have turned America into the world’s largest oil producer and a net-oil exporter. Last year, the United States produced 20% of the world’s oil, more than Saudi Arabia and Iran combined. On paper, at least, the long-held dream of multiple presidential administrations — that the U.S. achieve “energy independence” — has come true.
But it’s not true in reality. That’s because power within the global oil market rests not with the biggest producer per se, but with the biggest swing producer: the country or countries that can ramp their oil production up or down at will. Right now, an informal cartel of countries called “OPEC+” — made up of the traditional OPEC countries plus Russia — has that power.
In a way, you can think of the global oil market as a giant, very fancy bathtub. Water can only enter the tub from a few dozen big faucets. (These are the oil-producing countries) And the water exits the system as it runs down a giant drain. (Oil exits the market when it’s refined into a fuel and burned, or when it’s turned into a chemical or plastic.)
In such a system, who gets to decide how full the tub is? It’s not the person with the biggest faucet, but whoever can turn their faucet on or off.
That’s what makes OPEC+ so powerful: It can turn its tap on and off. When OPEC+ decreases the flow of oil, oil prices rise; when it opens the tap, they fall. It helps, yes, that OPEC+ produces 40% of the world’s oil, but what really matters is that it can adjust its own faucet.
The United States, meanwhile, has the world’s largest faucet, but no ability to turn it on or off. In the OPEC countries, state-run companies produce oil, so governments can decide to ramp up or ramp down their country’s production as need be. But in America, hundreds of private companies and investors decide when to open new wells and increase production. Our faucet goes on and off in response to circumstances outside anyone’s control.
That was why the White House’s SPR gambit was such a neat trick. In essence, the Biden administration found a way to turn up the United States’ faucet, refilling the world’s tub and lowering oil prices for Americans. It has the opportunity to do the opposite now. By filling the SPR immediately, Biden can use the bathtub, in effect, like turning down a faucet — and therefore establish a floor under the global oil price. (Because the SPR would buy oil specifically from American producers, he would do so in a way that helps the domestic economy.)
But Biden must act now to do so. Oil is a physical thing; it can’t be delayed and appealed like a legal deadline. If Biden doesn’t seize the moment now, while oil is in this price window, then OPEC+ could cut supply again, boosting the oil price and robbing Biden of any clout and leaving America at the whim of international price setters. (This isn’t a hypothetical concern: Paranoid Democrats should consider what Biden would do — and whether he’d be able to act — if Saudi Arabia and Russia decided to, say, slash oil production a month before next year’s presidential election.)
3. Yet these wonky arguments are somewhat beside the point. There’s one overriding reason why the government must refill the SPR immediately: because President Biden said that it would.
President Biden — and the Department of Energy — are engaged in a once-in-a-generation experiment to revive “a modern American industrial strategy.” Biden wants to reshape markets, make big public investments, and push American companies to make productive and innovative decisions that help the middle class and better the planet. This is going to be hard. It’s going to be fraught. And no matter what, it’s going to require credibility: Business leaders must believe that Biden will do what he says — and that he won’t renege on commitments when politics intervene.
If Biden squanders his credibility on the SPR, the effect will be neither immediate nor dramatic. But the SPR failure will seep into his policymaking and eat away at his authority. Executives will second-guess the president’s commitment to labor, childcare, or renewables.
Presidents are said to have a “bully pulpit,” but Teddy Roosevelt coined that term to describe how the president’s words can shape economic outcomes that the Executive Branch has no explicit power over. The bully pulpit, in other words, is a major tool of industrial policy. If Biden doesn’t practice what he preaches, his will cease to exist.
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Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “Super Scooper” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the Super Scooper collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the Super Scooper collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the Super Scooper, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Québécois firefighting planes are called Super Scoopers, not super soakers.
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At more than 40,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
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Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.