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Even with Trump in the White House, we’ll still have electric vehicles.
It would be easy to feel down about the state of electric vehicles with an avowed EV foe set to reenter the White House. Yes, the election’s fallout will no doubt reshape the car market in the years to come. But in the short term, there’s good news in the form of the new slate of EVs already in the pipeline. For those looking to ditch their fossil fuel-burner for an electric model, there’s plenty to be excited about in 2025.
Having long since displaced the minivan and the sedan as America’s family car, the crossover is the most important piece of the electric car market, and the biggest seller. Next year, we’ll welcome a slew of new models.
Hyundai’s Ioniq EVs have been a hit, with the hatchback/crossover hybrid Ioniq 5 selling impressive numbers (more than 30,000 in the first three quarters of 2024) and the quirky Ioniq 6 sedan earning rave reviews. The Korean brand will be filling out more Ioniq numbers in the years to come, and 2025’s major arrival in terms of size and importance is the three-row Ioniq 9 SUV. The sharp-looking big boy joins the EV9 by Hyundai’s partner brand, Kia, in offering a more affordable EV for those who need to move six or seven people at a time.
The Hyundai Ioniq 9Hyundai
Audi was a pioneer offerer of EVs in America: The original Audi e-Tron came to the U.S. in 2019, when Tesla was just starting to sell the Model 3 and many legacy brands had yet to enter the electric market. That model’s 204-mile range looks puny and outdated by today’s standards, however. Next year, Audi is slated to roll out a much-anticipated update to the lineup with the Q6 e-tron (and its A6 e-tron sedan counterpart) delivering a respectable 350 miles of battery power.
The Audi Q6Audi
The EV startups are expanding their lineups, too. No, we won’t see the new, more affordable Rivians until at least 2026. Lucid, however, plans to inflate the successful Air sedan up to the size of a three-row SUV when it introduces the Gravity, which it claims will deliver 440 miles of range. The story is similar at Polestar, where the upcoming Polestar 3 SUV looks like an expanded version of the Polestar 2 sedan that’s been on sale for several years now.
Remember Chrysler? The erstwhile member of Detroit’s Big Three had withered to a brand that, in the U.S., sells only minivans and the obsolete 300 sedan. Stellantis (parent company of Chrysler, Ram, Jeep, and others) has pinned its hopes for an American revival on electrification, which includes an EV Chrysler crossover planned for 2025. It looks to be called the Airflow and will target the Ford Mustang Mach-E as its competitor.
The Chrysler AirflowChrysler
The same is true of another decaying American giant. Cadillac, fresh off some success with the Lyriq EV (20,000-plus sold through Q3 2024), is pushing out a slate of electric vehicles in the hopes of reminding buyers of its former glory. The smaller Optiq, three-row Vistiq, and extravagant Escalade iq are soon to join the brand’s EV lineup, the latter bringing the icon of early 2000s wealth-bragging into the electric age.
The Cadillac Escalade iqCadillac
For those who swear by the go-anywhere potential of the true 4x4, battery power is a tough sell — there aren’t too many plugs in the backcountry. Yet as EV driving ranges get longer and EVs get more capable, the icons of off-roading are coming around.
Jeep, which has introduced plug-in hybrid models of some of its best-selling SUVs, is at last taking the all-electric plunge. No, you won’t be able to buy an EV Jeep Wrangler, which is still years away. (Stellantis is being cautious with its icon.) But we are on the cusp of having the Jeep Recon, a mid-size EV 4x4, as well as an EV version of the big, luxe Wagoneer called the Jeep Wagoneer S.
The Jeep Wagoneer SJeep
Wagoneer won’t be alone in the market for expensive luxury SUV EVs. Land Rover is telling anyone who’ll listen about the torture testing it is now performing on the upcoming Range Rover EV, subjecting prototypes to the 120-degree heat of the UAE’s desert. Arriving soon alongside the electric Range Rover is the battery-powered version of Mercedes-Benz’s G-Wagen, a $170,00 status symbol.
We may be on the cusp of seeing the titans of muscle embrace electricity. At last month’s L.A. Auto Show, Dodge’s machismo-dripping presentation of the Charger Daytona EVpromised the brawny battery-powered pony car would “save our planet … from all those lame, soulless, weak-looking, self-driving sleep pods.” With silent power that more than matches its combustion days, the Charger should win converts to the church of instantaneous electric torque. Oh, and in 2025, we just might get a look at the fully electric Chevy Corvette that’s in the works.
The Dodge Charger EVDodge
For those with no interest in dropping a wheelbarrow of cash on an electric sports car, fear not: The Chevy Bolt is coming back. The plucky, affordable Bolt was the best-selling non-Tesla EV when GM suddenly gave it the axe to focus on its Ultium EV platform. Chevrolet says it’ll release the new, Ultium-based Bolt in 2025, and that this version will feature faster charging and other bells and whistles lacking in the original car.
