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Preparing for wildfire season can feel daunting. Reroof your house, the advice often goes. Bury your propane tank. Gather your important documents in a go bag.
That is all well and good, but let’s face it: The average American has nine unfinished home improvement projects at any given time, and it’s going to take a lot more than one weekend to figure out where you put your social security card.
Firefighters don’t call it “dirty August” for nothing, though, and the predictive maps for the coming month show “above normal” wildland fire potential for all of Washington and Oregon, most of Idaho and Montana, as well as large swaths of Texas, Alaska, and the Great Lakes region (fire potential will remain high in most of the Pacific Northwest through September, aided by persistent drought).
But if you’re feeling overwhelmed about where to start, here are seven things you can do today — each in 30 minutes or less — to set yourself up for the weeks ahead.
The USDA Forest Service offers a handy dashboard for understanding the wildfire risk in your community. Take a few minutes to punch in your locale at Wildfirerisk.org and learn how on the alert you need to be.
The results might surprise you. As an experiment, I entered my mother’s address in the Phoenix area and learned she has a “very high” risk of wildfire — “higher than 94%” of counties. Yikes!
If you have anything more than a “low” risk of wildfire, you should sign up for emergency alerts for your area. Fires can spring up and spread quickly, and there are a number of different ways to stay informed of developing hazards. Here are three places to start:
Make sure you’re opted in to receive FEMA wireless emergency alerts (WEAs). Here is a guide for enabling the alerts on an iPhone and here’s a guide for Android. WEAs do not track your location but are sent using local cell towers in order to be relevant to cell phone users in a specific area. They are also free to receive and don’t count toward text limits.
Create an account on Smart911.com. Though the service is most commonly used to provide 911 dispatchers with extra information about you when you call during an emergency, Smart911 is also used by many counties to provide targeted weather, traffic, and yes, fire alerts to their residents.
Also check if your county has its own emergency alert system that you should be registered with.
Just staying inside isn’t necessarily enough to keep you safe from wildfire smoke. If you live in an area prone to wildfires, or in an area downwind of them, you’ll want to invest in a good air purifier before everyone else makes a run on them as the season starts to pick up.
If you don’t have an air purifier, can’t afford one, or have questions about using a purifier or AC unit during a smoke event, here is our guide to staying safe when the air quality is bad no matter what is at your disposal.
Sorry, you’ve got to put on shoes for this one. But it also might be the single best thing you do ahead of wildfire season.
Homes primarily catch on fire not from being overcome by a wall of flame, but because of small embers that can fly more than a mile from the main wildfire and ignite roofs, decks, and yard debris.
Fire managers like to talk about this in terms of the ominously named “home ignition zone,” which is the buffer area around your house that you want to make as inhospitable to embers as possible. It is broken down into three zones: Zone 1 or “the Immediate Zone,” which is the area zero to 5 feet around the sides of your house; Zone 2, or the “intermediate zone,” which is between 5 to 30 feet around your home; and Zone 3, the “extended zone,” which is 30 to 200 feet away from your home.
For the sake of prioritizing, though, you want to start with your house and work outward. Take a slow walk around your house and make a to-do list of future projects with an eye out for the following potential issues, as recommended by the National Fire Protection Association:
• Do your gutters need to be cleaned? Make a note to prioritize doing so — the dead leaves and pine needles that accumulate there can easily catch fire.
• Are there places on your roof where leaf litter and debris are accumulating? Make a note to get those cleaned ASAP as well.
• Do any tree limbs hang over your house? Add those to your removal list.
• How does the area immediately around the sides of your house look? You’ll want to keep this clear of dead vegetation, trees, shrubs, and wood mulch that can ignite and spread to your home. Add a gardening weekend to your to-do list if need be.
• Do you have a deck? Make sure it’s clean of vegetation above and below. Don’t store things under your deck!
• Locate the vents on your house; these are potential openings where embers can get in. Make sure they’re clear of vegetation and properly covered.
• Is your lawn starting to look overgrown? You’ll want to keep it mowed to about four inches for the duration of fire season.
• Do you have a wood fence — AKA, a fire superhighway — connected to your house? You’re going to want to do something about that eventually, too.
• Make sure your home address is visible from the road.
Now I know how we feel about home improvement projects, particularly ones that require a lot of labor, like redoing a garden, or money, like paying an arborist to cut down overhanging tree branches. But firefighters won’t waste time or their safety by defending homes that are dangerous. “You just drive past and you go to the places that you can save that have done some things to protect their own homes,” firefighter Bre Orcasitas told the authors of the forthcoming book This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Yourself, Your Home, and Your Community in the Age of Heat.
It might take a lot of work to get started, but in the event of a nearby wildfire, checking items off the to-do list you just created also might ultimately save you your home. Once back inside, pull out a calendar and set aside time to actually get these projects done.
Ready for a more robust checklist? Here’s the full home ignition zone task list from the National Fire Protection Association and here’s an additional checklist that focuses on potential design weaknesses of your home. This Is Wildfire is also an excellent guide for anyone who lives in fire country, with many additional tips for time-pressed individuals who want projects they can tackle after work or over a weekend. It can be pre-ordered here.
Maybe you put together an evacuation bag during your first wildfire season and have since forgotten about it. Maybe you never made a go bag at all. Now, though, is the time to make sure you have the basics set aside in case you need to quickly leave your home.
If you have an old go bag stuffed in a closet somewhere or buried in the back of your car, quickly look through it to make sure the items have not expired and all the batteries still work. There is no need to get extreme and fill it up with treasured heirlooms when there’s no active wildfire in your area, but do start setting aside irreplaceable items like photographs and beloved mementos if you get a pre-evacuation alert. And yes, now might finally be the time to start figuring out where your important documents are so they’re easily grabbed in the event you need to leave.
There are lots of slightly different checklists for preparing a go bag from scratch, but if you need a place to begin, here’s a good one. Here’s another that is specific to pet and livestock owners. You can also find pre-made emergency kits online to take some of the work out of getting started, though they tend to be pricier than assembling the items yourself.
Save this page (and if you’ve bookmarked InciWeb in the past, make sure the URL is up to date since it’s changed).
InciWeb is an emergency incident information page that offers the latest news on wildfires, including if a burn is prescribed, its containment, the number of responding personnel, potential evacuation orders, the firefighting outlook, and contact information if you need to learn more. If a fire is burning near you, it is the best source of general information, though you don’t want to use this to replace emergency alerts.
You probably check the weather in the morning anyway. When you do, keep an eye peeled for “red flag warnings” — many weather apps, including the one on iPhones, will display this, but you can also check the National Weather Service for alerts.
A red flag warning signifies that there is an increased risk of a fire starting due to warm temperatures (above 75 degrees Fahrenheit), low humidity (25% or less), and/or gusty winds (15 mph or greater). Lightning storms during prolonged dry spells can also trigger red flag warnings.
Red flag warnings tell locals they should be careful when extinguishing cigarettes outdoors and avoid any unnecessary burning of letters from estranged husbands. But the alerts also tell residents to be prepared in case a wildfire breaks out — as LAist says, consider it the “set” in “ready, set, go.”
And if a fire does ignite in your area, you’ll now know what to do. You took a day to prepare. Stay safe, stay calm, follow directions from authorities. And seriously, pack that go bag.
Read more advice about wildfires:
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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.