You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
“Do you ever think about electric cars?”
Between solar roofs, home batteries, and electric vehicles, Tesla could potentially “do more to fight climate change than any other company — perhaps any other entity — in the world,” Walter Isaacson muses in his much-anticipated biography of Elon Musk, out Tuesday.
But while the central character is at times painted as a heroic visionary (Isaacson’s previous subjects have included Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci), the biography also makes it clear that Tesla’s mercurial CEO isn’t always the easiest to work with — or, in the blunter words of Bill Gates, he can be “super mean.” Here are some of the most surprising moments about climate and energy shared in Isaacson’s Elon Musk:
On Musk’s EV passion:
When Elon went with [Peter] Nicholson’s daughter, Christie, to a party one evening, his first question was “Do you ever think about electric cars?” As he later admitted, it was not the world’s best come-on line.
On education:
Musk also focused on electric cars. He and [his friend Robin] Ren would grab lunch from one of the food trucks and sit on the campus lawn, where Musk would read academic papers on batteries. California had just passed a requirement mandating that 10 percent of vehicles by 2003 had to be electric. “I want to go make that happen,” Musk said.
Musk also became convinced that solar power, which in 1994 was just taking off, was the best path toward sustainable energy. His senior paper was titled “The Importance of Being Solar.” He was motivated not just by the dangers of climate change but also by the fact that fossil fuel reserves would start to dwindle. “Society will soon have no option but to focus on renewable power sources,” he wrote. His final page showed a “power station of the future,” involving a satellite with mirrors that would concentrate sunlight onto solar panels and send the resulting electricity back to Earth via a microwave beam. The professor gave him a grade of 98, saying it was a “very interesting and well written paper, except the last figure that comes out of the blue.”
On investing in batteries:
Eager to keep the conversation going, [Tesla co-founder JB] Straubel changed the topic to his idea for building an electric vehicle using lithium-ion batteries. “I was looking for funding and being rather shameless,” he says. Musk expressed surprise when Straubel explained how good the batteries had become. “I was going to work on high-density energy storage at Stanford,” Musk told him. “I was trying to think of what would have the most effect on the world, and energy storage along with electric vehicles were high on my list.” His eyes lit up as he processed Straubel’s calculations. “Count me in,” he said, committing to provide $10,000 in funding.
On building the Gigafactory:
The idea that Musk proposed in 2013 was audacious: build a gigantic battery factory in the U.S. […] There was one problem, Straubel recalls. “We had no clue how to build a battery factory.”
So Musk and Straubel decided to pursue a partnership with their battery supplier, Panasonic […] Musk and Straubel were invited to Japan by Panasonic’s new young president Kazuhiro Tsuga. “It was a come-to-Jesus session where we had to make him truly commit that we were going to build the insane Gigafactory together,” Straubel says.
The dinner was a formal, multicourse affair at a traditional low-table Japanese restaurant. Straubel was fearful about how Musk would behave. “Elon can be so much hell and brimstone in meetings and just unpredictable as all get out,” he says. “But I’ve also seen him flip a switch and suddenly be this incredibly effective, charismatic, high-emotional-intelligence business person, when he has to do it.” At the Panasonic dinner, the charming Musk appeared. He sketched out his vision for moving the world to electric vehicles and why the two companies should do it together. “I was mildly shocked and impressed, because, whoa, this is not like how Elon usually was on other days,” says Straubel. “He’s a person who’s all over the map, and you don’t know what he’s going to say or do. And then, all of a sudden, he pulls it all together.”
On the origins of SolarCity:
“I want to start a new business,” Musk’s cousin Lyndon Rive said as they were driving in an RV to Burning Man, the annual art-and-tech rave in the Nevada desert, at the end of the summer of 2004. “One that can help humanity and address climate change.” “Get into the solar industry,” Musk replied. Lyndon recalls that the answer felt like “my marching orders.” With his brother Peter, he started work on creating a company that would become SolarCity. “Elon provided most of the initial funding,” Peter recalls. “He gave us one clear piece of guidance: get to a scale that would have an impact as fast as possible.”
On buying SolarCity:
When Musk announced the deal in June 2016, he called it a “no-brainer” that was “legally and morally correct.” The acquisition fit with his original “master plan” for Tesla, which he had written in 2006: “The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy.”
