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“This is Sky Valley Fire. Evacuation alert for Bolt Creek Fire. GO! No time for delay. Load up your family and pets and LEAVE NOW.”
Imagine getting an alert like this on your phone. Your heart immediately starts pounding; your hands shake. Is it real? Could this actually be happening? All the while, as your head spins, you’re losing precious minutes of time.
Luckily for many of the people who received this actual message last year in the Seattle suburbs, the “go now” alert was a mistake. But if you live in an area with anything greater than a “low” risk of wildfire, you should have a plan in place for what to do if that alert does come. It’s far better to “overreact” and leave immediately than to risk your life — and the lives of first responders.
The good news is, wildfire evacuation plans can begin long before your phone ever buzzes with that dreaded alert. Preparing for fire season ahead of time takes, cumulatively, as little as 90 minutes — but when a fire is encroaching, the math becomes far more urgent.
Importantly: Do not wait for an evacuation notice if you feel like a fire is approaching or like you could be in danger. Trust your gut and leave immediately. Though agencies do their best to protect people with advanced notices, fire is fast and unpredictable. In fact, many survivors of the deadly fire in Lahaina, Hawaii, say they did not receive evacuation orders before the flames had closed in on them.
Here’s what to do if there’s a fire in your area:
If you are experiencing smoke from a wildfire at your home, you should be paying attention to its development — the hazards of wildfires, after all, start with the smoke. If the fire is within 20 miles of you, you should definitely start paying attention; and if it is within 10 miles of you, it’s a threat. This threat increases if you are downwind or uphill.
Do not underestimate how fast a fire can move: 6 miles per hour in forests and up to 14 miles per hour in grasslands, depending on conditions. Embers, which can ignite homes, can also travel several miles, and wind direction can also quickly shift. If a nearby wildfire is approaching the 10-mile range of your home but you haven’t received a voluntary evacuation notice or don’t feel directly endangered yet, still review this evacuation checklist from the U.S. Forest Service. If you do receive a pre-evacuation alert or notice of some kind or want to take further steps to prepare, also:
Make sure you are signed up for emergency alerts or have another way of receiving updates, such as an agency website or Twitter account or a radio tuned into the correct station. Turn the sound on and up on your phone so you’ll hear the alarm or it will wake you up if you’re asleep.
Keep your car charged or filled to half a tank of gas or more. Scope out potential evacuation routes ahead of time, planning alternative routes in case roads are blocked or closed. Authorities say you should memorize at least two ways out of your neighborhood and avoid sketchy shortcuts that might be dangerous or blocked. Otherwise, take the quickest route to the main road, highway, or freeway out of the area.
Make a plan of where you’ll go if you need to leave your home for an extended period of time. A family or friend’s house? A hotel? A community emergency shelter? Open Red Cross shelters can be found here.
Open your garage door so you’re easily able to leave if you lose power.
Round up pets and secure them so they’re easy to put into carriers and transport to the car if you need to evacuate, and so you don’t waste precious time trying to chase them down when they’re scared. As the U.S. Forest Service notes, “this is especially important with cats.”
Prepare livestock and horses, if applicable, by reviewing this checklist.
Load up your car so you are prepared to leave on short notice. Remember to pack your go-bag (here is a version of the list in Spanish); suitcases of clothes and medicine (enough for at least a few days); pet supplies like collars, food, and water bowls; important files and back-up disks; insurance and bank papers; special or sentimental items; valuable jewelry or heirlooms (or store them in a fireproof safe); photo albums; and household items like keys and purses.
Too much to remember? Washington State suggests running through the Five P’s of evacuation: People, Prescriptions, Papers, Personal Needs, and Priceless Items.
Strongly consider leaving immediately. Roads can get congested after a mandatory evacuation order is issued, potentially creating dangerous situations where you’re trapped in your car near the fire. It will also get more difficult to see as the fire gets closer and the smoke gets thicker (always evacuate with your headlights turned on). Evacuating early also gives you time to calmly prepare a plan and collect essential items. If you’re on the fence, keep in mind it’s always better to leave too early than too late.
If you have time to prepare your house ahead of your evacuation, here is a checklist from the Western Fire Chiefs Association that you can use to get ready. Keep in mind that “the accepted sequence for safe evacuation is people first, then pets, livestock, and finally property,” Idaho Firewise writes. Major steps include:
Close all windows and interior doors to prevent the spread of fire indoors if the flames reach your home, and remove any curtains from windows. Close shutters and blinds. Leave your exterior doors unlocked so firefighters can get inside if need be.
Turn on all the main lights in your house as well as outdoor lights. This will allow firefighters to be able to see and navigate around your home in smoky conditions.
