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A small victory for the planet.
They actually talked about climate change Wednesday night at the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle.
It was a quick conversation — about six minutes total. The non-Donald Trump candidates spent more time sniping at each other (and President Joe Biden) than they did talking about the warming planet. And it was hard to come away from that moment with a belief that anybody on stage had a plan, or even much interest, for addressing the climate.
But they did talk about it.
Better yet, the conversation came early: In the first segment before the commercial break, just 23 minutes into the debate, when the Americans who had tuned in were still actually tuned in. The question came from a younger Republican, naturally, who pointed out that climate change is a big issue for young voters.
What, he asked, could the candidates on stage say to those voters to "calm their fears that Republicans don't care about this?"
Not much as it turned out.
Given a chance to raise their hands if they believed in human-made global warming, none of the eight candidates did so. Instead, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked Biden’s response to the deadly Maui wildfire. And anti-woke entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy quickly jumped in to pronounce that “the climate change agenda is a hoax.”
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This was just a few moments after Ramaswamy had answered another question by urging America to “burn coal.” So it wasn’t surprising that given another stab at the topic, he doubled down. "The anti-carbon agenda is a wet blanket on our economy," Ramaswamy said. More people are dying from climate policies, he said, than from climate change itself.
That’s unlikely. Climate change is deadly and only going to get deadlier, particularly for the world’s poorest people. But Ramaswamy left no doubt where he stood.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley at least acknowledged the reality of climate change. “Is climate change real? Yes it is,” she acknowledged. But subsidies for green energy from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, she said, aren’t helping Americans. “All that does is help China,” she said. (That might surprise residents of all those red states benefiting from the law’s investments in their districts.)
And her fellow South Carolinian, Sen. Tim Scott, vowed to solve the problem by bringing jobs back to the United States. Besides, he said, the United States isn’t the only contributor — just look at Africa, India, and China. “Why would we put ourselves at a disadvantage” to those countries, he asked? (The United States, of course, has far and away been the world’s biggest emitter of carbon.)
After that, it was time for a commercial.
It wasn’t much, and it couldn’t have possibly satisfied the fears of all those young voters mentioned in the question. But it was remarkable that the question was given such prominence at all.
The “drag their heels” caucus has prominent members of both parties, of course. But Republicans and their conservative allies have long been ideologically committed to the notion that climate change isn’t real, or if it’s real it’s not human-made, or if it’s human-made it’s still not worse than giving up all those carbon that has produced so much energy — and thus so much wealth — for this country. That’s pretty much how they governed, too.
Maybe that’s no longer tenable, or at least not entirely. The lower 48 states are sweltering under a record-setting heat dome. They’re still searching for bodies in the ashes of Maui. Wildfires are sparking evacuations in Washington state. That’s just the stuff that’s happened this week.
For millions of Americans, climate change is no longer theoretical or some future problem to be dealt with later. They’re living it in their real lives, right this very moment.
Still, old habits die hard. Just a third of Republicans (and GOP-leaning independents) say that climate change has anything to do with the searing temperatures. And while young voters might be concerned about the climate, GOP voters — the folks who will be voting in the primary elections — have other things at the top of their mind.
Take the victories where you can find them. The existence of a climate change discussion during Wednesday night’s debate was at least a small concession to reality. Possibly there was no other choice. But still. They talked about climate change at the GOP presidential debate. It’s a start.
Read more about the Republican primary:
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On boasts and brags, clean power installations, and dirty air
Current conditions: Strong winds helped spark dozens of fires across parched Texas • India’s Himalayan state of Uttarakhand experienced a 600% rise in precipitation over 24 hours, which triggered a deadly avalanche • The world’s biggest iceberg, which has been drifting across the Southern Ocean for 5 years, has run aground.
President Trump addressed Congress last night in a wide-ranging speech boasting about the actions taken during his first five weeks in office. There were some familiar themes: He claimed to have “ended all of [former President] Biden’s environmental restrictions” (false) and the “insane electric vehicle mandate” (also false — no such thing has ever existed), and bragged about withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement (true). He also doubled down on his plan to boost U.S. fossil fuel production while spouting false statements about the Biden administration’s energy policies, and suggested that Japan and South Korea want to team up with the U.S. to build a “gigantic” natural gas pipeline in Alaska.