Finally, the most fascinating offering to come next year is the 2025 Ram 1500 Ramcharger, the first time range-extender EV technology comes to one of America’s best-selling vehicles. Like a normal EV, the Ramcharger has electric motors to propel it, a battery to store electricity, and can be plugged in to charge the battery, however, it also carries a gasoline engine that can turn on to recharge the battery when necessary. If this hopefully seamless version of a hybrid convinces America’s legion of truck buyers, it’ll go a long way toward advancing the pace of EV adoption.
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On rising global temperatures, LA’s fire disaster, and solar stations in space
Current conditions: A sinkhole threatens to swallow up Ecuador’s large hydroelectric power plant • Air quality is poor in Delhi where dense smog has caused travel chaos • Nearly 40,000 customers are already without power in Texas as a winter storm rolls in.
At least 10 people are known to have died in the Los Angeles fires, and some 10,000 structures are believed to have been destroyed. Five blazes continue to burn. The Palisades fire, the largest in the city’s history at 20,000 acres, remains just 6% contained. The Eaton fire has consumed 13,700 acres and is 0% contained. While lower wind speeds have helped firefighters make some progress over the last 24 hours, the Santa Ana gusts were expected to peak at 75 mph last night. “We are absolutely not out of this extreme weather event,” Los Angeles fire chief Kristin M. Crowley said in a news conference.
Charred homes in Pacific Palisades. Mario Tama/Getty Images
President Biden sent more than 30 government helicopters and planes to fight the flames, and said federal funding would cover the costs of the fire response for 180 days. (An early estimate from AccuWeather puts the cost of the disaster at more than $50 billion.) Biden also connected the emergency to climate change. “All has changed in the weather,” he said. “Climate change is real. We’ve got to adjust to it, and we can, it’s within our power to do it. But we’ve got to acknowledge it.”
Some of the world’s leading weather research organizations are releasing data today showing that 2024 was the hottest year on record. The World Meteorological Organization, the European Copernicus Climate Change Service, the UK Met Office, Berkeley Earth, NOAA, NASA, and others “have made a concerted effort to coordinate the release of their data, highlighting the exceptional conditions experienced during 2024,” Copernicus said. The service is one of the first to roll out its findings, showing that the global average temperature last year was 59.18 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15.10 degrees Celsius. This is 1.60 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average, making last year the first full calendar year during which the 1.5C warming threshold has been breached.
Copernicus
Oceans also were exceptionally warm, with sea surface temperatures reaching new record highs. Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions also increased. “These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapour levels in 2024, meant unprecedented heatwaves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
BlackRock yesterday announced its departure from the UN Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative. The decision is “a remarkable U-turn for a company that was once a poster child of the environmental, social, and governance investing movement,” saidThe Wall Street Journal. Asset managers participating in the initiative pledge to support the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. BlackRock’s departure is significant because it’s the largest asset manager in the world, but so far it “has not prompted others to follow,” Reutersreported. More than 325 signatories managing more than $57 trillion are still signed on to NZAMI. BlackRock is currently being sued by 11 Republican-led states over ESG investing practices.
“Climate change poses one of the greatest risks to our global economy and the long-term investments BlackRock’s clients rely on,” said Ben Cushing, campaign director for the Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign. “Membership in voluntary alliances sets an important baseline, but to truly fulfill its fiduciary duty to long-term investors, BlackRock must support real-world decarbonization through stronger shareholder voting and by directing capital toward industries that mitigate systemic climate risks. If BlackRock won’t do that, its clients should find a different asset manager that will.”
Coming later today (probably): President Biden will release short-term guidance on clean fuel tax credits, two sources toldReuters. But the final rules will be left to the incoming Trump administration, meaning “biofuel companies and their legislative backers will have to wait to see if Trump will back the plan on the highly anticipated guidelines on new clean fuel production tax credits aimed at the airline and biofuel industries.” The tax credits were supposed to come into effect on January 1 to help spur on production of sustainable aviation fuels.
China is reportedly planning to build a massive solar power station in space to harness the sun’s energy and beam it back to Earth. A Chinese scientist told the South China Morning Post that super-heavy rockets will be launched to build the station, which will be “another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth.” Space-based solar power is a “tantalizing” way to generate clean energy from the sun around the clock, and many countries are investing in R&D on the idea. The European Space Agency estimates sunlight is 10 times more intense at the top of the atmosphere than on Earth’s surface, but “in order to generate optimal, economically-viable levels of solar power, the required structures need to be very large, both on Earth and in space.” NASA noted that researchers would need to figure out how to build these large structures in orbit, then make sure they can operate autonomously. Plus, manufacturing costs would be extremely high. “Moving all that mass into orbit would require many sustained missions to carry infrastructure into space,” NASA said. China’s electricity demand rose by 6.4% in 2023, and the country is leading in clean energy investments. According to the International Energy Agency, China commissioned as much solar power in 2023 as the entire world did in 2022.