Push flammable furniture away from walls and windows and to the center of the room.
Shut off gas and turn off pilot lights. Don’t forget about pilot lights in gas fireplaces.
Attach hoses to outdoor water sources — firefighters will potentially use these to defend your home. The Western Fire Chiefs Association also recommends turning the nozzle to “spray” and propping a non-flammable ladder against your house to provide roof access. Fill buckets or garbage cans with water and leave them around your property if you’re able. However, you should not leave any water running, KQED notes, since that decreases the flow available to firefighters.
Prepare yourself for evacuation. California’s ReadyForWildfire.org recommends wearing “long pants, [a] long sleeve shirt, heavy shoes/boots, [a] cap, [a] dry bandanna for face cover [or a leftover COVID mask], goggles, or glasses,” and notes that “100% cotton is preferable.”
Finally, check on, text, or call neighbors and make sure they’re aware of the fire and also prepared to leave. Let them know you are choosing to evacuate. Also email, text, or call family who live outside the area and might be worried about you to let them know of your plans.
There is only one thing to do: Leave as fast as you can.
If you get an evacuation notice (or hear the high-low siren that also signals an evacuation order in California), do not waste time checking to see if the alert is real, gathering up items around your house, or making efforts to prepare your home. Your only focus at this point should be on getting to safety as quickly as you can.
Grab your go-bag and pets and get in your car; drive with the headlights on and follow the directions of any fire or emergency officials. If you need to evacuate on foot, quickly change into long pants, a long shirt, a cap, and heavy boots, and take essential items in a backpack or easily carried duffel bag. Know what to do if you get trapped near a wildfire. Be careful of downed powerlines or other hazards. And stay out of the area until officials say it is safe to return.
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On EU EVs, Exxon’s CCS projects, and Australia’s election
Current conditions: Spring rainshowers and thunderstorms will move over the Central and Eastern U.S. at the start of the week • The Eta Aquarids meteor shower, the result of debris from Halley’s Comet, peaks Monday night and Tuesday morning in the Northern Hemisphere • It’s another sunny day in Rio de Janeiro, where authorities are investigating an attempted attack on Lady Gaga’s Sunday outdoor concert at Copacabana Beach.
First quarter new car registrations for the European Union are in, revealing that March was the second-best month ever for BEVs on the continent, up 24% year-over-year with 245,000 units sold, Clean Technica reports. While the Tesla Model Y and Model 3 remained the top-selling electric vehicles for the month, Model Y deliveries were down 41% year-over-year. “The name Tesla has become toxic for many, limiting its appeal, so don’t expect the Model Y’s performance to go back to the sky-high results it once had,” Clean Technica writes. The Model 3, meanwhile, was up 6% year-over-year in March, but down 14% over the whole quarter.
The Renault 5, in third place for the month, delivered just over 8,000 units, marking “a new record for the French model” that could be even higher for April as it benefits from “Tesla’s off-peak month.” The Volkswagen ID.4, sitting in the fifth place spot with almost 7,600 deliveries, saw a remarkable 52% growth year-over-year. Also creeping up the charts was the BYD Song, which had the best result ever in Q1 for a BYD model in Europe.
ExxonMobil characterized carbon capture and storage as “probably the biggest thing we’re investing in this year” during its first quarter earnings call on Friday. “We have the permanent storage, we’ve drilled the wells, we’ve got the monitoring put in place, and so we’re feeling very good about how that business is progressing,” Kathryn Mikells, Exxon’s chief financial officer and senior vice president, said on the call, adding that low-carbon projects amount to “$30 billion of our total [capital expenditure] from 2024 through 2030,” or about 10% of the company’s total capital expenditure. Earlier in the week, energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie said ExxonMobil’s low-carbon investments place it ahead of Shell and BP.
Darren Woods, Exxon’s president and chief executive officer, also shared an update on the company’s planned Baytown Blue Hydrogen project. The project was announced in 2022 and would be the world’s largest such facility if developed; it aims to eventually produce 1 billion cubic feet of low-carbon hydrogen per day. Acknowledging there’s “some debate today with the Trump administration” and that “policy may change,” Woods said, “our expectation is the things that we need to drive low-carbon hydrogen will probably stay in place.” He added that he expects to make a final investment decision on the project “hopefully … later this year.”
A view of a proposed nuclear facility in Port Augusta, Australia.Brook Mitchell/Getty Images
Australia’s center-left Labor Party retained power in the national election on Saturday, securing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese a second term in office. He is the first Australian prime minister to win consecutive re-election in two decades, and is expected to secure the largest win for his party since 1946 — a landslide victory many have credited to the conservative coalition leader’s association with President Trump.
