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With emissions from transportation rising, it’s up to the states to fix it.
Last September, Jeanie Ward-Waller, a deputy director at California’s state transportation department, was called into her supervisor’s office and told she was being removed from her role, no explanation given. But Ward-Waller thinks she knows what happened.
A few weeks earlier, she’d threatened to blow the whistle on the agency for a highway repaving project that she believed was covertly — and illegally — going to widen the road. Under state law, highway expansions require environmental review and public input. It was also exactly the kind of project the agency was supposedly moving away from, according to its climate action plan, which said it would prioritize alternative forms of transit.
“Caltrans leaders believe they are widening highways in the public interest, despite decades of empirical research proving otherwise, and the agency’s own policies requiring solutions that reduce driving,” Ward-Waller wrote in an essay for the San Francisco Chronicle after leaving the agency.
Ward-Waller’s firing riled up climate advocates and sustainable transit proponents, and not just in California. (Multiple people I interviewed for this story mentioned it to me.) State transportation agencies all over the country are stuck in this kind of outdated thinking, critics say. Transportation is the biggest source of emissions in the U.S., and one of the only sectors where emissions grew last year. But most state transportation agencies are still funneling most of their budgets into road expansion projects. Few have taken on addressing climate change as part of their mission.
“State departments of transportation are kind of the next frontier for climate advocacy to conquer,” Justin Balik, the state program director for Evergreen Action told me. “There’s a lot of blue states where the transportation decisions are still divorced from the climate conversation.”
It’s a pivotal moment to change that, Balik argued. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed in 2021, has been sending billions of dollars of flexible funding into states for transportation projects. The Biden administration will also soon begin requiring these agencies to set greenhouse gas reduction targets. Although the targets are non-binding and states won’t be penalized for failing to achieve them, they will have to regularly report on their progress.
States have until February 1 to submit their initial plans to the federal Department of Transportation. So on Monday, climate and clean transportation advocates around the country sent letters to the governors of 22 states urging them to set targets consistent with reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. The letters ask officials to consider what’s achievable both through vehicle electrification and by reducing highway expansion.
“Electrification is critical and essential, but it’s not enough, just looking at the math, in terms of how long it's going to take for the vehicle fleet to turn over,” said Balik. “We need to think about the transportation system holistically and stop digging the hole deeper when we’re making transportation investment decisions.”
He directed me to a report published by the Georgetown Climate Center after the infrastructure law passed. The policy think tank modeled two scenarios, one where about a third of the $600 billion of flexible funding went to highway expansion, and one where states put more toward public transit and road maintenance. It found that the first scenario would increase emissions 1.6% by 2032, compared to business-as-usual, whereas the second would enable deeper emissions cuts — 1.3% more — than would otherwise have been expected with market forces and existing policies.
The reason is an effect called “induced demand,” and it’s at the center of this whole story. When state departments of transportation evaluate projects, they use models that assume building new roads or adding lanes increases the flow of traffic — thereby reducing congestion and reducing emissions. But real-world evidence has shown that expanding highways, especially in dense areas, actually encourages more people to drive — and within a few years, the traffic is just as bad as before.
“They’re vastly overestimating the benefits of expansion projects,” Miguel Moravec, a senior associate at RMI told me. “If the models are not capturing the reality that expanded lanes lead to more traffic, then you can’t really seriously engage with the pollution problem.”
The modeling is a symptom of a more entrenched issue. State Departments of Transportation are big agencies that can have thousands of staff, many of whom have been in their roles for decades. (Caltrans, for example, has more than 22,000 people.) The culture of these offices is built around an old paradigm where the primary metric of performance is to relieve traffic congestion — to help people drive places more quickly and easily.
“There’s a new movement to say, maybe it’s about helping people get to where they need to go efficiently, affordably, and safely,” Matt Frommer, the senior transportation advocate at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, told me. “But that is a really hard shift to make in a giant institution like a state DOT. Because all of the models and all of the policies and funding decision processes have been set up around the old paradigm.”