“While it would take an act of God far stronger than a fire to keep people from building homes on the slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains or off the Pacific Coast, the city that rebuilds may be smaller, more heavily fortified, and more expensive than the one that existed at the end of last year. And that’s just before the next big fire.” –Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the economic devastation of the LA fires
Recovering from the Los Angeles wildfires will be expensive. Really expensive. Insurance analysts and banks have already produced a wide range of estimates of both what insurance companies will pay out and overall economic loss. AccuWeatherhas put out an eye-catching preliminary figure of $52 billion to $57 billion for economic losses, with the service’s chief meteorologist saying that the fires have the potential to “become the worst wildfire in modern California history based on the number of structures burned and economic loss.” On Thursday, J.P. Morgan doubled its previous estimate for insured losses to $20 billion, with an economic loss figure of $50 billion — about the gross domestic product of the country of Jordan.
The startlingly high loss figures from a fire that has only lasted a few days and is (relatively) limited in scope show just how distinctly devastating an urban fire can be. Enormous wildfires thatcover millions of acres like the 2023 Canadian wildfires can spew ash and particulate matter all over the globe and burn for months, darkening skies and clogging airways in other countries. And smaller — and far deadlier fires — than those still do not produce the same financial roll.
It’s in coastal Southern California where you find large population centers areas known by all to be at extreme risk of fire. And so a fire there can destroy a whole neighborhood in a few hours and put the state’s insurance system into jeopardy.
One reason why the projected economic impacts of the fires are so high is that the structures that have burned and the land those structures sit on are very valuable. Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Santa Monica contain some of the most sought-after real estate on planet earth, with typical home prices over $2 million. Pacific Palisades itself has median home values of around $3 million, according to JPMorgan Chase.
The AccuWeather estimates put the economic damage for the Los Angeles fires at several times previous large, urban fires — the Maui wildfire in 2023 was estimated to cause around $14 billion of economic loss, for example — while the figure would be about a third or a quarter of a large hurricane, which tend to strike areas with millions of people in them across several states.
“The fires have not been contained thus far and continue to spread, implying that estimates of potential economic and insured losses are likely to increase,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote Thursday.
That level of losses would make the fires costlier in economic terms than the 2018 Butte County Camp Fire, whose insured losses of $10 billion made it California’s costliest at the time. That fire was far larger than the Los Angeles fires, spreading over 150,000 acres compared to just over 17,000 acres for the Palisades Fire and over 10,000 acres for the Eaton Fire. It also led to more than 80 deaths in the town of Paradise.
So far, around 2,000 homes have been destroyed,according to the Los Angeles Times,a fraction of the more than 19,000 structures affected by the Camp Fire. The difference in estimated losses comes from the fact that homes in Pacific Palisades weigh in at more than six times those in rural Butte, according to JPMorgan.
While insured losses get the lion’s share of attention when it comes to the cost impacts of a natural disaster, the potential damages go far beyond the balance sheet of insurers.
For one, it’s likely that many affected homeowners did not even carry insurance, either because their insurers failed to renew their existing policies or the homeowners simply chose to go without due to the high cost of what insurance they could find. “A larger than usual portion of the losses caused by the wildfires will be uninsured,” according to Morningstar DBRS, which estimated total insured losses at more than $8 billion. Many homeowners carry insurance from California’s backup FAIR Plan, which may itself come under financial pressure, potentially leading to assessments from the state’s policyholders to bolster its ability to pay claims.
AccuWeather arrived at its economic impact figure by looking not just at losses from property damage but also wages that go unearned due to economic activity slowing down or halting in affected areas, infrastructure that needs to be repaired, supply chain issues, and transportation snarls. Even when homes and businesses aren’t destroyed, people may be unable to work due to evacuations; businesses may close due to the dispersal of their customers or inability of their suppliers to make deliveries. Smoke inhalation can lead to short-, medium-, and long-term health impacts that take a dent out of overall economic activity.
The high level of insured losses, meanwhile, could mean that insurers’ will see less surplus and could have to pay more for reinsurance, Nancy Watkins, an actuary and wildfire expert at Milliman, told me in an email. This may mean that they would have to shed yet more policies “in order to avoid deterioration in their financial strength ratings,” just as California has been trying to lure insurers back with reforms to its dysfunctional insurance market.
The economic costs of the fire will likely be felt for years if not decades. While it would take an act of God far stronger than a fire to keep people from building homes on the slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains or off the Pacific Coast, the city that rebuilds may be smaller, more heavily fortified, and more expensive than the one that existed at the end of last year. And that’s just before the next big fire.
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.”