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What happened when the brain behind Project 2025 took the stage at New York Climate Week.
New York Times readers were already aghast even before Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — the man behind Project 2025 — took the stage at the outlet’s Climate Forward event, held during New York’s bustling Climate Week. Normally, this is when famous people including researcher Jane Goodall, Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, and Rivian CEO R.J. Scaringe would discuss climate solutions before an audience of the thoughtful and well-heeled. Inviting Roberts violated that norm, which may have been the point — nothing draws eyeballs like outrage, and for the Times’ elite liberal readership, bringing Roberts to a climate discussion certainly counts as outrageous. But Roberts’ segment, in which he was interviewed by climate reporter David Gelles, was as revealing as anything the more friendly celebrities had to say.
Not because Gelles exposed Roberts for the climate denier he is, discrediting fossil fuel stooges once and for all. That’s what many hope for from this kind of encounter, but it almost never happens. Gelles did his best, but Roberts was more than up to the challenge of advocating the conservative approach to addressing the warming of the planet (or rather, not addressing it) to a hostile audience.
We’ve come a long way from the time when crude denialists like Senator Jim Inhofe were bringing snowballs to the Senate floor to show that global warming must be a hoax. Roberts said many things that were framed in ways seemingly designed to appeal to liberal principles — he defended scientific skepticism, and claimed that when Project 2025 proposes ending civil service protections for government employees so they can be replaced by political appointees, its intention is to depoliticize the government (“We don’t care whether they’re Democrats or Republicans; we actually want them to be objective”) — but he returned again and again to one conspiracy-tinged notion. Serious climate policy, he argued, is an attack not just by American elites, but rather by an entire global elite against ordinary people, whom they are immiserating with ill-considered ideas not based in science, or even in reality.
While it might seem ironic to hear the head of a think tank with a nine-figure annual budget that comes largely from corporate interests talking like a tribune of the common folk, that’s where Roberts began. He started with a punch in the nose, saying that while he was surprised to get the invitation from the Times, “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American dream.” In response to the criticisms of Project 2025, he said, “Rather than take the well-funded agenda of elites in New York and Brussels and in the Chinese Communist Party, why don't we ask the American people?” And those struggling people, he insisted, are being harmed by the transition away from fossil fuels “far more than any of the harms that you would cite from so-called climate change.”
Does that mean he’s a climate denier? Heavens no. “That doesn’t mean that we’re rejecting that humans have an effect on climate; clearly they do,” he said. So climate change is real, but also maybe not; whatever perspective you like, you can decide Roberts agrees with you. He also claimed that according to Heritage’s irrefutable research, there’s just nothing we can do to stop that warming, which isn’t really a problem anyway. “Let’s just take all the ideas of everyone in this room and we implement them with a magic wand,” he said. “Our estimates show, what would the difference in temperature be? Zero point two three degrees Celsius. It's simply not going to make a difference.”
That kind of faux-precision is impossible to adjudicate in the moment, of course, which is why it can be so effective. This is another key theme for Roberts and others like him. “There is this thesis that if the United States leads on climate policy, the world will follow. That hasn't happened,” he said. “In fact, if we eliminate all emissions and pollution in the United States, it has an almost non-measurable impact on pollution and emissions worldwide.” That’s just false — the U.S. is still the second-largest carbon emitter in the world, after China — but if it were true, then why should we bother cutting our emissions, if doing so would have a “non-measurable impact”? There are no benefits, only costs.
The Biden administration, he said, “have made a grave mistake. They have taken the will of elites and they've imposed this on the American people.” And don’t think Roberts is an advocate for the corporate elites that pay his considerable salary; heck no, he’s just a humble reg’lar fella, thinking about the good honest folk who have no one to speak for them. “I see public policy through the lens of working-class people,” he insisted. “Our perspective at Heritage is on behalf of not just ordinary Americans but the global poor who are damaged by these policies.” The global poor.
What Roberts offers is climate denial without guilt. The details of increasing temperatures and their effects on people in the present and future are quickly minimized, then the focus shifts to imaginary harms to the vulnerable not from climate change but from climate action. Every emissions reduction proposal is dismissed as an indulgence of repugnant elitists, leaving only one moral alternative: to do nothing about climate change except burn more fossil fuels.
Presenting climate denial as an act of selflessness might seem appalling, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t attractive. If you want to hold to outright denialism, Roberts is with you. But if you admit that climate change is happening, he’s got you covered; what matters is that we shouldn’t do anything about it, because inaction is the real way to care for the vulnerable and fight back against the nefarious forces holding the world in their grip. The chutzpah is jaw-dropping, but it would be a mistake to think no one will find this argument attractive.
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Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “Super Scooper” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the Super Scooper collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the Super Scooper collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the Super Scooper, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Québécois firefighting planes are called Super Scoopers, not super soakers.
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 Friday, 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.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
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 more than 40,000 acres burned total, 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 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, 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 5,000 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 wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
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Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.