Though the Australian campaigns, like Canada’s, did not center around climate issues, “few voters have as much power over climate change as an Australian citizen,” The New York Times writes, noting that the country has the highest per capital greenhouse gas emissions among democracies and that it is one of the biggest exporters of coal and natural gas, which it mainly ships to Asia. During the campaign, the Labor Party pitched voters on quickly deploying wind, solar, and pumped storage hydropower to reduce domestic emissions, while the conservative coalition made a pitch for building new nuclear reactors over the next 10 years. “This was an energy referendum,” Amanda McKenzie, the CEO of Australia’s Climate Council, said. “Nuclear bombed at the ballot, with Australians dubbing it toxic.” Australian Conservation Foundation CEO Kelly O’Shanassy added that the landslide for Labor means the door has not just closed on nuclear — “it is welded shut.”
Soil testing by the Los Angeles Timeshas found that properties that burned in the Los Angeles fires in January have elevated levels of arsenic, lead, and mercury — in some cases, levels that are “three times higher than the state benchmark.” That is true even of properties remediated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with dangerous contaminants potentially present in “thousands” of the county’s now-empty lots.
Soil testing is a precautionary measure that has followed every major California wildfire since 2007, the Times writes, due to the known toxicity of fire-scorched properties. In my interview earlier this year with Ruben Juarez, one of the lead researchers of the Maui Wildfire Exposure Study, a multi-year effort to track the 2023 Lahaina fire’s physical and mental health impacts on residents, he told me that “60% of participants may have poor lung health, and 40% may have mild to severe lung obstruction. We believe this is associated with the exposure to ash and the [inadequate] personal protective equipment individuals wore when they returned to the fire site.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency “now insists it’s not the agency’s responsibility to meet California’s health standards for private properties,” the Times writes, and has said its current clean-up procedures are “sufficient to rid properties of fire-related contamination.” Rachel Morello-Frosch, an environmental health scientist and professor at the University of California Berkeley, described FEMA’s attitude as “no data, no problem,” calling the government’s failure to properly clean up contaminated properties in Altadena a “quintessential environmental justice issue.” Read the Times’ full findings here.
Two major American scientific societies have announced their intention to produce peer-reviewed studies on climate change in the wake of the Trump administration’s retreat from funding such research. “This effort aims to sustain the momentum of the sixth National Climate Assessment, the authors and staff of which were dismissed earlier this week by the Trump administration, almost a year into the process,” the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union said in their joint statement on Friday. The Trump administration laid off nearly 400 scientists from working on the NCA, which is mandated by Congress and due in 2027. “Our economy, our health, our society are all climate-dependent,” AMS President David Stensrud said, per The Guardian. “While we cannot replace the NCA, we at AMS see it as vital to support and help expand this collaborative scientific effort for the benefit of the U.S. public and the world at large.”
Hawaii passed a first-of-its-kind law on Friday that will increase the tax on hotels, vacation rentals, and cruise ships to raise money for climate resiliency projects. Officials say the new tax could generate as much as $100 million for the fund annually.
The administration can’t have it both ways on the Clean Air Act.
The Trump administration filed lawsuits this week against four states that are pursuing compensation from oil and gas companies for climate change-related damages. But Trump’s separate aim to revoke the government’s “endangerment finding,” the conclusion that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and should therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act, could directly undercut the legal basis for the suits.
In each of the cases, the Trump administration is arguing that the Clean Air Act preempts the states’ actions. But if the Environmental Protection Agency rules that the Clean Air Act does not, in fact, require the federal regulation of greenhouse gases, that argument could fall apart.
Two of the lawsuits target Vermont and New York for their new “climate superfund” laws that require the companies responsible for the greatest amount of emissions over the last three decades to pay into a fund supporting adaptation and disaster response. The Department of Justice is also suing Hawaii and Michigan to block them from suing fossil fuel companies for damages for climate change-related harms. Neither state had actually filed such a lawsuit yet, although both had expressed interest in doing so. (Hawaii went ahead and filed its suit on Thursday night.)
“I just want to start by saying that these lawsuits by the government are totally unprecedented,” Rachel Rothschild, an assistant professor of Law at Michigan State University, told me when we hopped on the phone. To her knowledge, never before has the federal government tried to preemptively stop a state from filing a liability case against companies.
In an executive order in early April, Trump had directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “stop the enforcement” of state climate laws and actions that “may be unconstitutional” or “preempted by federal law.” The order singled out lawsuits against oil companies as well as climate superfund laws, calling both a form of “extortion” and a “threat to economic and national security.”
