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Anything decarbonization-related is on the chopping block.
The Biden administration has shoveled money from the Inflation Reduction Act out the door as fast as possible this year, touting the many benefits all that cash has brought to Republican congressional districts. Many — in Washington, at think tanks and non-profits, among developers — have found in this a reason to be calm about the law’s fate. But this is incorrect. The IRA’s future as a climate law is in a far more precarious place than the Beltway conventional wisdom has so far suggested.
Shortly after the changing of the guard in Congress and the White House, policymakers will begin discussing whether to extend the Trump-era tax cuts, which expire at the end of 2025. If they opt to do so, they’ll try to find a way to pay for it — and if Republicans win big in the November elections, as recent polling and Democratic fretting suggests could happen, the IRA will be an easy target.
Yes, the law has created a ton of jobs in states and congressional districts controlled by Republicans. Sure, some in the GOP have moderated on climate and stopped denying the science behind the warming of our planet. Absolutely, the IRA is the kind of all-carrot and no-stick approach to energy that Republicans tend to like, and there would be legal and political challenges to accomplishing anything of consequence in today’s polarized and chaotic Congress.
But while some lawmakers may be evolving on climate, the broader GOP under Trump’s control has grown far more willing to spurn its pro-business past and give industries heartburn in pursuit of other ideological or cultural objectives.
“The Republican Party’s traditional views on climate and business are both changing and result in competing pressures,” Alex Flint, a longtime Senate Republican energy staffer, told me. Flint now runs the pro-business climate group Alliance for Market Solutions. “There is less climate denialism. And less support for business. So on the one hand, more Republicans are comfortable supporting climate policies like those in the IRA, but are less responsive to the businesses that want to defend those programs.”
What that means is that, in the event of a big GOP victory, anything impossible to fully repeal may be fiddled with, whether through legislative or administrative means. On top of all the energy and climate regulations that would be targeted in that event, the nation’s transition away from fossil fuels could lose significant federal policy tailwinds.
On the legislative side, there is already broad GOP support for: repealing the consumer electric vehicle and charging station benefits, nixing the methane fee, killing the national “green bank” program, and eliminating any money labeled “environmental justice.” Broader programs with immense importance to decarbonization such as the “clean electricity” investment and production tax credits could be diminished or gutted at the urging of the party’s rightward flank. (See: this GOP committee chair’s IRA repeal bill, which targeted the investment and production tax credits, specifically.)
Anything that cannot be repealed — as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 instructs — Republicans will attempt to modify. Mike Faulkender, a former Trump official at the Treasury Department who is now chief economist for the America First Policy Institute, explained to me for an Axios story last October that if Trump wins, “We are going to review every rule, every notice, everything the administration has done in its implementation of that statute.” Demonstrating his seriousness, Faulkender also pointed to the IRA’s credit for carbon removal. “The dollar values on this are extraordinary … I would go through that statute and see how we, through the rulemaking process, can narrow it as much as possible.”
It is possible to take these threats with a grain of salt. Kimberly Clausing, a former Biden official for the Treasury Department, told me that while she can imagine “one or two elements” of the law being revisited if they’re political priorities, it would require “too many lawyer man-hours” to “justify that kind of wholescale implementation pivot.”
Industries would also lobby heavily to avoid their credits going away. Going after the tech-neutral ITC and PTC, for example, could spark an immense backlash among a swath of energy sectors Republicans do support, including nuclear energy. Same for incentives to advanced manufacturing. Not to mention there are substantial logistical realities to repealing the IRA or changing its programs, as with Obamacare in the past. Such an effort would require organizing GOP lawmakers at a time when infighting has undermined even seeming slam dunks like a ban on gas stove bans.
But seasoned political veterans and D.C. industry pros I spoke with for this story noted that Republicans may be more receptive to tweaking programs in a selective fashion, going after industries like solar and offshore wind that some have long-standing grievances with. For example, it may be too difficult to repeal the “tech-neutral” electricity credits in their entirety, but legislators could try to limit their reach for these less-favored sectors — as some have proposed doing for solar projects on farmland — in the name of saving the government money or helping other favored interests.
Energy lobbying veteran Frank Maisano put it to me this way: “Businesses will support many things that they have their tentacles into and Republicans will support many things that are going on in their districts that constituents like. The reality is, if you’re going to try to repeal it, you’re going to have to do it through Congress and a lot of the action in the energy transition is in Republican districts. It becomes a constituent issue.”
