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Current conditions: Tropical storm Filipo will make landfall on Mozambique’s coast today • Morel season has begun in parts of the Midwest • It is cold and cloudy in Stockholm, where police forcibly removed climate activst Greta Thunberg from the entrance to parliament.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Climate and energy ‘figure prominently’ in Biden’s budget
President Biden proposed a $7.3 trillion budget yesterday, and his “climate and energy promises figured prominently,” reportedE&E News. Biden requested $17.8 billion for the Interior Department to help with climate resilience, national parks, wildfire management, tribal programs, ecosystem restoration, and water infrastructure in the west. He wants $11 billion for the EPA and $51 billion for the Department of Energy to tackle climate change and help fund the energy transition. The proposal calls for funding toward expanding the “Climate Corps.” Biden also asked Congress to put $500 million into the international Green Climate Fund in 2025, and then more in the following years. And he wants to make this spending mandatory. The budget would also “cut wasteful subsidies to Big Oil and other special interests,” Biden said. As Morning Brewnoted, the budget proposal has “about as much chance of getting passed by Congress as a bill guaranteeing each American a pet unicorn, so it’s mostly a statement of Biden’s priorities.”
2. U.S. EV prices drop 13% year-over-year
EV prices in the U.S. have dropped by about 13% in the last year, according to Kelley Blue Book. The drop “has been led in part by the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, the two most popular EVs in the U.S.,” explained Michelle Lewis at Electrek. However, EVs are still more expensive than “mainstream non-luxury vehicles,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of Industry Insights at Cox Automotive.
3. Report: BYD struggles to ramp up overseas EV sales
Chinese EV maker BYD has reportedly hit a speed bump on the road to international expansion. Having dominated the Chinese market and established itself as the top-selling EV maker in the world, BYD set an internal goal of selling 400,000 cars overseas this year. But a global slowdown in EV sales growth has hampered that effort, reported The Wall Street Journal. “As of the end of last year, more than 10,000 BYD passenger cars were waiting in warehouses in Europe,” the Journal added, “and the certificates authorizing them to be sold in the European Union are set to expire soon, meaning it may not be possible to sell them in Europe.” At the same time, quality control issues have been cropping up in some vehicles, and higher prices in Europe are making it more difficult for the company to compete with better-known brands.
4. U.K. emissions hit 145-year low
Greenhouse gas emissions in the UK fell last year to their lowest level since 1879, according to analysis from Carbon Brief. The decline is attributed mainly to a drop in gas demand thanks to higher electricity imports and warmer temperatures. As recently as 2014, the power sector was the UK’s largest source of emissions, but now it has been eclipsed by transportation, buildings, industry, and agriculture. “Transport emissions have barely changed over the past several decades as more efficient cars have been offset by increased traffic,” Carbon Brief explained. Remarkably, coal use in the country is at its lowest level since the 1730s, “when George II was on the throne.” The emissions drop is good news but “with only one coal-fired power station remaining and the power sector overall now likely only the fifth-largest contributor to UK emissions, the country will need to start cutting into gas power and looking to other sectors” to meet net zero by 2050. Meanwhile, the British government today announced a plan to build new gas plants.
5. Seaside town’s $500K new protective sand dune washes away in 3 days
Residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, last week finished building a $500,000 sand dune meant to protect their beachside homes from rising tides and repeated storms. Three days later, the barrier, made of 14,000 tons of sand, washed away when a storm brought historic high tides to the seaside town. “We got hit with three storms – two in January, one now – at the highest astronomical tides possible,” said Rick Rigoli, who oversaw the project. The sea level off the Massachusetts coast has risen by 8 inches since 1950, and is now rising by about 1 inch every 8 years.
THE KICKER
On average, installing a heat pump in your home could cut between 2.5 to 4.4 tons of carbon during the equipment’s lifespan, meaning widespread adoption could result in a 5% to 9% drop in national economy-wide emissions.
Everyone knows the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, the one that allegedly knocked over a lantern in 1871 and burned down 2,100 acres of downtown Chicago. While the wildfires raging in Los Angeles County have already far exceeded that legendary bovine’s total attributed damage — at the time of this writing, five fires have burned almost 16,000 acres — the losses had centralized, at least initially, in the secluded neighborhoods and idyllic suburbs in the hills above the city.
On Wednesday, that started to change. Evacuation maps have since extended into the gridded streets of downtown Santa Monica and Pasadena, and a new fire has started north of Beverly Hills, moving quickly toward an internationally recognizable street: Hollywood Boulevard. The two biggest fires, Palisades and Eaton, remain 0% contained, and high winds have stymied firefighting efforts, all leading to an exceedingly grim question: Exactly how much of Los Angeles could burn. Could all of it?
