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Holding the big climate conference in Dubai was always absurd.
The biggest annual event in climate diplomacy is the Conference of the Parties. This year is the 28th conference — hence COP28. As I’ll explain below, such a conference is vital for many reasons. Heatmap’s own Robinson Meyer is reporting there on the ground.
But that importance makes it all the more deranged that this year’s conference is being held in the United Arab Emirates. The president of the conference, Sultan al-Jaber, is literally the head of the U.A.E.’s state-owned oil company. As The Guardianreported, at an online event in November, he said: “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 C,” referring to the target of keeping warming under that figure. At the conference itself, Al Gore presented data showing that the U.A.E.’s emissions had increased by 7.5 percent in 2022, as compared to just 1.5 percent across the world. Leaked notes demonstrate the U.A.E. intended to use the conference to strike some oil and gas sales deals with foreign governments. Advocacy groups have counted more than 2,400 fossil fuel lobbyists at COP28 as well.
It’s madness.
The idea behind COP, which has evolved into a rough system of global climate diplomacy, is simple and rational. As Brad Plumer writes, governments and scientists had previously tried to set up formal, binding treaties that would set firm caps for greenhouse gas emissions and penalize those who exceeded them. After all, this was the structure of the Montreal Protocol, which successfully phased out the use of ozone-destroying refrigerants. Hence the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 was based on that triumph.
Alas, Kyoto was a massive flop. Probably the biggest problem was that America did not sign onto the treaty, in part because our Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate to ratify one, and so just 34 senators (representing as little as 7 percent of the U.S. population) can block the process. But hardly anyone else was keen on reducing their emissions either. On the contrary, several developing countries, above all China, deliberately went for crash industrialization based on fossil fuel energy, and global emissions skyrocketed.
A binding treaty worked for a relatively small chemical sector where substitutes were readily available. But when it came to energy — one of the foundations of any advanced economy — where substitutes at the time were unavailable or expensive, it was a different story.
So in COP21 in Paris in 2015, diplomats came up with a new approach. Thanks to the plummeting cost of renewable energy on one hand, and the ever-more obvious risks and damages created by climate change on the other, simple self-interest would suffice to motivate countries. Everyone would have to set out commitments to cut emissions — the famous “Paris Agreement” was to keep warming under 1.5 Celsius — but there would be no penalties. The annual conference would serve as a “global stocktake” where records can be compared, information exchanged, and violators named and shamed.
This has worked a lot better. Now, hardly any country is taking action sufficient to keep emissions under 1.5 degrees. According to the Climate Action Tracker, a few countries like Norway, Costa Rica, Nigeria, and Nigeria are “almost sufficient,” while most of Europe and the U.S. are “insufficient.” (Canada, India, and China are “highly insufficient.”) Still, overall since 2015 global emissions have roughly stalled rather than skyrocketing, and in particularly responsible countries like Denmark they have fallen dramatically. Even in America emissions have fallen quite substantially. With ongoing crash investment into renewables in Europe, the U.S., and especially China, net global emissions reductions are coming soon.
But the worst offenders, rated as “critically insufficient,” are petrostates like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and — wouldn’t you know it — the U.A.E. And this exposes the big hole in the COP approach. Self-interest is a good climate motivation for Europe, China, and the U.S., because while their economies currently depend on fossil fuel energy, they also have a lot more going for them. Just electrify transportation, industry, and agriculture with zero-carbon power, and (a few carbon-producing regions aside) they will remain much as before — indeed, probably wealthier and healthier.
But that is not true of the petrostates. The Gulf monarchies in particular could not possibly exist without their massive fossil fuel profits. These absurd political dinosaurs have been out of date for decades, kept alive by an ocean of essentially free money to spread around to their populations. Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. have attempted some modernization and reforms, to be fair, but these are much more in the category of “megalomaniac dictator mega-projects” rather than any serious effort to develop a new economy. If history is any guide, actually doing that would require a political revolution.
It’s unclear why the U.A.E. was selected as this year’s host. The conference rotates between various United Nations sub-groups, and back in 2021 it got unified support from the Asia-Pacific group of countries. (If I had to guess, I would expect the process was similar to how these countries get sports teams.)
Luckily, there is every sign that the world is going to wean itself off oil and gas eventually, if for no other reason than renewable energy is beating fossil power in the market, and will only continue to get cheaper. But in the meantime, it is just appalling to have the world’s most important climate conference — at which the future of humanity itself is being ironed out — held in a petrostate dictatorship. These countries, along with the big oil companies and their battalions of lobbyists, will cause untold devastation in their attempt to wring out every last dollar from their carbon reserves.
Holding the world's premier climate conference in Dubai was always an absurd idea.
Read more about COP28:
The Global Stocktake Draft Has Something to Make Everyone Mad
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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 many 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.
And more of this week’s top renewable energy fights across the country.
1. Otsego County, Michigan – The Mitten State is proving just how hard it can be to build a solar project in wooded areas. Especially once Fox News gets involved.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Opponents of offshore wind in Atlantic City are trying to undo an ordinance allowing construction of transmission cables that would connect the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project to the grid.
3. Benton County, Washington – Sorry Scout Clean Energy, but the Yakima Nation is coming for Horse Heaven.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In Connecticut, officials have withdrawn from Vineyard Wind 2 — leading to the project being indefinitely shelved.
In Indiana, Invenergy just got a rejection from Marshall County for special use of agricultural lands.
In Kansas, residents in Dickinson County are filing legal action against county commissioners who approved Enel’s Hope Ridge wind project.
In Kentucky, a solar project was actually approved for once – this time for the East Kentucky Power Cooperative.
In North Carolina, Davidson County is getting a solar moratorium.
In Pennsylvania, the town of Unity rejected a solar project. Elsewhere in the state, the developer of the Newton 1 solar project is appealing their denial.
In South Carolina, a state appeals court has upheld the rejection of a 2,300 acre solar project proposed by Coastal Pine Solar.
In Washington State, Yakima County looks like it’ll keep its solar moratorium in place.
And more of this week’s top policy news around renewables.
1. Trump’s Big Promise – Our nation’s incoming president is now saying he’ll ban all wind projects on Day 1, an expansion of his previous promise to stop only offshore wind.
2. The Big Nuclear Lawsuit – Texas and Utah are suing to kill the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to license small modular reactors.
3. Biden’s parting words – The Biden administration has finished its long-awaited guidance for the IRA’s tech-neutral electricity credit (which barely changed) and hydrogen production credit.