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Biden-Harris policies have created hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the industries of the future — all of which now hang in the balance.
For my entire life, I’ve heard politicians talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America. Now it is finally happening. “We’re not going back!” has become Kamala Harris’s rallying cry, and it’s apt here too, because those jobs and industries of the future are what’s at stake in this election.
The Biden-Harris administration and the 117th Congress enacted a trio of laws — the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, otherwise known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — that made major public investments to cultivate and strengthen several key industries of the future: semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, solar and wind manufacturing, hydrogen-based energy, and clean steel.
Those new laws (and other Biden-Harris Administration actions on trade and tariffs) have directed and amplified a megatrend in “reshoring” and driven a huge surge in private sector investments in U.S. manufacturing, creating tens of thousands of good jobs in communities across America. Investment in manufacturing construction has more than doubled since passage of the IRA and CHIPS, and the U.S. has seen nearly 127,000 new jobs created, according to Energy Innovation policy analyst Jack Conness.
Just last week, on the occasion of the IRA’s two-year anniversary, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote about a new report finding that 6,285 utility-scale clean energy projects in the U.S. may be eligible for IRA tax credits, meaning 3.9 million jobs, all of which will be subject to minimum pay standards if they want the federal rewards.
These investments are supporting a diverse set of communities across America. Of the nearly $71 billion of clean energy manufacturing investments announced in 2023, more than $59 billion — around 83% — were in House districts represented by Republicans per the Clean Economy Tracker, a partnership between Atlas Public Policy and Utah State University. That’s tens of billions of dollars flowing into rural areas, including a significant chunk going to “energy communities,” areas that have historically produced, processed, or transported fossil fuels.
We all know that manufacturing plants can be an anchor employer for a community and play an even more important role than the direct jobs numbers reveal. The opening of dozens of new advanced manufacturing plants means dozens of communities across America have a brighter economic future — or at least, they do for now.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s vision for “the next conservative administration,” contains a set of plans and policies that would put all those communities and hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs in jeopardy. Energy Innovation modeled the policy scenario outlined in Project 2025 against one in which the U.S. meets its stated goal of reducing emissions 50% to 52% below 2005 levels by 2030 and found that the former would lead to 3.9 million fewer jobs in 2030 compared to the latter, including 1.7 million jobs straight-up lost. The overall economic effect would be catastrophic: a $320 billion annual drop in GDP in 2030, compared to a $450 billion per year gain if the U.S. meets its clean energy and climate goals.
Trump has publicly disavowed Project 2025, but the evidence for his private alignment with its authors and principles continues to mount — most recently the release of secret Project 2025 training videos, featuring more than two-dozen former Trump administration figures.
Project 2025 calls for gutting the IRA and the infrastructure law, which would, in the words of a memo released last week by the center-left think tank Third Way, “end crucial federal investments in US manufacturing, scrap tax incentives that help U.S. manufacturers compete with China, and make it harder for U.S. manufacturers to obtain loans.” It would also have ominous implications for America’s geopolitical position in the medium- to long-term. “Funding basic research and then cutting all subsequent support, as Trump plans to do, opens the door for other countries to swoop in and claim market share,” the authors write. This has happened before: The U.S. developed much of the solar and battery technology China is now using to dominate those global markets.
That’s to say nothing of the overall environment of chaos and policy uncertainty that comes with a Trump presidency, which wreaks havoc on business investment. Business leaders would be wise to remember what it was like under Trump 1.0. Trump might promise corporate tax cuts, but with a strong economy, cooling inflation, and a vibrant manufacturing renaissance finally underway, the worst thing we could do is pull the rug out from under the entire U.S. economic policy framework — continuity and certainty are good for business.
As Greg Sargent pointed out in The New Republic, “All this gives Harris an opening.” The green transition can be exciting, a source of the kind of joy Harris and her vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, have been stumping about. “Without getting entangled in cultural cross-signaling around fossil fuels, she can argue that the very last thing we should do is reverse the clean energy boom. It’s creating lots of jobs building cool, innovative stuff right in the American heartland.”
I, for one, will be looking to see if this contrast starts to show up in political ads and speeches at this week’s Democratic National Convention — something like: “Harris will continue investing in U.S. manufacturing and the industries of the future. Trump will blow that all up. The choice is on the ballot. And we’re not going back.”
What future do you choose?
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Suburban streets, exploding pipes, and those Santa Ana winds, for starters.
A fire needs three things to burn: heat, fuel, and oxygen. The first is important: At some point this week, for a reason we have yet to discover and may never will, a piece of flammable material in Los Angeles County got hot enough to ignite. The last is essential: The resulting fires, which have now burned nearly 29,000 acres, are fanned by exceptionally powerful and dry Santa Ana winds.
But in the critical days ahead, it is that central ingredient that will preoccupy fire managers, emergency responders, and the public, who are watching their homes — wood-framed containers full of memories, primary documents, material wealth, sentimental heirlooms — transformed into raw fuel. “Grass is one fuel model; timber is another fuel model; brushes are another — there are dozens of fuel models,” Bobbie Scopa, a veteran firefighter and author of the memoir Both Sides of the Fire Line, told me. “But when a fire goes from the wildland into the urban interface, you’re now burning houses.”
This jump from chaparral shrubland into neighborhoods has frustrated firefighters’ efforts to gain an upper hand over the L.A. County fires. In the remote wilderness, firefighters can cut fire lines with axes, pulaskis, and shovels to contain the blaze. (A fire’s “containment” describes how much firefighters have encircled; 25% containment means a quarter of the fire perimeter is prevented from moving forward by manmade or natural fire breaks.)
