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Fear of the unknown is only natural. It’s no surprise many drivers who are unfamiliar with electric vehicles worry that if they make the leap to this new technology, their lives will be plagued by problems they’ve heard about on the news like range anxiety or long recharge times. Predictably, those with a political ax to grind against electrification stoke those fears, hoping to paint EV as a deficient or inferior product, or a sacrifice big government wants you to make for the greater good. They are wrong.
I won’t lie to you and say EVs are flawless. There are things gasoline gas does that electric cannot, such as making a Cannonball Run across the country with a bare minimum of stops. What you might not realize if you’ve yet to drive or own an EV, however, is all of the ways that they are clearly, obviously better. Yes, the climate case for electric vehicles powered by renewable energy is the big, bold-faced reason to move away from internal combustion. Even if you set aside green reasons to buy an EV, the electric life is an upgrade.
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Fearmongering about EVs often focuses on long-distance driving, since this is the one place where gasoline holds a clear advantage — yes, it is slightly more cumbersome to rely on EV fast-chargers than it is to pull off the interstate for five minutes or less whenever you need gas. As charging gets faster, though, and battery ranges get longer, the inconvenience gap is shrinking. At a certain point, the distance you can travel down the highway on one charge will be greater than or equal to the amount of time you’d want to go between bathroom breaks, anyway.
Now ask yourself: What are your driving habits actually like? If you’re like most Americans, you take the occasional long road trip, but 90 percent of your driving happens within a few dozen miles of home: getting groceries, commuting, dropping off the kids at dance practice. (There’s a reason most auto accidents happen within 15 miles of home. It’s where we drive.)
You don’t need gasoline to live like this. EV owners can plug into the garage after work and wake up each morning with more than enough range for the daily grind. No more stopping at the gas station on the way home from work and standing out in the blazing heat or freezing cold to pump fossil fuels into your car.
Saying goodbye to the gas station also, mercifully, means saying goodbye to paying for gas. As I write this in Los Angeles, the average price in California has exceeded $6 per gallon, while the national average is up to $3.79. For a variety of reasons, it’s difficult to do an apples-to-apples cost comparison between gas and electric. They don’t commonly use the same units; electricity can have a much different price per kilowatt-hour depending on the time of day and whether you charge at home or at a public fast-charger. However, although you can find studies that bend over backward to twist the numbers to favor gasoline, driving electric typically costs less per mile. The gap gets bigger if you live in a state with high gas prices or do nearly all your charging at home, where it’s cheap.
Those savings, along with government incentives, made the higher up-front cost of an EV easier to swallow. So does the potential for less routine maintenance. I can’t tell you how nice it is to forget about oil changes.
Then there’s performance.
Today’s super-deluxe EVs post bonkers zero-to-sixty times. High-end versions of the Tesla Model S, Lucid Air, Porsche Taycan, and even the Rivian R1T pickup truck hit the mark in three seconds or less. The reason is mechanical: An electric motor can deliver all its torque from a stop, while a gas engine is particular about just where it can reach peak horsepower and torque.
This truth matters even if you’re not planning to spend six figures on an electric car, because it means even the more modestly priced EVs are just fun to drive, with lots of zip off the starting line. Forget the car guy stats: What will make you happy is the feeling as your EV silently pins you back against the seat or effortlessly accelerates to highway speed as you merge — the moment of Zen that has been promised by a thousand cliched car commercials. And you don’t have to spend a hundred thousand dollars to get it.
EV ownership also delivers other little quality-of-life improvements. For example, full climate control: A big battery means you can blast the car’s AC or heat for a long time without running a gasoline engine. It means you’re not polluting the neighborhood’s air as you sit there idling for minutes on end, waiting for the kid you’re picking up to get in the car already. It means you can preheat or pre-cool the car from inside the house, or leave the vehicle on Dog Mode so it air-conditions your pooch while you run into Starbucks.
A combustion vehicle will always be a rolling, carbon-emitting power plant. An EV has the potential to be much more — part of a smarter, more integrated future. Homeowners with solar panels could use that clean energy to fill up their car batteries. And when more vehicles join the Ford F-150 Lightning in offering two-way charging, more EV owners will be able to use their cars as a power supply that could, for example, keep the house lights on in case of a blackout.
Electric isn’t for everyone. Not at this moment, anyhow. For people who can’t charge at home or at work, the challenge of getting electricity at public fast-chargers can be too annoying or expensive. If you drive lots of miles off the beaten path, far from the interstate highway system, you might wait, justifiably, until the map fills in with more chargers.
For the urbanite or suburbanite, it’s time to get real. We all want our cars to do everything, and yes, for the occasional journey of four-plus hours, it’d be slightly easier to keep burning gas. Life isn’t summer vacation, though. Life is driving to work and to date night. Life is sitting in traffic and then feeling that sweet exhale of accelerating when it finally opens up. Electric isn’t just better for the planet — for everyday driving, electric is better for you, too.
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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.