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If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected president in November — as is looking increasingly likely — her term will last until the beginning of 2029. At that point, we’ll have a much better idea whether the planet is on track to hit the 1.5 degrees Celsius climate threshold that some expect it to cross that year; we’ll also know whether the United States is likely to meet the first goal of the Inflation Reduction Act: to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions to half of 2005 levels by 2030.
There is a lot riding on the outcome of the 2024 election, then. But even more to the point, there is a lot riding on how, and how aggressively, Harris extends President Biden’s climate policies. Last week, I spoke to nine different climate policy experts about what’s on their wishlists for a potential Harris-Walz administration and encountered resounding excitement about the opportunities ahead. I also encountered nine different opinions on how, exactly, Harris should capitalize on those opportunities, should she wind up in the White House come January.
That said, the ideas I heard largely coalesced into three main avenues of approach: The first would see Harris use her position to shore up the country’s existing climate policies, doubling down on spending and addressing loopholes in the IRA. A second path would involve aggressively expanding on Biden’s legacy, mainly through major new investments. The final and most ambitious path would involve Harris approaching climate change and the energy transition with an original and bold vision for the years ahead (though your priorities may vary).
The policy proposals that fall under these loosely organized paths aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, and, as you’ll see, some of the advocate’s proposals fall into multiple categories. But it’s also true that by making everything a priority, nothing is. With that in mind, here are three approaches climate insiders say Harris could take if she wins the White House in November.
Before jumping headlong into expanding the country’s climate policies, the Harris administration could start by shoring up existing legislation — mainly, the loopholes and oversights in the Inflation Reduction Act. “The IRA was the biggest climate investment in history and fundamentally changed the emissions trajectory of the U.S — but the work is not done,” Adrian Deveny, founder of the decarbonization strategy group Climate Vision who previously worked on the IRA as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s director of energy and environmental policy, told me.
As things stand, the policies in the IRA alone won’t be enough to meet President Biden’s goal of halving the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030; to do that, the U.S. would “need to pass another IRA-sized bill,” Deveny said. Until that happens, filling the IRA’s emissions gaps will take a lot of work “in every sector of the economy,” he added.
Lena Moffitt, the executive director of Evergreen Action — which has already released a comprehensive 2025 climate roadmap for a Harris administration — told me that the task of “doubling down on Biden’s climate legacy as a job creator” will run through rebuilding and expanding the grid and revitalizing industry and rural economies, two projects that started in the IRA but remain incomplete. “We’d love to see a day one executive order from the White House outlining a plan to create American jobs and seize the mantle of leadership by building clean energy and clean tech in the United States,” she told me.
Permitting reform is part of that — and could be another piece of yet-unfinished business Harris will need to wrap up. “If that doesn’t get done this year, that is what we have to look to as soon as possible during a future Harris administration,” Harry Godfrey, who leads Advanced Energy United's Federal Investment and Manufacturing Working Group, told me.
That’s not the only regulatory matter still up in the air. Austin Whitman, the CEO of The Climate Change Project, a non-profit that offers climate certification labeling and helps businesses reduce their emissions, told me that the Federal Trade Commission, for example, still hasn’t updated its green guides — “a loose collection of recommendations to companies on how to behave to not violate the FTC Act” — since 2012. “We just need a clear timeline and a sense of direction of where that whole process is going,” Whitman told me. Additionally, he said that the government has a substantial and outstanding role to play in standardizing and streamlining emissions reporting practices for businesses — which, while perhaps not “very sexy,” are necessary to “relieve the administrative burden so companies can focus on decarbonization.”
The last piece: Make sure everything that’s already in place is actually working. “We’re seeing that states and local governments need additional capacity to manage [the IRA] money well,” Jillian Blanchard, the director of Lawyers For Good Government’s climate change program, told me. Harris could help by enacting “more tangible policies like granting federal funding to hire community engagement specialists or liaisons or paying for the time of community leaders to provide local governments with key information on where the communities are that need to be benefited, and what they need.” She also floated the idea of a Community Change Grant extension to help get federal funding to localities more directly.
“One of the criticisms of the Inflation Reduction Act is that it didn’t do ‘X’ — whatever ‘X’ is,” Costa Samaras, the director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon and a former senior White House energy official, told me. “And in reality, it probably did. It just didn’t do it big enough.”
