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Your guide to the important races from Alaska to Arizona and everywhere in between.
In 2015, just one state had a goal of reaching 100% clean energy; today, over half the American population lives in states that do. That progress is thanks in large part to voters, who’ve prioritized electing candidates that support renewable energy, electric vehicles, climate justice, and other green policies.
And who’s making those policies? The people at the bottom of the ticket — candidates for the kind of local and state-level offices that do most of the nitty-gritty climate policymaking in this country. Here is a representative, albeit far from exhaustive, list of eight I’ll be keeping my eye on this year.
Who’s running: There are 10 candidates in Anchorage’s nonpartisan mayoral election, but the ones you need to know are Republican incumbent Mayor David Bronson; Democratic Party-endorsed Suzanne LaFrance, who helped pass the city’s Climate Action Plan while in the State Assembly; former state legislator and Democratic Party-endorsed Chris Tuck; and the Republican Party-endorsed former president and CEO of the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation Bill Popp.
State of the race: Bronson led with 35% of the vote in polls a month out from election day on April 2, but that wouldn’t put him over the 45% hump he needs to win without a runoff. LaFrance holds around 25% of the potential vote, and experts say she’d likely beat Bronson if it goes to a runoff.
Why it matters: Southcentral Alaska, home to half the state’s population, gets most of its energy from wells owned by Hilcorp in Cook Inlet. Hilcorp, however, has warned that it won’t commit to signing new contracts, which begin to expire next year, due to natural gas shortages. Mayors in the region, including Anchorage’s Bronson, recently formed a coalition to address the looming energy crisis, with solutions ranging from importing liquified natural gas from out of state, abroad, or Alaska’s North Slope 800 miles away; to new drilling (Bronson’s proposal); to finding an “alternative” source of energy (LaFrance’s stance). Whatever way you cut it, though, the next mayor of Anchorage is likely to have an outsized role in determining the state’s energy future, with organizations like The Alaska Center, which advocates for renewable energy, and Lead Locally, which champions climate leaders, rallying behind LaFrance.
Who’s running: Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego and “MAGA darling” Kari Lake are fighting for outgoing Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s seat.
State of the race: It’s a true toss-up, although early polls show Gallego with the edge.
Why it matters: Sinema’s replacement could determine which party controls the Senate once the dust settles on November 5. In one corner is Lake, who has blamed heat-related deaths in the state on meth and, while “not opposed to some of the green energy,” has said she’d block renewable mandates. Gallego, by contrast, is endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund in part for having paid special attention to public lands and waters and clean energy jobs while in Congress. He also co-sponsored the CHIPS and Science Act.
What it is: The Salt River Project is the biggest public power company in the country by generation, serving the Phoenix metropolitan area. Its board and council are chosen through a confusing and dubiously democratic “acreage-based voting system” on the first Tuesday in April in even-numbered years.
State of the race: A coalition of 14 clean energy candidates is attempting to flip the SRP board and council to make it more solar-friendly. However, only half of SRP’s customers are eligible to cast a vote — renters, for example, are not allowed — and less than 1% of those who are eligible actually do.
Why it matters: Currently, less than 4% of SRP’s energy comes from solar, compared to almost 10% for other local utilities. Incumbents on the council and board — some of whom have had SRP seats in their families for more than a century — have voted to keep using coal and penalized rooftop solar, with six-time elected official Stephen Williams telling the local NBC affiliate that the “sun doesn’t shine at night” — which, while true, does not typically prohibit solar energy from being generated during the daytime. In addition to pushing for more solar, the Clean Energy candidates also want to protect the local watershed, an issue likely to become increasingly critical in the heat-baked state.
What it is: A vote on whether or not to overturn Senate Bill 1137, which prohibits new oil and gas wells from being built within a half-mile of homes, schools, nursing homes, jails, and hospitals, and requires additional safety measures like leak detection.
State of the race: Big-money campaigns have killed progressive bills in California before, and the oil industry is poised to dump a lot more money into defeating the regulations. The campaign to overturn Senate Bill 1137 has already spent $20 million, while California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and Jane Fonda have rallied to support the bill.
Why it matters: The California referendum is set to be one of a handful of cases of voters deciding directly on legislation related to oil, gas, and emissions this November. Oil interests are already tailoring their arguments to sway California’s liberal constituency, arguing that the law’s limits are arbitrary and that it will be worse for the environment in the long run by forcing the state to import oil from places with less stringent regulations. Proponents of the bill, however, say it is a cut-and-dry case of environmental justice, given that many of the more than 2 million Californians who live within a mile of an oil or gas well in the state are people of color. That hasn’t stopped oil interests from undertaking some confusing shenanigans, even as some experts say gas interests just want the referendum to cause a delay “until they figure out what they’re going to do next.”