Or, in plain English: If it’s a successful project in a GOP constituent district and their specific voters like it, that will be what has the most sway.
That won’t stop Republicans from claiming that the renewable sector as a whole is flagging. In an interview with E&E News’ Kelsey Brugger, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise responded to the question of whether the jobs created by the IRA would put Republicans in a tough spot on repeal by — dubiously — downplaying the figures. “Overall, there haven’t been many projects built,” Scalise said. “We’re scrutinizing all of it.”
There’s a reason for this: It creates an opening to point to real market struggles (though possibly in a selective fashion) as a predicate for squeezing benefits to renewables. It’s easy to imagine a world where the impacts of tariffs on domestic solar or hurdles facing offshore wind are used as rationale for paring back credits and other federal supports. You might not be hearing much about this right now as the GOP is quietly letting Democrats knife themselves, but it’ll be worth watching the Republican National Convention next week to see if anyone spills the tea on plans for the IRA next year.
“Which of [these] forces prevail on any specific IRA program and on the totality of the IRA package is impossible to predict,” said Flint, “because members – Republicans who acknowledge the need to address climate – may be aligned with companies that receive those subsidies. But on the other hand, populists not closely aligned with business interests may be willing to criticize those programs without regard to their climate benefits. So what happens to climate policies and all of the IRA is a test case for the future of the Republican Party.”
Developers are starting to ask questions about the durability of IRA programs, Abigail Ross Hopper, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, told me. Hopper’s optimistic that the marketplace will continue to favor solar. But she is clear-eyed about the risks ahead for certain aspects of the IRA – naming bonuses and the transferability of credits — that may not survive in their current form.
“People ask me all the time about, ‘How do I make educated opinions, not prognostications?’” she said. “There is this kind of built in uncertainty because of the partisanship that clean energy has unfortunately [had] imposed upon us … I am in agreement that the pace of decarb is going to be impacted by these elections and policy decisions. [But] I am not persuaded that we’re going to stop these efforts.”
To Hopper and others, at most risk is any unspent money or unused spending authority left over at agencies at the conclusion of Biden’s first term. Those supports face “probably the highest risk of clawback or not being spent,” she said.
Some agencies are still moving at a brisk pace that has reassured those in industry and advocacy spaces. The Treasury Department has signaled it may complete implementation of several key IRA credits — including the “clean electricity” investment and production tax credits — before Jan. 20, 2025. And the Environmental Protection Agency’s been quite successful at doling out dollars that would otherwise be targeted in a future GOP-controlled Congress, such as those the IRA provided for the Solar For All program and the green bank initiative. These dollars will live on independent of who remains president because once they’re given to states or nonprofits, those parties get to decide how to spend them.
But there are still billions that may wind up in Trump’s control should he win in November. One example is the Department of Energy’s home electrification rebates, which received $8.8 billion. Despite almost all states applying for at least some of the funding, per DOE’s own tracker, only five have been accepted, and only one – New York – had made those rebates available as of this week.
“I’m under the assumption that if it’s not going out in January 2025, then it’s not going out the door,” Harrison Godfrey, who works for energy policy shop Advanced Energy United, told me. “If the dollars get out the door, then the story of ‘25 is that regardless of who’s president, the states are in the driver’s seat.”
There are aspects of the IRA that could survive even a Republican trifecta. The law’s support for low-carbon fuels enjoys apparent bipartisan backing because of the lifeline it can offer corn-based ethanol as the federal renewable fuel standard wanes in relevance. And despite grousing about Biden’s implementation of the hydrogen tax credit, it’s easier to imagine industry lobbying for a rule change under Trump than it is a full-scale repeal of a credit that could be a boon to the oil and gas sector.
Meanwhile, the administration and other industry groups continue to sound an optimistic note.
“The Inflation Reduction Act credits have spurred a clean energy boom in communities across the country and markets have responded overwhelmingly,” Treasury spokesperson Michael Martinez told me in a statement. Jason Ryan, a spokesperson for American Clean Power, said that “with the new tax credits in place,” more than $488 billion investments have been announced, including new or expanded utility-scale manufacturing plants, and that “with over a third of those manufacturing facilities already up and running or under constructions, these numbers translate to real-world positive impacts.”