On the same day as the speech, new tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China came into effect, triggering retaliatory duties and causing stock markets to plunge. Experts are busy trying to figure out what it all means for American businesses and consumers. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained, the tariffs are likely to make electricity prices go up, raise construction costs, make gas more expensive at the pump, and make new cars costlier. Fossil fuel firms aren’t thrilled. The American Gas Association said the 10% tariff on Canadian natural gas “indicates potential impacts totaling at least $1.1 billion in additional costs to American consumers per year.” Chet Thompson, CEO of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, said that “imposing tariffs on energy, refined products, and petrochemical imports will not make us more energy secure or lower costs for consumers.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has implied Trump might lift these tariffs as soon as today, but TBD.
The Trump administration has ended a program that monitored the air quality at more than 80 U.S. embassies and consulates around the world, citing “budget constraints.” The program started in 2008 with the U.S. embassy in Beijing and expanded from there. The data collected, which was posted on the AirNow website, has been used in academic studies and credited with helping reduce pollution levels in the host countries, leading to better health outcomes. This move “puts the health of foreign service officers at risk” and could hinder research and policy, Dan Westervelt, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, toldThe New York Times.
Clean power installations soared in the fourth quarter of 2024, sending total operational capacity above and beyond the 300 gigawatt mark, according to a new report from the American Clean Power Association. “It took more than 20 years for the U.S. to install the first 100 GW of clean power, five years to install the next 100 GW, and three years to install the most recent 100 GW,” the report says. Here are some takeaways:
ACPA
China plans to ramp up its efforts to rein in emissions, expanding its emissions trading system beyond power plants to to include industries such as steel, aluminum, and cement, Premier Li Qiang said in a report this week. “Li also confirmed China intends to continue to play a key role in diplomacy on emissions reduction, as the U.S. retreats from international cooperation,” Bloombergreported. The country plans to roll out major climate projects such as offshore wind farms, “new energy bases” across its deserts, with a goal of reaching peak emissions before 2030. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and while it has been rapidly expanding renewable power generation, it also struggles to wean itself off coal.
The Supreme Court yesterday watered down the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate water pollution, siding with the city of San Francisco in an unusual lawsuit pitting the liberal hub against the environmental authority. In a 5-4 decision, the justices said the agency had overstepped its authority under the Clean Water Act when it issued permitting for a San Francisco wastewater treatment plant that empties into the Pacific. The permit included provisions that would have made San Francisco authorities responsible for ensuring the water quality in the Pacific met EPA standards. Justice Samuel Alito essentially wrote that the permitting rules were too vague. “When a permit contains such requirements, a permittee that punctiliously follows every specific requirement in its permit may nevertheless face crushing penalties if the quality of the water in its receiving waters falls below the applicable standards,” Alito wrote. The ruling will make it harder for the EPA to limit water pollution. Next up on the SCOTUS docket: nuclear waste!
Bernard Looney, the former CEO of oil giant BP, is the new boss of an AI startup that tells businesses how to cut their emissions.
A conversation with Resources for the Future’s David Wear on the fires in the Carolinas and how the political environment could affect the future of forecasting.
The Wikipedia article for “wildfire” has 22 photographs, including those of incidents in Arizona, Utah, Washington, and California. But there is not a single picture of a fire in the American Southeast, despite researchers warning that the lower righthand quadrant of the country will face a “perfect storm” of fire conditions over the next 50 years.
In what is perhaps a grim premonition of what is to come, several major fires are burning across the Southeast now — including the nearly 600-acre Melrose Fire in Polk County, North Carolina, a little over 80 miles to the west of Charlotte, and the more than 2,000-acre Carolina Forest fire in Horry County, South Carolina. The region is also battling hundreds of smaller brush fires, the smoke from which David Wear — the land use, forestry, and agriculture program director at Resources for the Future — could see out his Raleigh-area window.