“I hate to be doom and gloom, but if those winds kept up … it’s not unfathomable to think that the fires would continue to push into L.A. — into the city,” Riva Duncan, a former wildland firefighter and fire management specialist who now serves as the executive secretary of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group, told me.
When a fire is burning in the chaparral of the hills, it’s one thing. But once a big fire catches in a neighborhood, it’s a different story. Houses, with their wood frames, gas lines, and cheap modern furniture, might as well be Duraflame. Embers from one burning house then leap to the next and alight in a clogged gutter or on shrubs planted too close to vinyl siding. “That’s what happened with the Great Chicago Fire. When the winds push fires like that, it’s pushing the embers from one house to the others,” Duncan said. “It’s a really horrible situation, but it’s not unfathomable to think about that [happening in L.A.] — but people need to be thinking about that, and I know the firefighters are thinking about that.”
Once flames engulf a block, it will “overpower” the capabilities of firefighters, Arnaud Trouvé, the chair of the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland, told me in an email. If firefighters can’t gain a foothold, the fire will continue to spread “until a change in driving conditions,” such as the winds weakening to the point that a fire isn’t igniting new fuel or its fuel source running out entirely, when it reaches something like an expansive parking lot or the ocean.
This waiting game sometimes leads to the impression that firefighters are standing around, not doing anything. But “what I know they’re doing is they’re looking ahead to places where maybe there’s a park, or some kind of green space, or a shopping center with big parking lots — they’re looking for those places where they could make a stand,” Duncan told me. If an entire city block is already on fire, “they’re not going to waste precious water there.”
Urban firefighting is a different beast than wildland firefighting, but Duncan noted that Forest Service, CALFIRE, and L.A. County firefighters are used to complex mixed environments. “This is their backyard, and they know how to fight fire there.”
“I can guarantee you, many of them haven’t slept 48 hours,” she went on. “They’re grabbing food where they can; they’re taking 15-minute naps. They’re in this really horrible smoke — there are toxins that come off burning vehicles and burning homes, and wildland firefighters don’t wear breathing apparatus to protect the airways. I know they all have horrible headaches right now and are puking. I remember those days.”
If there’s a sliver of good news, it’s that the biggest fire, Palisades, can’t burn any further to the west, the direction the wind is blowing — there lies the ocean — meaning its spread south into Santa Monica toward Venice and Culver City or Beverly Hills is slower than it would be if the winds shifted. The westward-moving Santa Ana winds, however, could conceivably fan the Eaton fire deeper into eastern Los Angeles if conditions don’t let up soon. “In many open fires, the most important factor is the wind,” Trouvé explained, “and the fire will continue spreading until the wind speed becomes moderate-to-low.”
Relief is supposed to begin Wednesday night, meaning firefighters will have a crucial opportunity to gain a foothold — an opportunity that will increase after the red flag warning expires on Friday. But “there are additional winds coming next week,” Kristen Allison, a fire management specialist with the Southern California Geographic Area Coordination Center, told me earlier today. “It’s going to be a long duration — and we’re not seeing any rain anytime soon.”
As wildfires spread through the Los Angeles area, one resident of a tony neighborhood made a desperate plea for help on social media. “Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home in Pacific Palisades?” asked Keith Wasserman on X. “Will pay any amount.” The reaction was predictable: Some users expressed their wish that Wasserman’s house would burn down, while others found earlier tweets in which he had cheered Donald Trump’s pledges to lower taxes, and even once said “Real estate ballers don’t pay any taxes!”
It’s hard to feel too much sympathy for a rich guy getting what looks like a pointed object lesson in the necessity of universal services: If you’re disappointed that the government wasn’t able to save your house in a disaster, perhaps you should reconsider your advocacy for lowering the taxes that fund things like the fire department. But once we get the mockery out of our systems, perhaps we should approach Mr. Wasserman and his like-minded peers with a more open heart, and see this particular disaster as an opportunity to convince more people like him that we’re all in the path of the same threats.
Because like it or not, addressing climate change requires the help of the wealthy — not just a small number of megadonors to environmental organizations, but the rich as a class. The more they understand that their money will not insulate them from the effects of a warming planet, the more likely they are to be allies in the climate fight, and vital ones at that.
As of this writing the fires in Los Angeles are still burning, but it already appears that they could be among the costliest in history, not because of their size but because they are reducing some of the priciest real estate in America to ashes. It’s another vivid lesson in a truth more people need to learn: Climate change will affect everyone, no matter how much money you have.