Who’s running: Former Democratic State Senator Curtis Hertel Jr., who is endorsed by the LCV, is running against former Republican State Senator Tom Barrett.
State of the race: The Cook Political Reporthas called Michigan’s 7th district, representing Lansing and the surrounding area, “the most competitive open seat in the country.”
Why it matters: “Climate won the Michigan midterms,” the Sierra Club wrote in 2022 after voters elected a “pro-environment majority” to the state legislature. Having control of both chambers allowed Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer to make speedy and impressive progress on the energy transition locally, while at the national level, Democrats took seven of the state’s 13 House seats. The advantages are slim, though, and going into November, Congressional Democrats face threats in MI-03, MI-08, and most notably, MI-07, which Democratic Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin has vacated to run for Senate. Notably, Democrats need to win five more House districts nationally to regain control of the chamber, which means every close district race is essential. It’s important locally, too; the race for Slotkin’s open seat is among the most competitive in the country, and green groups have hit Barrett for his poor environmental voting record and opposition to clean energy jobs.
Who’s running: Incumbent Democrat Jon Tester will face the winner of the Republican primary — likely former Montana Secretary of State and Public Service Commission Chair Brad Johnson, a Libertarian, or ex-Navy SEAL and entrepreneur Tim Sheehy, who was endorsed by Trump as an “American hero.”
State of the race:It’ll be a nail-biter. Tester “will likely have to convince one out of every six Trump voters to cross over for him” on a split ballot in November, RealClearPoliticsnotes. Still, polls show the Democrat with an early edge in potential Republican match-ups.
Why it matters: Unlike Arizona, which has turned purple in the last two elections, Montana is still a solidly conservative state, which Trump won by more than 16 points in 2020. At the same time, Montana is becoming a “must-watch climate battleground,” balanced between its cheap and ample supply of coal and its deep-rooted pride in its natural landscape. But while Tester’s environmental record isn’t perfect, the opposition looks much worse: Johnson has scaremongered about the reliability of renewable energy and EVs stressing the grid, while Sheehy quietly deleted references to sustainability and climate change from the website for his aerial firefighting company, seemingly to boost his credibility with MAGA voters.
Who’s running: North Carolina’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein will face the state’s Republican Lieutenant Governor, Mark K. Robinson.
State of the race: Either a toss-up or a slight lean Democratic, depending on who you ask. Early polls show Stein and Robinson neck and neck.
Why it matters: When I spoke to LCV’s senior vice president of campaigns, Pete Maysmith, he cited the North Carolina race as one of the advocacy group’s top 2024 priorities. Term-limited outgoing Democratic Governor Roy Cooper had long been an ally of green policymakers, setting strong EV goals for the state and making a (thwarted) push for offshore wind. Stein has vowed to keep up his predecessor’s work. Robinson, on the other hand, is one of the most flagrant deniers of climate change on any 2024 ballot: He’s called climate research “junk science” and misleadingly alleged there are “more polar bears on Earth now than ever.” Electing Stein wouldn’t just keep a climate denier out of office; with Cooper’s seat, Republicans could seize a trifecta in the state if, as expected, they keep control of the House and Senate. With no remaining opposition, they could start rolling back more of Cooper’s work.
Who’s running: There are currently 13 candidates in the nonpartisan primary for outgoing Governor Jay Inslee’s seat, but leading the polls are Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat endorsed by Inslee; moderate Democratic State Senator Mark Mullet; former moderate Republican Representative Dave Reichert; and former Richland school board member Semi Bird, the first Black Republican to run for governor in the state.
State of the race: Likely Democrat; the state last elected a Republican governor in 1985. Still, a November poll that pitted Ferguson against Reichert showed the Republican with a 2-point lead over his opponent.
Why it matters: Inslee’s apparent departure from politics will leave a gaping hole not just in the state’s climate leadership but also in the nation’s — as governor, Inslee made Washington an example for other states with its aggressive clean energy goals, phase-out of new gas-powered cars and trucks, heat pump requirement for new buildings, and local Climate Corps. That progressive trajectory is under threat from Republicans, who’ve successfully gathered signatures for potential initiatives that would chip away at “radical” policies like the state’s cap-and-invest program — a repeal of which both Reichert and Bird support. But Washington’s governor race could be consequential even if a Democrat wins. While Ferguson has called “climate change” a top priority and under Inslee opposed building a methane gas pipeline through the state, Mullet has taken a somewhat more moderate stance, expressing concerns about gas “affordability” for families.