Wear is also the co-author of a study by RFF and the U.S. Forest Service that came out in late 2024 and singled out the Southeast as facing a “particularly worrisome” rise in wildfire risk over the next half-century. I spoke with him this week to learn more about why the Carolinas are burning and what the future of fire looks like for the region. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
When discussing fires in the American West, we often talk about how historic suppression efforts are responsible for the megafires we see today. What was the historic fire regime like in the Southeast? What’s going on to make it a hot spot for wildfires?
First, there are the similarities. Both Western and Southeastern forests, especially pine forests, are fire-adapted systems; they need regular fires to maintain health. Anything that takes those forests out of balance is a problem, and fire suppression is an issue in the East and the West, and especially in the Southeast. But forests in the Southeast are the most heavily managed forests in the country — perhaps in the world. In many cases, they’re regularly burned; the South does more prescribed burning than the rest of the country combined. It’s a very, very common practice in this part of the world.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that there is fire in Southeastern forests. There have been big, episodic fires in the South, though they’re not as common. There was the fire in 2016 in East Tennessee, from the Smokies into Gatlinburg, with a number of fatalities and lots of structures damaged or destroyed. There have been big fire years in east and west Texas. And there have been big fire seasons in Florida, though it’s been a while.
How is population growth in the Southeast adding to the strain?
We’re accustomed to talking about the wildland-urban interface in the West, but it’s also a big issue in the Southeast. Some of our urban growth centers in the Southeast include the Raleigh-Durham area, where I live, and Atlanta, Nashville, and Florida. These are generally flat landscapes, as well as very heavily forested landscapes. As the population grows out of the city centers, they go into pine and mixed-pine hardwood forests that are fire-adapted ecosystems. Then you have interspersed communities with forest vegetation, and that’s a big issue.
I also read in your report that much of that land is privately owned, which makes management tricky.
Private ownership is about 89% of forests in the South. [Editor’s note: By comparison, only about a third of forests in the West are privately owned.] Even where you have public ownership, a lot of that is by the Department of Defense and concentrated in a couple of different areas in the Ozarks and southern Appalachians. Much of the landscape in the coastal plain and Piedmont — which is most of the South — is predominantly private ownership.
There’s a distinction to be made between commercial owners, like timber investment management companies or real estate investment trusts, who actively manage landscapes. With timber harvesting, there are a lot of risk mitigation activities and a lot of prescribed burning. But then you have over a million non-industrial private landowners with small holdings. If you’re trying to coordinate any kind of wildfire mitigation scheme using fuel treatments and the like, it requires some work.
Horry County, South Carolina, and Polk County, North Carolina, were not part of your paper’s list of counties vulnerable to wildfire. I’m curious if you think what we’re seeing now says something about the limits of the study and the data you had available, or if you have another takeaway about what’s going on.
Importantly, our study looked at long-term averages. Throughout the South, there is a fire regime, and in any given year, it is possible to have wildfires of consequence. I would point out that we were especially concerned this year because Hurricane Helene laid down an awful lot of trees and created a fuel load.
We’re also entering one of the two fire seasons in the South. Wildfire is most predominant in the spring and in the fall; it’s at those times when temperatures begin to rise but humidity remains low, and there are extended dry periods that allow the fuels to dry out. You have warm temperatures and wind in the spring, setting the stage for wildfire. Typically, that window will begin to close at the end of April because it’s pretty darn humid in the South at that point, and it’s much less likely that fuels will get dry enough to carry a fire.
The same thing happens in the fall: Temperatures may remain high, and if we don’t have a lot of precipitation and humidity — usually in October and into November — then you have the conditions right for fire. But as the climate shifts, we see the length of those seasons growing to the point where the fall is approaching the spring. Wildfires in January and February indicate that these two seasons are growing toward one another and providing a much longer season. Our paper showed that, when you account for climate change across all of those global climate models and representative concentration pathways, the windows for more wildfire activity and more intense wildfire activity are expanding.
Your paper cited wildfire risks across the Sun Belt. Today, the National Weather Service is warning of “potentially historic” fire conditions in central Texas. Can local emergency managers use your modeling to prepare for such situations?