Nevermind that climate change is a major threat to economic and national security, and states have filed these lawsuits and created these laws because they are scrambling to find ways to pay to address the unprecedented damages brought by the increasing severity of wildfires and floods.
Even before Trump took office, Rothschild said, the federal government had warned states that they were going to need to take more responsibility for preparing for and responding to increasing natural disasters. “[States] do not have the resources alone to address this problem,” said Rothschild. “These companies have engaged in an activity that causes external harms that they’ve not taken into account as part of their business practices, they’'re imposing all the costs of those harms on states and citizens, and they should be liable to help us deal with the resulting problems. That’s a very normal activity for tort suits.”
Dozens of states have filed similar lawsuits seeking damages from oil companies. (A Justice Department press release did not say why it was singling out states that had not taken any legal action yet rather than targeting those that had.) Many of these lawsuits have been stuck in a holding pattern for years, though. “Climate superfund” laws are a new legal strategy, modeled on the federal superfund program, that some states are testing to get oil companies to pay up.
The DOJ’s lawsuits claim that states cannot fine oil companies for their emissions because that authority lies with the federal government under the Clean Air Act. That argument is underpinned by the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, which stems from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gases are a pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act, and therefore the EPA must determine whether these emissions pose a threat to public health. The court said that if the agency finds there is enough scientific evidence to say greenhouse gases are harmful, it must develop regulations to rein them in. EPA officially made this finding in 2009.
This was a big headache for Trump during his first term. He wasn’t allowed to simply repeal Barack Obama’s greenhouse gas rules — by law, he had to replace them. If he’s able to reverse the endangerment finding, however, he could undo climate protection rules and that would be that.
At the same time, he’d make oil companies much more vulnerable. “There is great concern that reversing the finding would open the door to a lot more nuisance lawsuits against all types of energy companies,” Jeff Holmstead, a partner with Bracewell, a lobbying firm, told E&E News. “It would eliminate one of the best arguments that oil companies have used to get lawsuits against them dismissed,” he added.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin will face an uphill battle in reversing the finding, as there is a mountain of scientific evidence that greenhouse gases cause dangerous climate change. But Zeldin may instead try to argue that the EPA did not consider the cost of addressing these emissions when it made the initial finding — and that the costs of reining them in outweigh the costs of emitting freely.
Legal experts are skeptical this argument will go anywhere, either. In 2012, the D.C. Circuit Court found that the EPA’s endangerment finding should be based on science, not economics. Cost-benefit analyses and other policy considerations are relevant if the EPA finds that greenhouse gases do, in fact, pose a threat, but they “do not inform the ‘scientific judgment’” that the law requires the EPA to make, the judge ruled. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn “Chevron deference,” a decades-long precedent that gave agencies broad authority to interpret their statutory mandates, could also hurt Zeldin’s case.
Rothschild, for her part, is confident that states’ superfund laws and tort suits are defensible regardless of what happens to the endangerment finding. These actions have nothing to do with the Clean Air Act, she argued, because they are not an attempt to regulate emissions. “They're trying to impose liability for local, environmental, and public health harms from past activities,” she said.
One thing is for certain: Between states’ lawsuits suing oil companies, oil companies’ countersuits, the DOJ’s new lawsuits against states, and probably future suits against any actions the Trump administration takes on endangerment, there’s going to be a whole lot of new case law about greenhouse gases over the next four years.
The fundamentals are the same — it’s the tone that’s changed.
At some point in the past month, the hydrogen fuel cell developer Plug Power updated its website. Beneath a carousel explaining the hydrogen ecosystem and solutions for transporting fuel, the company’s home page now contains a section titled “Hydrogen at Work.”
“Hydrogen is key to energy independence, providing clean, reliable power while reducing reliance on imported fuels,” the text in this new box reads. “Plug’s hydrogen and fuel cell solutions strengthen the energy grid and enhance national security, positioning the U.S. as a leader in the global energy transition.”
It is fairly ordinary website copy, but to a keen reader, the text jumps out as an obvious Trump 2.0 tell. Plug Power — like many green economy companies — has pivoted to meet the political and economic moment, where “energy independence” and “energy dominance” are in and “climate” and “sustainability” are out.
“I am actually shocked every time I look at the website of a climate tech company that still uses the language from 12 months ago, from four months ago — that doesn’t do them any good,” Peter Atanasoff, the managing director and vice president of Scratch Media and Marketing, which helps B2B technology companies and climate tech businesses achieve growth and recognition, told me.
The shift in language is more significant than just brands chasing the latest buzzwords.