Once a fire moves into an urban community and starts spreading house to house, however, as has already happened in Santa Monica, Pasadena, and other suburbs of Los Angeles, those strategies go out the window. A fire break starves a fire by introducing a gap in its fuel; it can be a cleared strip of vegetation, a river, or even a freeway. But you can’t just hack a fire break through a neighborhood. “Now you’re having to use big fire engines and spray lots of water,” Scopa said, compared to the wildlands where “we do a lot of firefighting without water.”
Water has already proven to be a significant issue in Los Angeles, where many hydrants near Palisades, the biggest of the five fires, had already gone dry by 3:00 a.m. Wednesday. “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quiñones explained in a news conference later that same day.
LADWP said it had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the fires started, but the city’s water supply was never intended to stop a 17,000-acre fire. The hydrants are “meant to put out a two-house fire, a one-house fire, or something like that,” Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, told me. Additionally, homeowners sometimes leave their sprinklers on in the hopes that it will help protect their house, or try to fight fires with their own hoses. At a certain point, the system — just like the city personnel — becomes overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the unfolding disaster.
Making matters worse is the wind, which restricted some of the aerial support firefighters typically employ. As gusts slowed on Thursday, retardant and water drops were able to resume, helping firefighters in their efforts. (The Eaton Fire, while still technically 0% contained because there are no established fire lines, has “significantly stopped” growing, The New York Times reports). Still, firefighters don’t typically “paint” neighborhoods; the drops, which don’t put out fires entirely so much as suppress them enough that firefighters can fight them at close range, are a liability. Kearns, however, told me that “the winds were so high, they weren’t able to do the water drops that they normally do and that are an enormous part of all fire operations,” and that “certainly compounded the problems of the fire hydrants running dry.”
Firefighters’ priority isn’t saving structures, though. “Firefighters save lives first before they have to deal with fire,” Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the author of an ongoing case study of the 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, California, told me. That can be an enormous and time-consuming task in a dense area like suburban Los Angeles, and counterintuitively lead to more areas burning down. Speaking specifically from his conclusions about the Camp fire, which was similarly a wildland-urban interface, or WUI fire, Maranghides added, “It is very, very challenging because as things deteriorate — you’re talking about downed power lines, smoke obstructing visibility, and you end up with burn-overs,” when a fire moves so quickly that it overtakes people or fire crews. “And now you have to go and rescue those civilians who are caught in those burn-overs.” Sometimes, that requires firefighters to do triage — and let blocks burn to save lives.
Perhaps most ominously, the problems don’t end once the fire is out. When a house burns down, it is often the case that its water pipes burst. (This also adds to the water shortage woes during the event.) But when firefighters are simultaneously pumping water out of other parts of the system, air can be sucked down into those open water pipes. And not just any air. “We’re not talking about forest smoke, which is bad; we’re talking about WUI smoke, which is bad plus,” Maranghides said, again referring to his research in Paradise. “It’s not just wood burning; it’s wood, plastics, heavy metals, computers, cars, batteries, everything. You don’t want to be breathing it, and you don’t want it going into your water system.”
Water infrastructure can be damaged in other ways, as well. Because fires are burning “so much hotter now,” Kearns told me, contamination can occur due to melting PVC piping, which releases benzene, a carcinogen. Watersheds and reservoirs are also in danger of extended contamination, particularly once rains finally do come and wash soot, silt, debris, and potentially toxic flame retardant into nearby streams.
But that’s a problem for the future. In the meantime, Los Angeles — and lots of it — continues to burn.
“I don’t care how many resources you have; when the fires are burning like they do when we have Santa Anas, there’s so little you can do,” Scopa said. “All you can do is try to protect the people and get the people out, and try to keep your firefighters safe.”
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 Thursday, 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 many of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Five major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event this week:
Officials have not made any statements about the cause of any of the fires yet.
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 about 27,000 acres burned, 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 2,000 structures damaged so far, 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 1,000 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 very wet and very dry years over the past eight decades. But climate change is expected to make dry years drier in Los Angeles. “The LA area is about 3°C warmer than it would be in preindustrial conditions, which (all else being equal) works to dry fuels and makes fires more intense,” Brown wrote.
And more of this week’s top renewable energy fights across the country.
1. Otsego County, Michigan – The Mitten State is proving just how hard it can be to build a solar project in wooded areas. Especially once Fox News gets involved.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Opponents of offshore wind in Atlantic City are trying to undo an ordinance allowing construction of transmission cables that would connect the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project to the grid.
3. Benton County, Washington – Sorry Scout Clean Energy, but the Yakima Nation is coming for Horse Heaven.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In Connecticut, officials have withdrawn from Vineyard Wind 2 — leading to the project being indefinitely shelved.
In Indiana, Invenergy just got a rejection from Marshall County for special use of agricultural lands.
In Kansas, residents in Dickinson County are filing legal action against county commissioners who approved Enel’s Hope Ridge wind project.
In Kentucky, a solar project was actually approved for once – this time for the East Kentucky Power Cooperative.
In North Carolina, Davidson County is getting a solar moratorium.
In Pennsylvania, the town of Unity rejected a solar project. Elsewhere in the state, the developer of the Newton 1 solar project is appealing their denial.
In South Carolina, a state appeals court has upheld the rejection of a 2,300 acre solar project proposed by Coastal Pine Solar.
In Washington State, Yakima County looks like it’ll keep its solar moratorium in place.