Things like the year-to-year fire projections and the day-to-day forecasts best serve local emergency managers. Wildfire in the South is determined by the drying of fuels and temperature and humidity conditions, which vary daily. If we look over the last week, Saturday was beautiful in the Carolinas. It was sunny, in the 70s, dry, and a little windy. That was the day [hundreds of] fires started across the Southeast. And the next day, there were very few new fires. Mid-week projections of wildfire potential in the Southeast show that it’s really low, with the exception of Texas. It changes day to day, driven by fine-grain weather forecasts, and that gives emergency managers some insight into where they might want to pre-position crews or do pre-suppression activities.
What we’re doing with the modeling is asking, What is this going to look like in 50 years? The takeaway is that wildfire activity is going to remain strong and perhaps grow in the West, but the big structural change is really strong growth and active fire in the Southeast, where you have wildfire and wildlands proximal to millions of people and more vulnerable communities. It’s a fire regime that’s going to affect more people.
I also wanted to ask about the USDA Forest Service’s contributions to your paper. Do you think research like this could still happen today, given the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate anything climate-related from the federal agenda?
I came to Resources for the Future six years ago after a long career with the Forest Service, so it’s hard for me to remain a dispassionate scientist here. I think we need to see how the dust settles. It’s hard to imagine a future where the agency and federal government do not have a high level of concern regarding fire — and I don’t think you can do any kind of effective planning, or thinking about the future, or targeting of activities without understanding how climate is likely to impact these disturbance regimes.
I don’t have the crystal ball that many people are seeking right now. We’ll have to wait to see. But our research demonstrates the vital role of understanding climate dynamics, and it shows how critical weather forecasts are for people with boots on the ground who are trying to stay ahead of disaster.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that about a third of land in the West is privately owned, not publicly owned.
Rob and Jesse visit Intersolar and Energy Storage North America.
Longtime listeners of Shift Key will recognize the name Intersolar and Energy Storage North America, one of the country’s premier solar industry conferences. Shift Key was live at this year’s event, hosting a panel on the present and future of the solar industry featuring a pair of marquee panelists: Tom Starrs, currently the vice president for government and public affairs at EDP Renewables, North America, who has more than 30 years of experience in the renewables industry; and Maria Robinson, until recently the director of the Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office and now the president and CEO of the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. (Robinson is also a repeat Shift Key guest.)
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with the panelists about the momentum propelling solar energy forward in the U.S. and whether the uncertainty created by the Trump administration could put a damper on that. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Maria Robinson: I actually want to go back to the permitting piece because I think this is directly related to the conversation. I suspect everyone here has tried to permit at some point in time on federal lands and found that to be an incredibly overwhelming experience, right? When we talk about this — and my new bugaboo, for the rest of my life, is we cannot call it NEPA anymore. It is not just NEPA. It is also the Fish and Wildlife Section 7 piece, it is also working with your state historical preservation offices. There are so many other pieces than just NEPA that some of these energy permitting reform bills do not, will not actually solve some of the issues that folks are looking at.
Jesse Jenkins: They’re too narrow, yeah.
Robinson: They’re just far too narrow, associated with that. And I think that was one of the things that I was not allowed to say like four weeks ago but I can say now. That did not go far enough in —
Robinson Meyer: Do you think that friendlier lawmakers in Congress understand this distinction? Or is it all the focus is still on NEPA?
Robinson: I think all the focus is still on NEPA, and there has to be a little bit more of that conversation, right? It was fascinating to me: This weekend, the National Governors Association met in D.C., and they all agreed on this resolution about, we need to do energy permitting. And the truth of the matter is, I think, I’m sure for many of you who’ve tried to work with a state historical preservation office, that you’re actually butting up against a lack of capacity at the state level sometimes, as opposed to at the federal level.
So there needs to be that conversation that is not just all, if we suddenly make vast changes to NEPA, that everything in terms of investment is and infrastructure is going to move faster. And I think that that is something that, especially Republican lobbyists and members of Congress and members of the administration can get behind, is that sort of efficiency, right? Efficiency is the word of the moment.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.