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Recovering from the Los Angeles wildfires will be expensive. Really expensive. Insurance analysts and banks have already produced a wide range of estimates of both what insurance companies will pay out and overall economic loss. AccuWeatherhas put out an eye-catching preliminary figure of $52 billion to $57 billion for economic losses, with the service’s chief meteorologist saying that the fires have the potential to “become the worst wildfire in modern California history based on the number of structures burned and economic loss.” On Thursday, J.P. Morgan doubled its previous estimate for insured losses to $20 billion, with an economic loss figure of $50 billion — about the gross domestic product of the country of Jordan.
The startlingly high loss figures from a fire that has only lasted a few days and is (relatively) limited in scope show just how distinctly devastating an urban fire can be. Enormous wildfires thatcover millions of acres like the 2023 Canadian wildfires can spew ash and particulate matter all over the globe and burn for months, darkening skies and clogging airways in other countries. And smaller — and far deadlier fires — than those still do not produce the same financial roll.
It’s in coastal Southern California where you find large population centers areas known by all to be at extreme risk of fire. And so a fire there can destroy a whole neighborhood in a few hours and put the state’s insurance system into jeopardy.
One reason why the projected economic impacts of the fires are so high is that the structures that have burned and the land those structures sit on are very valuable. Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Santa Monica contain some of the most sought-after real estate on planet earth, with typical home prices over $2 million. Pacific Palisades itself has median home values of around $3 million, according to JPMorgan Chase.
The AccuWeather estimates put the economic damage for the Los Angeles fires at several times previous large, urban fires — the Maui wildfire in 2023 was estimated to cause around $14 billion of economic loss, for example — while the figure would be about a third or a quarter of a large hurricane, which tend to strike areas with millions of people in them across several states.
“The fires have not been contained thus far and continue to spread, implying that estimates of potential economic and insured losses are likely to increase,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote Thursday.
That level of losses would make the fires costlier in economic terms than the 2018 Butte County Camp Fire, whose insured losses of $10 billion made it California’s costliest at the time. That fire was far larger than the Los Angeles fires, spreading over 150,000 acres compared to just over 17,000 acres for the Palisades Fire and over 10,000 acres for the Eaton Fire. It also led to more than 80 deaths in the town of Paradise.
So far, around 2,000 homes have been destroyed,according to the Los Angeles Times,a fraction of the more than 19,000 structures affected by the Camp Fire. The difference in estimated losses comes from the fact that homes in Pacific Palisades weigh in at more than six times those in rural Butte, according to JPMorgan.
While insured losses get the lion’s share of attention when it comes to the cost impacts of a natural disaster, the potential damages go far beyond the balance sheet of insurers.
For one, it’s likely that many affected homeowners did not even carry insurance, either because their insurers failed to renew their existing policies or the homeowners simply chose to go without due to the high cost of what insurance they could find. “A larger than usual portion of the losses caused by the wildfires will be uninsured,” according to Morningstar DBRS, which estimated total insured losses at more than $8 billion. Many homeowners carry insurance from California’s backup FAIR Plan, which may itself come under financial pressure, potentially leading to assessments from the state’s policyholders to bolster its ability to pay claims.
AccuWeather arrived at its economic impact figure by looking not just at losses from property damage but also wages that go unearned due to economic activity slowing down or halting in affected areas, infrastructure that needs to be repaired, supply chain issues, and transportation snarls. Even when homes and businesses aren’t destroyed, people may be unable to work due to evacuations; businesses may close due to the dispersal of their customers or inability of their suppliers to make deliveries. Smoke inhalation can lead to short-, medium-, and long-term health impacts that take a dent out of overall economic activity.
The high level of insured losses, meanwhile, could mean that insurers’ will see less surplus and could have to pay more for reinsurance, Nancy Watkins, an actuary and wildfire expert at Milliman, told me in an email. This may mean that they would have to shed yet more policies “in order to avoid deterioration in their financial strength ratings,” just as California has been trying to lure insurers back with reforms to its dysfunctional insurance market.
The economic costs of the fire will likely be felt for years if not decades. While it would take an act of God far stronger than a fire to keep people from building homes on the slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains or off the Pacific Coast, the city that rebuilds may be smaller, more heavily fortified, and more expensive than the one that existed at the end of last year. And that’s just before the next big fire.
Suburban streets, exploding pipes, and those Santa Ana winds, for starters.
A fire needs three things to burn: heat, fuel, and oxygen. The first is important: At some point this week, for a reason we have yet to discover and may never will, a piece of flammable material in Los Angeles County got hot enough to ignite. The last is essential: The resulting fires, which have now burned nearly 29,000 acres, are fanned by exceptionally powerful and dry Santa Ana winds.
But in the critical days ahead, it is that central ingredient that will preoccupy fire managers, emergency responders, and the public, who are watching their homes — wood-framed containers full of memories, primary documents, material wealth, sentimental heirlooms — transformed into raw fuel. “Grass is one fuel model; timber is another fuel model; brushes are another — there are dozens of fuel models,” Bobbie Scopa, a veteran firefighter and author of the memoir Both Sides of the Fire Line, told me. “But when a fire goes from the wildland into the urban interface, you’re now burning houses.”