The first Trump administration saw broad-based pushback from the business community against Trump’s more inflammatory positions, especially by consumer-facing brands that played to the pussy hat-wearing, brunch-and-protest attitudes of the time. The CEOs of Facebook (now Meta), Nike, and Google issued statements of disappointment when the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk even dropped out of the president’s business council over the decision. It was, needless to say, a very different time.
During Trump’s second term, he promised “retribution.” Many of the more moderate voices from his first administration are long gone, and there’s a palpable fear among nonprofits and businesses of drawing the wrong kind of attention from Washington, losing grant funding for saying the wrong thing. “The real trigger” for resulting differences in branding between the first and second Trump administrations has been “the change of tone and change of economic policy,” Atanasoff told me. “It is explicit opposition to any of these technologies."
The administration has launched an all-out assault not just on climate policy, but also on the very language of the energy transition. In a February memo obtained by E&E News, the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed 34 words to be erased from official documentation, including “global warming,” “carbon footprint,” “net zero,” and even “green.” As I’ve covered for Heatmap, farmers applying for Department of Agriculture grants have been encouraged to resubmit proposals with climate-focused language removed and “refocus … on expanding American energy production.” And at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists have quickly learned to pivot to talking about “air pollution” rather than emissions, contending with a banned-words list of their own.
Lobbyists and clean energy companies that want to be in the administration’s good graces have adapted, as well. That has changed the tenor of green business at large. Alexander Bryden, who runs the Washington, D.C. office of Browning Environmental Communications, told me over email that tweaking brand language is “typical after any change of administration, particularly when there are significant shifts in policy.” But especially for organizations in the public eye, “it’s more important than ever to highlight the historic and potential economic benefits of environmental solutions — and show how they are supported by, and benefit, people across the political spectrum.”
The actual fundamentals of green business haven’t changed, though. On the contrary, in the first quarter of 2025, venture capitalists and private equity firms invested more than $5 billion in climate tech startups in the U.S., a 65% increase from the same period a year earlier, according to PitchBook data. While there are certainly obstacles like supply chain uncertainty and tariffs to contend with, especially for clean energy manufacturing, on the whole “it’s still a great time to start a climate startup,” Tommy Leep, the founder of the software-focused venture firm Jetstream, told my colleague Katie Brigham last November. His caveat? “Just don’t call it a climate startup.”
Roger Ballentine, the president of the management consulting service Green Strategies and the chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Bill Clinton, explained this thinking to me. “It’s what I refer to as climate capitalism, which is the realization that by incorporating climate change and its risks and opportunities into your business strategy, you’re actually going to be a more successful, more profitable, and more competitive company,” he said. Even with the recent economic turbulence, “That hasn’t changed. That’s not going to change.”
Where you do see adjustments, however, is “around the edges,” per Ballentine. Companies are attempting to match the frequency of the administration and, in turn, the broader policy ecosystem — a frequency that tends to be aggressive, assertive, and heavy on words like “dominance” and “security.” It might also take the form of decreasing the volume at which companies had previously shouted their climate bona fides.
Anya Nelson, the senior vice president of public relations at Scratch M+M, said her team has also advised touting “American-made production” in brand messaging, and reframing copy to focus on “the positive impacts and immediate business benefits” of the companies, rather than more idealistic messaging about climate goals that may have had stronger resonance during the Biden administration.
At this point, you may have noticed that I haven’t quoted any corporate brand officers. That’s not because I didn’t try to talk to any. (Even Plug Power, my example at the beginning of this story, didn’t respond to a request for comment on the change in their messaging.) Though the sudden prevalence of terms like “energy dominance” becomes conspicuous once you start to look for them, no one wants to draw the wrong kind of attention from the administration. It’s part of a greater trend of clamming up that my colleagues and I have experienced across sectors in our reporting, and at a time when even the word “green” can give you a black mark, I can’t say I don’t understand.
Ballentine, the Green Strategies president, dismissed reading too much into how language itself changes under President Trump. “If yesterday a new technology company was touting itself as a climate solution, and now it’s touting itself as a way to achieve energy dominance — I don’t care,” he said.
His thinking was more pragmatic. “Good business remains good business,” Ballentine went on. “Around the edges, will things change? Yes. General belt tightening? Yes. Fundamental change of direction? No.”
It might sound like branding agencies are encouraging companies to “play along” with the administration, but Nelson of Scratch M+M stressed that wasn’t what she was trying to say. At the end of the day, “your end goal is to be a viable company, right?” she said. “To be a thriving company that is going to change the world, first and foremost, you need to make sure you don’t go out of business.” The message might be more accurately summarized as “read the room.”