But even if some of the IRA remains, without regulations to drive demand for decarbonization solutions, its climate benefits would be substantially undermined. One must look only at research from Clausing and others, who found even a partial IRA repeal combined with weakened EPA regulations could significantly harm odds of meeting the current administration’s goal of slashing emissions in half by 2030.
In other words, deep breaths! It’s only four months until the election and six months until the tax conversation begins.
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On disaster relief, rain in California, and solar power
Current conditions: Storm Herminia could bring fresh flooding to England and Wales, just days after Storm Éowyn • A giant iceberg is on a collision course with the island of South Georgia in the Atlantic Ocean • Phoenix, Arizona, might see rain today for the first time in 156 days.
President Trump signed an executive order establishing a review council to assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and said the agency needs to be “drastically” improved. The council will have no more than 20 members, and will include department heads as well as people from outside the government that are appointed by Trump himself. “These non-Federal members shall have diverse perspectives and expertise in disaster relief and assistance, emergency preparedness, natural disasters, Federal-State relationships, and budget management,” the order states. This new council will be tasked with scrutinizing the agency’s disaster relief efforts and making recommendations for improvement. Trump has slammed FEMA and the prior administration for their responses to recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Helene and the wildfires in Los Angeles. Misinformation and conspiracy theories – often floated by Republican politicians and rightwing figureheads – spread quickly in the wake of both emergencies. The executive order insists there are “serious concerns of political bias in FEMA.” While touring hurricane damage in North Carolina a few days ago, Trump suggested “getting rid of” FEMA altogether, although that would require some help from Congress. The Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation has recommended that FEMA be removed from the Department of Homeland Security, and that programs like the National Flood Insurance Program be privatized.
Rainstorms have prompted flooding alerts in parts of Los Angeles that have been left charred by recent large wildfires. The downpours are helping firefighters get a handle on the blazes that remain, with the Palisades, Eaton, and Huges fires all more than 90% contained. But the city is on edge: Too much rain could trigger landslides and flooding around burn scars. A flood advisory is in effect around the Palisades fire burn scar, and areas surrounding the Eaton fire burn scar are also on high alert. The rain could also bring “toxic runoff” – rainwater laced with the chemicals leftover from burned objects like cars and furniture. Workers have been putting improvised filters over storm drains to try to trap pollutants. The worst of the rain was expected Sunday night and Monday.
In case you missed it: The Department of Interior issued an order suspending the ability of its staff, except a few senior officials, to permit new renewables projects on public land. The document suspended the authority of “Department Bureaus and Offices” over a wide range of regular actions, including issuing “any onshore or offshore renewable energy authorization.” The suspension lasts for 60 days and can only be overridden by “a confirmed or Acting official” in a number of senior roles in the Department, including the secretary. “This step will restrict energy development, which will harm consumers and fail to meet growing electricity demand,” Jason Ryan, a spokesperson for American Clean Power, the clean energy trade group, told Heatmap in an email. “We need an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy strategy, not just a ‘some-of-the-above’ approach.”
President Trump has also requested that the Supreme Court pause all pending litigation on environmental cases, including one focusing on California’s EPA waiver to set and enforce its own vehicle emissions standards. Sources toldReuters the administration has also reassigned four Justice Department attorneys that focus on environmental issues, so that the government “speaks with one voice.”
U.S. power generation growth will be led mostly by new solar power additions over the next two years, according to the Energy Information Agency. It expects 26 gigawatts of solar to be added in 2025, down from 37 GW in 2024. Wind power additions are expected to increase by about 8 GW this year, but honestly, who knows. Meanwhile, 6% of coal generating capacity will be removed this year as coal plants are retired. U.S. energy consumption is expected to continue growing at its current rate of about 2% per year through 2026, which would mark the first three years of consecutive growth since the early 2000s.
Energy Information Agency
Here’s a little bit of good news to start the week: Trade group data suggests that air-source heat pump sales outpaced those of gas furnaces by 37% in the U.S. last year – or at least through November. If confirmed, that would be the widest margin recorded, much bigger than last year’s 21%. “The data comes with a notable caveat,” Canary Mediacautioned. “Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces, but that doesn’t necessarily mean more households are choosing heat pumps over gas heating; homes often need multiple heat pump units to replace a single fossil fuel-fired appliance.”