This jump from chaparral shrubland into neighborhoods has frustrated firefighters’ efforts to gain an upper hand over the L.A. County fires. In the remote wilderness, firefighters can cut fire lines with axes, pulaskis, and shovels to contain the blaze. (A fire’s “containment” describes how much firefighters have encircled; 25% containment means a quarter of the fire perimeter is prevented from moving forward by manmade or natural fire breaks.)
Once a fire moves into an urban community and starts spreading house to house, however, as has already happened in Santa Monica, Pasadena, and other suburbs of Los Angeles, those strategies go out the window. A fire break starves a fire by introducing a gap in its fuel; it can be a cleared strip of vegetation, a river, or even a freeway. But you can’t just hack a fire break through a neighborhood. “Now you’re having to use big fire engines and spray lots of water,” Scopa said, compared to the wildlands where “we do a lot of firefighting without water.”
Water has already proven to be a significant issue in Los Angeles, where many hydrants near Palisades, the biggest of the five fires, had already gone dry by 3:00 a.m. Wednesday. “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quiñones explained in a news conference later that same day.
LADWP said it had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the fires started, but the city’s water supply was never intended to stop a 17,000-acre fire. The hydrants are “meant to put out a two-house fire, a one-house fire, or something like that,” Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, told me. Additionally, homeowners sometimes leave their sprinklers on in the hopes that it will help protect their house, or try to fight fires with their own hoses. At a certain point, the system — just like the city personnel — becomes overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the unfolding disaster.
Making matters worse is the wind, which restricted some of the aerial support firefighters typically employ. As gusts slowed on Thursday, retardant and water drops were able to resume, helping firefighters in their efforts. (The Eaton Fire, while still technically 0% contained because there are no established fire lines, has “significantly stopped” growing, The New York Times reports). Still, firefighters don’t typically “paint” neighborhoods; the drops, which don’t put out fires entirely so much as suppress them enough that firefighters can fight them at close range, are a liability. Kearns, however, told me that “the winds were so high, they weren’t able to do the water drops that they normally do and that are an enormous part of all fire operations,” and that “certainly compounded the problems of the fire hydrants running dry.”
Firefighters’ priority isn’t saving structures, though. “Firefighters save lives first before they have to deal with fire,” Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the author of an ongoing case study of the 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, California, told me. That can be an enormous and time-consuming task in a dense area like suburban Los Angeles, and counterintuitively lead to more areas burning down. Speaking specifically from his conclusions about the Camp fire, which was similarly a wildland-urban interface, or WUI fire, Maranghides added, “It is very, very challenging because as things deteriorate — you’re talking about downed power lines, smoke obstructing visibility, and you end up with burn-overs,” when a fire moves so quickly that it overtakes people or fire crews. “And now you have to go and rescue those civilians who are caught in those burn-overs.” Sometimes, that requires firefighters to do triage — and let blocks burn to save lives.
Perhaps most ominously, the problems don’t end once the fire is out. When a house burns down, it is often the case that its water pipes burst. (This also adds to the water shortage woes during the event.) But when firefighters are simultaneously pumping water out of other parts of the system, air can be sucked down into those open water pipes. And not just any air. “We’re not talking about forest smoke, which is bad; we’re talking about WUI smoke, which is bad plus,” Maranghides said, again referring to his research in Paradise. “It’s not just wood burning; it’s wood, plastics, heavy metals, computers, cars, batteries, everything. You don’t want to be breathing it, and you don’t want it going into your water system.”
Water infrastructure can be damaged in other ways, as well. Because fires are burning “so much hotter now,” Kearns told me, contamination can occur due to melting PVC piping, which releases benzene, a carcinogen. Watersheds and reservoirs are also in danger of extended contamination, particularly once rains finally do come and wash soot, silt, debris, and potentially toxic flame retardant into nearby streams.
But that’s a problem for the future. In the meantime, Los Angeles — and lots of it — continues to burn.
“I don’t care how many resources you have; when the fires are burning like they do when we have Santa Anas, there’s so little you can do,” Scopa said. “All you can do is try to protect the people and get the people out, and try to keep your firefighters safe.”
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 Thursday, 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.
Five major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event this week:
Officials have not made any statements about the cause of any of the fires yet.
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 about 27,000 acres burned, 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 2,000 structures damaged so far, 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 1,000 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 very wet and very dry years over the past eight decades. But climate change is expected to make dry years drier in Los Angeles. “The LA area is about 3°C warmer than it would be in preindustrial conditions, which (all else being equal) works to dry fuels and makes fires more intense,” Brown wrote.