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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 company says its first Optimus robots will start rolling off the line in “2026.”
Tesla is a car company everywhere except Wall Street. It delivered some 1.7 million cars in 2024, which were built in factories in Texas, California, Germany, and China. These car sales (and leases and sales of regulatory credits) generated some $77 billion in revenue. Its gross margin on these cars is about 18.5%, or around $14 billion.
When Tesla reported its first quarter earnings, it announced a more than 70% decline in profits, continued falling sales, and ahit to its business from the trade war with China. But its stock climbed the next day, and is now trading at around $350 a share, from $238 before the report, giving it an overall value of over $1 trillion. By some metrics, Tesla makes up more than half of the overall value of the automotive industry.
That’s because it’s not valued like a car company. The company’s investors are putting a huge stake on future innovations that largely spring from the head of Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive. These include promised self-driving cars and a self-driving taxi service, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot, which Musk has said could turn into a $10 trillion business. (For reference, Walmart’s annual revenue is just under $650 billion; Walmart is also worth less than Tesla today.) So far, all we know about the Optimus is that it can dance.
One reason analysts and shareholders cheered its most recent results is because Musk committed to spending less time in Washington trying to reshape the federal government and more time with the company that makes up the lion’s share of his immense personal wealth. But just getting more of Musk’s time is the easy test. A more consequential challenge for the thesis that Tesla can be more than just a company that sells cars to people who drive them is its upcoming robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, scheduled for next month.
While Google’s Waymo already has a fully autonomous taxi system available in a few areas of a few cities, Musk has repeatedly promised that Tesla could reach full autonomy globally far more cheaply than Waymo — or, as he puts it, “Waymo needs ‘way mo’ money to succeed 😂.”
But the initial rollout of the robotaxi may be modest. Adam Jonas, a bullish Tesla analyst with Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients on Friday after a conversation with Tesla’s head of investor relations that the Austin debut will “have 10-20 cars” and “plenty of tele-ops to ensure safety levels.”
Another future Tesla business, its Optimus robot, might be able to open up its factory to tours for investors sometime in the last three months of the year, Jonas reported, with commercialization coming by the middle of 2026 at a cost of around $20,000 per unit. The company aims to produce “several thousand” robots by the end of this year, he said. (Though you should be skeptical of any and all dates and deadlines given by Tesla — Musk has been promising an imminent fleet of autonomous Teslas for over five years.) Right now, Jonas wrote, about 12 are being produced at a time, more or less by hand.
And that’s just the mechanics. The software for humanoid autonomy also isn’t there yet: “Tesla admits both intelligence and cost ‘need to come a long way’ to unlock the true potential of humanoid robots,” Jonas wrote. “The neural nets for Optimus are far larger than for cars given greater degrees-of-freedom and far more open-ended tasks.”
Tesla also has more prosaic worries for these next generation businesses. Company officials told Jonas that they’re in an “incredibly competitive” hiring market, especially compared to Chinese companies, which “own the supply chain” for advanced technologies.
While Tesla and Musk are eager to tell the public that the company is orienting itself toward an AI-driven robotic future, some of its other corporate actions may reflect the more present-day concerns of brand management. Tesla sales have declined sharply overseas, and its showrooms have become sites for protest, driven by anger over Musk’s role in the Trump administration.
The company said Friday that it would welcome a new member of its board: Jack Hartung, president and chief strategy officer of Chipotle, a brand with its own history of crisis, stock market volatility, and precarious executive leadership. While it’s unlikely Tesla will get involved in the food business anytime soon, it may benefitfrom learning from Chipotle’s struggles over the last few years of giving people what they expect.
At least one target of Chris Wright’s grant review may run into some sticky statutory issues.
The Department of Energy announced on Thursday that it’s reviewing some 179 awards made by the Biden administration worth $15 billion to ensure they were “consistent with Federal law and this Administration’s policies and priorities.”
But what happens when federal law and Trump’s priorities are at odds?
In the case of at least one awardee, the major U.S. steel producer Cleveland Cliffs, the DOE’s review process may become a mechanism to take funding that is statutorily designated for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and channel it into long-lived fossil fuel assets.
Lourenco Goncalves, the CEO of Cleveland Cliffs, a major U.S. steel producer, said on an earnings call last week that the company was in the process of renegotiating its $500 million award under the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The DOE program funded 33 projects to decarbonize heavy industry, including cement, steel, aluminum, and glass production, with first-of-its-kind or early-scale commercial technologies.
Cleveland Cliffs was originally going to use the money to replace its coal-fired blast furnace at a steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, with a new unit that ran on a mix of hydrogen and natural gas as well as new electric furnaces. Now, the company is working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” Goncalves told investors. The project would no longer assume the use of hydrogen and “would instead rely on readily available and more economical fossil fuels.”