“We spend a lot of time talking about short-term financials, but we’re building a business for the next few decades. So, eh, who cares? It’s going to be a little more challenging the next couple of years.”
–Rivian founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe speaking toInsideEVs about whether Trump’s policies will affect his EV company
It’s useful for more than just decarbonization.
Now that President Donald Trump has been officially inaugurated and issued his barrage of executive orders celebrating fossil fuels and shelving climate technologies such as wind energy and electric vehicles, climate tech startups are in a pickle. Federal funding can play a critical role in helping companies scale up and build out first-of-a-kind projects and facilities. So how to work with a government hostile to one of these startups’ core value propositions: aiding in the energy transition?
Talk of clean tech and electrification may be out of vogue, but its utility is not. The potential of many of these companies goes beyond mitigating climate change and into the realm of energy security and resilience — something the Department of Defense is well aware of.
The White House’s climate webpage has gone dark, but the Department of Defense’s climate resilience portal is up and running (at least for now). As the site reads, “The changing climate is one of many threat multipliers to National Security, which adds complexity to Department of Defense decisions.” That’s a major reason why this agency can’t stop, won’t stop funding climate technologies. Another reason is that many technologies that happen to be good for the planet might also simply be the best tool for the job, meaning the DOD need not utter the word “climate” at all when justifying its decision to deploy new solutions.
“The Defense Department, so far in our experience, has framed things largely in terms of alternative benefits that our technology can have, such as fuel supply chain redundancy and reliability,” Ted McKlveen, co-founder and CEO of the hydrogen storage company Verne, told me. Verne received a $250,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Army last May to work on the development of hydrogen vehicles.
Cindy Taff, CEO of the next-generation geothermal startup Sage Geosystems, told me something similar. “What the military likes to talk about is energy resilience,” she said, though she has heard the DOD tout the climate benefits of her company’s tech, too. Sage currently has multiple DOD engagements, including feasibility studies with both the Army and Navy and a $1.9 million grant to build a demonstration project for the Air Force.
That’s not to say it’s clear what the Department of Defense’s funding priorities under Trump will be. When I contacted the DOD in mid-December to request an interview for this story, a spokesperson initially told me they would help connect me to the right person. But as Trump’s inauguration drew nearer, I got a message saying the agency would have to hold off until it got more guidance, as “it remains to be seen in the next few weeks what direction the new administration is going.”
Regardless of how the priorities shake out, practically every climate-focused company and venture capitalist I talk to emphasizes that their companies will only succeed if they can make or invest in products that can compete on economics and/or quality alone, sans government support. That was true even before a second Trump turn in the White House started to look like an inevitability, and this new administration will at least partially reveal which companies can do that. But while everybody aims to be independent of federal support, they might not actually need to say goodbye to that funding stream, so long as they can tout their economic and performance benefits to the right customers.
Take Pyka, for example. When Michael Norcia co-founded the autonomous electric aircraft company in 2017, the ultimate goal was to design a passenger plane. “We want that to be our legacy, but we were also very, very realistic about the challenges associated with actually doing that,” he told me. So when the DOD took an interest in the company’s commercial cargo planes and their potential ability to deliver supplies in contested environments, the startup jumped at the opportunity, delivering its first aircraft to AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Department of the Air Force, early last year. Interest from such a lucrative government customer helped the company to close its $40 million Series B round in September.
Of course, the decarbonization benefits of electrifying military cargo delivery would be huge. But unsurprisingly, Norcia told me that the DOD primarily frames the opportunity in terms of the capabilities of all-electric or hybrid-electric planes, which could take a variety of fuels, operate quietly, and give off minimal heat, making them more difficult to detect via thermal imaging. Plus, the more equipment is electrified the better, “in terms of having them be able to operate in a highly contested environment, where moving fuel around maybe is not feasible,” Norcia explained. Not to mention the fact that if a manned aircraft is shot down, people die, meaning that in a counterfactual sense, Pyka’s tech is saving lives.