Yes, those most affected will be people without resources, who live in vulnerable areas they can’t easily flee, and who are unable to harden their homes and communities against the most destructive effects of warming. Those with the lowest incomes feel the brunt of climate change in multiple ways.
But there’s a difference between being less vulnerable and being invulnerable. There are only so many times you can rebuild your beach house, only so many private firefighters you can hire, and only so often you can turn up the air conditioning. We saw in Asheville how a place believed to be a “climate haven” turned out to be just as susceptible to natural disaster as anywhere else. In the end, climate change comes for us all. And experiencing a climate-related event has a significant impact on whether people both accept the reality of climate change and prioritize it as a political issue.
The more wealthy people believe that climate change is a threat to them and support policies that mitigate emissions, the better the chances that those policies will be translated into law. A number of studies by political scientists in recent years have shown that the policy preferences of the wealthy are more likely to prevail; it’s one of those findings that no one is surprised by, but it’s useful to have it demonstrated empirically. The wealthy are more politically active, donate more money, and are generally treated by politicians as though they cannot be ignored.
So while mass mobilization is a key component of successful movements, it doesn’t hurt to have rich people on your side, too. Surveys already show that higher-income voters are somewhat more likely to support policies to address climate change, though the differences are not that large. And if increasing numbers of them decide that the government has to institute more climate-friendly policies, wealthier voters might even put pressure on the party that usually represents their interests as a class: the GOP.
Admittedly, getting the wealthy to unite with the rest of us in common purpose will not be easy. One of the primary functions of wealth is to insulate the privileged from negative externalities of existence, both large and small. It separates them from ordinary people and the ordinary headaches of life. The wealthy glide through the world as though on a moving walkway, exempted from having to wait in lines or get their hands dirty or spend time worrying about their vulnerability. And they often use their political influence to insulate themselves even further, advocating for policies that starve the government of funds and exacerbate inequality.
Moreover, disasters like the fires we’re seeing right now wind up being interpreted through existing political lenses; Donald Trump is blaming them on the governor of California, to whom he refers, classy and mature as ever, as “Gavin Newscum,” while other conservatives are angrily denying that warming temperatures had anything to do with the destruction in southern California.
Nevertheless, there’s room for a generous response, to say even to the wealthiest of victims that we’re sorry they suffered the consequences of warming and hope they’ll become allies in the fight against climate change, because we’re all in it together. We all need robust public infrastructure (including an effective fire department), along with policies that will make wildfires and other disasters less destructive. The more people who come into the tent — even if it was only once they had to flee a disaster they only thought would affect the little people — the better off we’ll be.
Wildfires have been raging across Los Angeles County since Tuesday morning, but only in the past 24 hours or so has the city’s air quality begun to suffer.
That’s because of the classic path of the Santa Ana winds, Alistair Hayden, a public health professor at Cornell who studies how wildfire smoke affects human health, told me. “Yesterday, it looked like the plumes [from the Palisades fire] were all blowing out to sea, which I think makes sense with the Santa Ana wind patterns blowing to the southwest,” Hayden said.
But with the Eaton fire now raging near Pasadena, northeast of Los Angeles, the air quality across large swaths of the city is deteriorating, Hayden said. That’s because the winds are now carrying a smoke plume as they travel down to the coast. And the situation is still changing rapidly.
At 6:30 p.m. Pacific time on Wednesday, the historic core of L.A. registered an air quality index of 105, according to the AirNow fire and smoke map, part of the federal government’s national air quality index. Anything over 100 is considered unhealthy for sensitive groups such as asthmatics. In Pasadena and East Los Angeles, the AQI was in the high 180s, 190s, and even the low 200s, which ranks as “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy” for everyone.
The AirNow map is a joint effort of the Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program and the Environmental Protection Agency, incorporating smoke plume data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s satellites, Hayden said.
It also shows readings from the EPA’s permanent air quality monitors set up across Los Angeles. And it includes data from cheaper, commercial sensors — from manufacturers such as PurpleAir — that people can set up in their homes and backyards. The AirNow site also calibrates the data from those commercial sensors so that they can be more accurately compared to the government’s more robust and scientific air quality sensors. (Many websites that display the PurpleAir data do not calibrate the data in this way, he said, which can lead to faulty readings.)
“We’ve been so successful that cleaning up our air through the Clean Air Act and other state-level activities that the air has been getting better for decades,” Hayden told me. “Now, with the growth of these huge wildfires emitting large amounts of pollution, that has undone some of the progress of all this awesome work over this past decade.
“It’s amazing what we can do when we choose to do so,” he said. “But it shows there’s more work needed to be done of how do we protect communities from this current and growing threat of not just wildfires, but the smoke from those wildfires as well.”