On hating SolarCity:
The solar roof project caused enormous friction between Musk and his cousins. In August 2016, around the time he was teasing the new product, Peter Rive invited Musk to inspect a version that the company had installed on a customer’s roof. It was a standing-seam metal roof, meaning the solar cells were embedded in sheets of metal rather than tiles. When Musk drove up, Peter and fifteen people were standing in front of the house. “But as often happened,” Peter recalled, “Elon showed up late and then sat in the car looking at his phone while we all just waited very nervously for him to get out.” When he did, it was clear that he was furious. “This is shit,” Musk explained. “Total fucking shit. Horrible. What were you thinking?”
On really, really hating SolarCity:
There were four versions [of solar roofs], including those that looked like French slate and Tuscan barrel tiles, along with a house that featured the metal roof that Musk hated. When Musk visited two days before the scheduled event and saw the metal version, he erupted. “What part of ‘I fucking hate this product’ don’t you understand?” One of the engineers pushed back, saying it looked okay to him and that it was the easiest to install. Musk pulled Peter aside and told him, “I don’t think this guy should be on the team.” Peter fired the engineer and had the metal roof removed before the public event.
On cutting solar roof installation time:
[…] Musk clambered up a ladder to the peak of the roof, where he stood precariously. He was not happy. There were too many fasteners, he said. Each had to be nailed down, adding time to the installation process. “Instead of two nails for each foot, try it with only one,” he ordered. “If the house has a hurricane, the whole neighborhood is fucked up, so who cares? One nail is going to be fine.” Someone protested that could lead to leaks. “Don’t worry about making it as waterproof as a submarine,” he said. “My house in California used to leak. Somewhere between sieve and submarine should be okay.” For a moment he laughed before returning to his dark intensity.
On talking climate with Bill Gates:
“Hey, I’d love to come see you and talk about philanthropy and climate,” Bill Gates said to Musk when they happened to be at the same meeting in early 2022. Musk’s stock sales had led him, for tax reasons, to put $5.7 billion into a charitable fund he had established. Gates, who was then spending most of his time on philanthropy, had many suggestions he wanted to make. They’d had friendly interactions a few times in the past, including when Gates brought his son Rory to SpaceX. [...] Gates argued that batteries would never be able to power large semitrucks and that solar energy would not be a major part of solving the climate problem. “I showed him the numbers,” Gates says. “It’s an area where I clearly knew something that he didn’t.” He also gave Musk a hard time on Mars. “I’m not a Mars person,” Gates later told me. “He’s overboard on Mars. I let him explain his Mars thinking to me, which is kind of bizarre thinking. It’s this crazy thing where maybe there’s a nuclear war on Earth and so the people on Mars are there and they’ll come back down and, you know, be alive after we all kill each other.”
On dismissing climate philanthropy:
At the end of the tour, [Gates and Musk’s] conversation turned to philanthropy. Musk expressed his view that most of it was “bullshit.” There was only a twenty-cent impact for every dollar put in, he estimated. He could do more good for climate change by investing in Tesla.
On Bill Gates’ betrayal:
There was one contentious issue that [Bill Gates and Elon Musk] had to address. Gates had shorted Tesla stock, placing a big bet that it would go down in value […] Short-sellers occupied [Musk’s] innermost circle of hell. Gates said he was sorry, but that did not placate Musk. “I apologized to him,” Gates says. “Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.”
[...] When I asked Gates why he had shorted Tesla, he explained that he had calculated that the supply of electric cars would get ahead of demand, causing prices to fall. I nodded but still had the same question: Why had he shorted the stock? Gates looked at me as if I had not understood what he just explained and then replied as if the answer was obvious: he thought that by shorting Tesla he could make money. That way of thinking was alien to Musk. He believed in the mission of moving the world to electric vehicles, and he put all of his available money toward that goal, even when it did not seem like a safe investment. “How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?” he asked me a few days after Gates’s visit. “It’s pure hypocrisy. Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?”
On rejection:
Gates followed up in mid-April, sending Musk the promised paper on philanthropy options that he had personally written [...] “Sorry,” Musk shot back instantly. “I cannot take your philanthropy on climate seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.” When angry, Musk can get mean, especially on Twitter. He tweeted a picture of Gates in a golf shirt with a bulging belly that made him look almost pregnant. “In case u need to lose a boner fast,” Musk’s comment read.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.