Verne’s North Star is also decarbonization. And given that the military is the world’s largest oil consumer, McKlveen was excited to partner with the Army to put its hydrogen storage tech to use in medium and heavy-duty vehicles. The company stores hydrogen (ideally green hydrogen, produced via renewables-powered electrolysis) at high density as a cold, compressed gas, making it possible to build hydrogen vehicles with greater range and lower cost than has traditionally been done. Similar to Pyka, the Army is enthused that these vehicles would be difficult for adversaries to detect, as they’re quiet and give off little heat. Likewise, McKlveen told me that hydrogen power could replace the Army’s notoriously noisy generators.
While Verne has also partnered with the Department of Energy and its R&D arm, ARPA-E, McKlveen said that working with the DOD has been unique in a few ways. “The key difference is the DOD is a customer and a grant provider. So they can say both what their needs are as a potential customer and represent a potential customer,” he explained. This, along with the agency’s clear, phased approach that it puts companies through, helps bring a level of transparency to the whole process, from pilot to full-fledged military implementation, that McKlveen appreciates.
And lest we forget, “they also have a very large budget,” he told me. For fiscal year 2025, the DOD has requested $849.8 billion, while the DOE, by comparison, has requested a mere $51.4 billion.
“I find military people to be get-it-done type of people,” Taff of Sage Geosystems told me. “So I think that helps to create a sense of urgency and also push things along a lot faster than you would see with maybe other organizations.” Sage uses drilling technologies adopted from the oil and gas industry to access heat for clean electricity production across a wide variety of geographies. This is an especially attractive option for the DOD as the majority of geothermal infrastructure is underground, and thus well protected from attack. And unlike other renewables, this tech can provide 24/7 energy no matter the weather conditions. So it’s no surprise that the military is pouring money into this sector, pursuing partnerships with other big names in the geothermal space such as Fervo Energy and Eavor.
Electric planes, hydrogen, and geothermal all felt intuitively justifiable to me from a defense standpoint, but I was more surprised to learn that the DOD has gotten into the alternative proteins, a.k.a. “fake meat”, industry. Though meat substitutes won’t power tankers or keep the lights on, the Defense Department’s $1.4 million grant to The Better Meat Co. is intended to strengthen the American supply chain. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs views lab-grown meat as critical to its five-year agricultural plan. “So we don’t want to have the United States be importing clean protein in the way that we’re currently dependent on Asia for our semiconductors and photovoltaics,” Paul Shapiro, the company’s CEO, told me.
The Better Meat Co. produces a protein called Rhiza that’s derived from microscopic fungi, which it then sells as an ingredient to other companies to make either 100% animal-free meat or a meat blend. “This isn’t an alternative protein program. It’s a domestic biomanufacturing program,” Shapiro told me when I asked if military funding for meat substitutes could be at risk under Trump. Looking at some of the other companies that got grants through the same program, he said, “it’s literally like bio manufacturing things for military planes and jet lubricants and chemical catalysts for bullets.” That is, probably not Republican targets for defunding. “It’s clearly solely about wanting the U.S. to be a leader in biomanufacturing for the products that the world is going to depend on in the future.”
The DOD also sees promise in numerous other clean energy technologies, including nuclear microreactors for their portability and ability to provide off-grid energy in remote locations and alternate battery chemistries that could help the U.S. move away from a dependence on Chinese-produced lithium-ion batteries.
But despite the deep well of funding and pragmatic approach to deployment that the Department of Defense offers, agreeing to work with the DOD isn’t always an obvious choice. Many fear their company’s tech could be used in ways and in wars that they oppose. In 2018, for example, thousands of Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s participation in Project Maven, a partnership with the Pentagon that uses artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy of drone strikes. Supporters of the project said it would lead to fewer civilian deaths, while protestors argued that Google “should not be in the business of war.” Google did not renew the contract. More recently, employees at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have signed petitions opposing their company’s provision of cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government.
Norcia noted that most, but not all of his employees were neutral to positive when it came to working with the Air Force, while “for a small minority of the company, it unfortunately was not something that they really wanted to devote their life to.” While he understands that perspective, Norcia does believe that Pyka’s work with the DOD is a net positive for the world. “If you assume wars are going to keep happening — which, unfortunately, I think is the reality — I’d rather have it be the case that they’re more of a robot war than a human war,” he told me. And at the end of the day, passenger planes are still the goal.