The CEO later clarified that the company planned to “reline” its blast furnace at Middletown, extending its life, “now that the project is changing scope.”
But the Inflation Reduction Act, which created the Industrial Demonstrations Program, says the funds must be used for “the purchase and installation, or implementation, of advanced industrial technology,” which it defines as tech “designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction progress to net-zero.”
“I don’t know at this point what Cleveland Cliffs can confidently say they’re going to do to substantially reduce greenhouse gasses and also deliver gains in public health and jobs to local communities, which is a prerequisite for IDP grant money,” Yong Kwon, a senior advisor for the Sierra Club’s Industrial Transformation Campaign, told me.
The memo announcing the Department of Energy’s review says that it has already reached some “concerning” findings, though it does not describe what was concerning or provide any further detail about the awards under review.
Compared to his peers at other agencies, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been noticeably quiet about the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to slash funding across the Department of Energy. But in March, Axiosobtained documents that said more than 60% of grants awarded under the Industrial Demonstrations Program were being targeted. The following month, CNN reported that Cleveland Cliffs’ Middletown project was on the list slated for termination, noting that it would have secured 2,500 jobs and created more than 100 new, permanent jobs in JD Vance’s hometown.
At the time, Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich told CNN that “no final decisions have been made” about the funding and that “multiple plans are still being considered.” Now it appears the Department may be negotiating with Cleveland Cliffs to develop a cheaper and more politically palatable project.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have also introduced a bill that would rescind any money from the Industrial Demonstrations Program that isn’t obligated, meaning that if the Department of Energy can find a way to legally terminate its contracts with companies, Congress may claw back the money.
The Industrial Demonstrations Program was the Biden administration’s “missing middle” grant program, designed to support projects that were past the early experimental stage, in which case they were no longer candidates for funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, but were also not ready for mass deployment, like those supported by the Loan Programs Office. In the case of Cleveland Cliffs, the funding was also aimed at making the U.S. a leader in the future of steelmaking, retaining thousands of jobs, saving the company money, and enabling it to command a higher price for its products.
“If you’re going to maintain blast furnaces, it means you have one foot in a technology that is now quickly becoming outdated that the rest of the global steel industry is transitioning away from,” Kwon told me.
David Super, an expert in administrative law at Georgetown University, told me in an email that if the Department of Energy provides and Cleveland Cliffs accepts funding that does not comply with statute, “the Department officials involved could be in violation of the Antideficiency Act and Cleveland Cliffs could be required to return the money, a modified contract notwithstanding.” The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from obligating funds for projects that are not authorized by law.
Super added that the law also specifies that the money be awarded “on a competitive basis.” As Cleveland Cliffs won the competition with its hydrogen project, allowing it to use the money for a different project at the company’s plant “would thus violate the requirement of competitive awards and would allow the unsuccessful bidders to challenge this funding award.”
Neither Cleveland Cliffs nor the Department of Energy responded to a request for comment.
Leaks to the press have signaled that the Department of Energy may be taking a similar approach with the hydrogen hubs, potentially terminating contracts to develop renewable energy-based projects — all of which are in blue states — while allowing natural gas-based projects in red states to continue.
It is still not clear how the agency will handle its $3.5 billion direct air capture hubs, which news outlets have reported may also be under threat. On Friday, however, the oil and gas company Occidental, which was awarded a contract to develop a DAC hub in Texas, announced that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company is considering investing up to $500 million in the project as part of a new joint-venture agreement. The press release notes that the agreement was signed during President Trump’s visit to the United Arab Emirates.
Last week, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said during a confirmation hearing for Kyle Haustveit, the nominee to head the Office of Fossil Energy, that two carbon capture projects in her state were “in limbo” due to the agency’s spending review. The same day, in another hearing, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida accused Wright of having frozen $67 billion worth of funds and asked him to commit to releasing it.
Wright denied this. “We’re not withholding any funds and we’ve paid every invoice we’ve had for work done and funds that are due,” he replied. But he went on to clarify that the agency is “engaging with” recipients “to make sure American taxpayer monies are being spent in thoughtful, reasonable ways.”
According to efficiency department data, the DOE has “terminated” 39 contracts worth $60 million and five grants worth $3.4 million. The contracts include news subscriptions, various technical support services, and a $22 million contract with consulting firm McKinsey for “rapid response deliverables” for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the department that runs the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The grants include three Advanced Research Projects Agency awards to explore using geologic stores of hydrogen, and another to reduce methane emissions from natural gas flares.
On budget negotiations, Climeworks, and DOE grants
Current conditions: It’s peak storm season in the U.S., with severe weather in the forecast for at least the next six days in the Midwest and East• San Antonio, Texas, is expected to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit today• Monsoon rains have begun in Sri Lanka.