As opposed to those who thought Harris should take a quieter, dare I say conservative approach to advancing the U.S. climate agenda, Samaras told me he wanted to see Harris pump up the volume. The current climate moment requires “attacking the places where we need to immediately make big emissions cuts and big resilience investments. This is the industrial sector, the cultural sector, heavy transportation, as well as making sure that our cities and communities are built for people.”
There are plenty of existing programs that could take some supersizing. Godfrey of Advanced Energy United brought up the home energy rebate programs, arguing that as things stand, those resources are only serving “a fraction of the eligible population.” Blanchard of Lawyers For Good Government also pointed out that the Environmental Protection Agency had almost 300 Climate Pollution Reduction Grant applications totaling more than $30 billion in requests — but only $4.3 billion to hand out. “There are local governments, state governments, tribal nations, and territories hungry for this money to implement clean energy projects,” she said. “There are plans that are ready to go if there are additional federal award dollars in the future.”
Another place Harris could expand on Biden’s legacy would be by reinstating the U.S. as a climate leader on the world stage. “We need to say, ‘climate is back on the table,’” Whitman of The Climate Change Project told me. “It’s a main course, and we’re going to talk about it” — something that would give us “a more credible seat at the negotiating table at the COPs.”
Perhaps most importantly, though, Harris needs to use her term to start looking toward the future. As Deveny of Climate Vision told me, “We designed the IRA to think about meeting our 2030 target. And now we have to think about 2035.” Looking ahead isn’t “just about extending policies,” in other words, but about anticipating new technologies and opportunities that could arise in the next decade — and Harris, if elected, should step up to the challenge.
Some believe Harris shouldn’t limit herself to the framework of the IRA as it exists now — that she needs to dream bigger and better than anything seen under the Biden administration. “The question is: Are we going to just ride the coattails of the IRA as if this problem is mostly solved? Or are we going to put forward a whole new, bold vision of how we can take things on?” Saul Levin, the political director of the Green New Deal Network, wondered to me.
According to Deveny of Climate Vision, that means continuing to build on “our industrial renaissance.”
“We have really awakened a sleeping giant of clean industrial manufacturing in this country to make solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries,” he explained. “We can also lead the world in clean industrial manufacturing for steel, cement, and other heavy industry projects.” Samaras of Carnegie Mellon, too, shared this vision. “By the end of a potential Harris Administration first term, the path to zero emissions should be visible everywhere,” he told me. Also on his wishlist were “abundant energy-efficient and affordable housing, accessible clean mobility infrastructure everywhere, schools and post offices as community clean energy and resilience hubs, and climate-smart agriculture and nature-based solutions across the country,” plus greater investment in adaptation.
“The fact is that both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act are the largest investments in resilience we’ve ever done,” he said. But “we have to think about it the same way we have to think about mitigation,” he went on. “It’s the largest thing we’ve ever done — comma, so far.”
One of the biggest openings for Harris to distinguish herself from Biden, though, would be by taking a tougher tone with big polluters. Biden had shown less of an appetite for going after businesses, several times kicking the can down the road on a decision to what would have been his second term. Harris, by contrast, is well positioned with her background as a prosecutor and already went as far as to call for a “climate pollution fee” and the creation of an independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice and Accountability during her 2019-2020 campaign.
“We love seeing her already reference from the stump that there is a lot that she can do with Congress or through the executive branch to hold polluters accountable for the toll that they have taken on families and our climate,” Moffitt of Evergreen Action told me. “That could look like a host of things, from repealing subsidies to using the Department of Justice to hold polluters accountable.” Maria Langholz, the senior director of Arc Initiatives, a strategy group that works with climate-related organizations, told me in an email that her team would also like to see the Harris administration revoke the presidential permit for Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline as high, in addition to developing a public interest determination “that fully addresses the social, environmental, and economic impacts of LNG.”
But Levin, more than anyone else, wanted to see Harris pursue a “moonshot campaign from day one,” he said. “Hoping that tweaking the IRA is an appropriate solution to climate change is totally out of step with mainstream scientific consensus. It’s absolutely ridiculous. At the end of the day, we need to fundamentally transform our economy so that all people can survive climate change.” To have a prayer of meeting the IRA’s climate goals — let alone putting a meaningful dent in America’s contribution to global emissions — the U.S. must “invest trillions of dollars in transforming our transportation system, our building sector, our food and agriculture sector, and every part of the economy so that we can create a livable, sustainable world forever that works for everyone.”
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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.