As for his team at Verne, McKlveen told me everybody was on board. “The Defense Department has led to some of the biggest innovations of the last century, whether that’s the internet or GPS. And our team knows that.” Plus, even if the DOD doesn’t talk much about the climate benefits of sustainability-focused tech, that doesn’t negate them. A 2019 study revealed that the Pentagon purchases an average of 100 million barrels of oil per year, so from that perspective, “it’s hard to find a bigger customer that we can address,” McKlveen told me.
Norcia agreed. “I think the gains of your impact get turned way up if you’re doing work with the DOD,” he said, “as opposed to, you know, building an app that makes something incrementally more efficient or more addictive.”
The president is on his way to Los Angeles next.
On his fifth day back in office, President Trump is making the rounds to recent disaster zones —- North Carolina, which is recovering from Hurricane Helene, and later Los Angeles, where fires are still burning. In the immediate aftermath of both catastrophes, Trump was quick to blame Democrats for their response. Touching down in North Carolina earlier today, he sounded the same tune as he proposed overhauling or even eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is responsible for disaster preparation and recovery nationwide.
On the tarmac, Trump told the press that his administration was “looking at the whole concept of FEMA,” saying he would rather states be solely responsible for disaster recovery. Later, at a hurricane recovery briefing, Trump said that he planned to sign an executive order that would “begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA — or maybe getting rid of FEMA.” Trump dodged questions on details of the order or a timeline for implementation.
While speaking to a group of North Carolina families at a separate event, Trump told them, “Unfortunately, our government failed you, but it wasn’t the Trump government. It was a government run by Biden.” False claims about the hurricane response, stoked by Trump during the final month of his campaign against Kamala Harris, led FEMA to put up a “myth and fact” response page on its website to debunk swirling rumors.
It is true, however, that earlier this month, FEMA informed thousands of displaced North Carolina residents that their vouchers for temporary housing were about to expire for one of three reasons: their homes had been deemed “habitable,” the residents had not approved a FEMA inspection, or the agency couldn’t get in contact with them. Speaking to the families, Trump said this was unjustifiable given that “your government provided shelter and housing for illegal aliens from all over the world.” He claimed he would “surge housing solutions” to the state that went beyond FEMA’s temporary measures, but did not provide more details as to how.
After arriving in Los Angeles, where large swaths of the city have been devastated by still-active wildfires, President Trump met with Governor Gavin Newsom on the tarmac, striking a conciliatory tone as he said he wanted to “work together” to help L.A. recover. This disaster also prompted a flurry of misinformation when fire hydrants in the city temporarily ran dry. While the city’s water infrastructure simply wasn’t equipped to put out numerous simultaneous historic blazes, Trump put the blame squarely on Newsom and his previous opposition to a policy that would have redirected water from a river delta in Northern California to farms in the Central Valley and cities in Southern California, endangering a fish species called the Delta smelt.
Experts say this has nothing to do with the fires or the ability to put them out, as all water storage tanks were full and the blazes were due to a combination of drought and extreme winds. Yet Trump has continued to hold up the protection of the smelt fish as all that’s wrong with California’s fire response, even making it a feature of his recent executive order “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism To Provide Water Solutions To Southern California.”
After a tour of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and a photoshoot with L.A. firefighters, Trump met with city and state leaders and pledged to declare a national emergency that would allow him to waive all federal permits for rebuilding. “The federal permit can take 10 years. We’re not going to do that. We don’t want to take 10 days,” Trump said to applause. “I’d ask that the local permitting process be the same.”
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass agreed that she wanted to expedite the process but reiterated that before rebuilding efforts could begin in earnest, all the fire debris needed to be cleared. That’s an arduous process that the Army Corp of Engineers estimated could take 18 months to complete. While Bass vowed to speed up this timeline, Trump claimed that “the people are willing to clean out their own debris.”
Trump also repeated his promise to “open up the pumps and valves in the North,” though again, there’s no evidence that more piped water would have done anything to prevent these fires. “We want to get that water pouring down as quickly as possible. Let hundreds of millions of gallons of water flow down into Southern California, and that’ll be a big benefit to you.”
And he didn’t miss an opportunity to mention the smelt once more, telling the assembled leaders “it’s in numerous other areas. So it doesn’t have to be protected. The people of California have to be protected.”
Editor‘s note: This story has been updated to reflect Trump’s visit to Los Angeles.