The House Budget Committee meeting to prepare the reconciliation bill for a floor vote as early as next week appears to be a go for Friday, despite calls from some Republicans to delay the session. At least three GOP House members, including two members of the Freedom Caucus, have threatened to vote no on the budget because a final score for the Energy and Commerce portion of the bill, which includes cuts to Medicaid, won’t be ready from the Congressional Budget Office until next week. That is causing a “math problem” for Republicans, Politico writes, because the Budget Committee “is split 21-16 in favor of Republicans, and Democrats are expecting full attendance,” meaning Republicans can “only lose two votes if they want to move forward with the megabill Friday.” Republican Brandon Gill of Texas is currently out on paternity leave, further reducing the margin for disagreement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is also contending with discontent in the ranks over cuts to clean energy tax credits. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still pretty bad,” New York Republican Andrew Garbarino, a co-chair of the House Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, told Politico on Thursday. But concerns about the cuts, which would heavily impact Republican state economies and jobs, do not appear to be a “red line” for many others, including Georgia’s Buddy Carter, whose district benefits from Inflation Reduction Act credits for a Hyundai car and battery plant that is among the targets for elimination. You can learn more about the cuts Republicans are proposing to the IRA in our coverage here.
The Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks is preparing for significant cuts to its workforce, citing the larger economic landscape and the Trump administration’s lack of consistent support. The company currently has 498 employees, but is undergoing a consultation process, indicating it is looking to cut more than 10% of its workforce at once, SwissInfo.ch reports. “Our financial resources are limited,” Climeworks’ co-founder and managing director Jan Wurzbacher said in comments on Swiss TV.
Though Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is a known proponent of carbon capture, and there had been excitement in the industry that Trump’s attempts to expedite federal permitting would benefit carbon storage sites, the administration has also hollowed out the Department of Energy’s carbon removal team, my colleague Katie Brigham has reported. The ongoing funding cuts and uncertainty have made it difficult to get information from the government that could affect Climework’s Project Cypress in Louisiana, although Wurzbacher stressed that “we are not currently aware that our project would be stopped.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced in a Thursday memo that the department will be reviewing at least $15 billion worth of grants awarded to “power grid and manufacturing supply chain projects” under the Biden administration, Reuters reports. “With this process, the Department will ensure we are doing our due diligence, utilizing taxpayer dollars to generate the largest possible benefit to the American people and safeguarding our national security,” Wright said in his statement.
The memo goes on to note that the DOE plans to prioritize “large-scale commercial projects that require more detailed information from the awardees for the initial phase of this review, but this process may extend to other DOE program offices as the reviews progress.” Projects that don’t meet the DOE’s standards could be denied, as could projects of grantees who fail to “respond to information requests within the provided time frame, does not respond to follow-up questions in a timely manner.” As of last week, Wright told lawmakers, “we’ve canceled zero” existing projects so far, E&E News writes; the agency will reportedly be reviewing at least 179 different awards during its audit.
The number of National Weather Service offices ending 24-hour operations and severe weather alerts is increasing. On Thursday, The San Francisco Chronicle confirmed that California’s Sacramento and Hanford offices, which provide information to more than 7 million people in the Central Valley, have been forced to reduce service due to “critically reduced staffing.”
Eliminating 24-hour service is especially concerning for the Central Valley and surrounding foothills, where around-the-clock weather updates can be critical. “These are offices that have both dealt with major wildfire episodes most of the past 10 years, and we are now entering fire season,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told the Chronicle. “That’s a big, big problem.” Swain additionally shared on LinkedIn a map he’d put together of regions in the U.S. that no longer have full-service weather coverage, including “a substantial chunk of Tornado Alley during peak tornado season and the entirety of Alaska’s vast North Slope region.” The NWS is additionally seeking to fill 155 vacancies in coastal states that could face risks as the Atlantic hurricane season begins at the end of the month, The Washington Post reports. An estimated 500 of 4,200 NWS employees have been fired or taken early retirements since the start of Trump’s term.
Heatmap’s “most fascinating” EV of 2025 just got pushed back to 2026. The Ram 1500 Ramcharger — which has a 140-mile electric range as well as a V6 engine attached to a generator to power the car when the battery runs out — is now set to launch in the first quarter of next year due to “extending the quality validation period,” Crain’s Detroit Business reported this week. Parent company Stellantis also pushed back the launch of its fully electric Ram 1500 REV until summer 2027, with a planned model year of 2028. “Our plan ensures we are offering customers a range of trucks with flexible powertrain options that best meet their needs,” Stellantis spokeswoman Jodi Tinson told Crain’s in an email. Though you now have even longer to wait, you can read more about the car Jesse Jenkins calls “brilliant” here.
GMC
The 2026 GMC Hummer EV just got even more ridiculous. “Thanks to the new Carbon Fiber Edition,” the 9,000-pound car “can zoom to 60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds,” InsideEVs reports.