Even in places where that’s beginning to shift, there are still long-term challenges. California, for example, has had a law on the books for a decade that says the state must assess the impacts of transportation projects by measuring the amount of driving they induce or reduce — not by their effect on congestion. But local advocates like Jamie Pew, a climate advisor at NextGen Policy, say this has failed to move the state meaningfully away from highway expansion.
Ward-Waller’s firing brought long-simmering criticisms of the state’s climate strategy to a boil, he said. “For all of the money that we’re investing in new transit infrastructure, electrification, and green mobility options, as long as we continue to invest in freeway expansion, we’re not going to see the progress in emissions that we need to see.”
There are a few states that are starting to do things differently. Colorado, for example, has seen a significant shift in the way the state approaches transportation projects. In 2021, the state legislature passed a law directing its transportation agency to set regional greenhouse gas reduction targets and incorporate them into project planning. Frommer said the new approach has already resulted in real changes. In 2022, the state scrapped a long-planned highway expansion through downtown Denver after it was found that it would undermine the agency’s targets.
“That freed up hundreds of millions, if not over a billion dollars for other multimodal projects to help enable transit, biking and walking,” said Frommer.
The state that is leading the nation in innovative transportation policy, however, is Minnesota. Like Colorado, it has transportation-specific greenhouse gas targets. But it also has a specific goal to reduce “vehicle miles traveled” — a measure of how much people drive. Last year, lawmakers passed a big transportation package that gave more teeth to these goals, requiring the state’s DOT take them into account in decision making. It also went a step further and said that if the agency moves forward with any projects that induce demand, it has to offset them with additional projects that get people out of their cars.
The new federal rule requiring state transportation departments to report on their progress achieving declining greenhouse gas targets could help nudge more states in this direction. As climate advocates tell me on a weekly basis, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
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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 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 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 35,000 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.
Editor’s note: This story was last update on Friday, January 10, at 10:00 a.m. ET.
On rising global temperatures, LA’s fire disaster, and solar stations in space
Current conditions: A sinkhole threatens to swallow up Ecuador’s large hydroelectric power plant • Air quality is poor in Delhi where dense smog has caused travel chaos • Nearly 40,000 customers are already without power in Texas as a winter storm rolls in.
At least 10 people are known to have died in the Los Angeles fires, and some 10,000 structures are believed to have been destroyed. Five blazes continue to burn. The Palisades fire, the largest in the city’s history at 20,000 acres, remains just 6% contained. The Eaton fire has consumed 13,700 acres and is 0% contained. While lower wind speeds have helped firefighters make some progress over the last 24 hours, the Santa Ana gusts were expected to peak at 75 mph last night. “We are absolutely not out of this extreme weather event,” Los Angeles fire chief Kristin M. Crowley said in a news conference.
Charred homes in Pacific Palisades. Mario Tama/Getty Images
President Biden sent more than 30 government helicopters and planes to fight the flames, and said federal funding would cover the costs of the fire response for 180 days. (An early estimate from AccuWeather puts the cost of the disaster at more than $50 billion.) Biden also connected the emergency to climate change. “All has changed in the weather,” he said. “Climate change is real. We’ve got to adjust to it, and we can, it’s within our power to do it. But we’ve got to acknowledge it.”
Some of the world’s leading weather research organizations are releasing data today showing that 2024 was the hottest year on record. The World Meteorological Organization, the European Copernicus Climate Change Service, the UK Met Office, Berkeley Earth, NOAA, NASA, and others “have made a concerted effort to coordinate the release of their data, highlighting the exceptional conditions experienced during 2024,” Copernicus said. The service is one of the first to roll out its findings, showing that the global average temperature last year was 59.18 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15.10 degrees Celsius. This is 1.60 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average, making last year the first full calendar year during which the 1.5C warming threshold has been breached.
Copernicus
Oceans also were exceptionally warm, with sea surface temperatures reaching new record highs. Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions also increased. “These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapour levels in 2024, meant unprecedented heatwaves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
BlackRock yesterday announced its departure from the UN Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative. The decision is “a remarkable U-turn for a company that was once a poster child of the environmental, social, and governance investing movement,” saidThe Wall Street Journal. Asset managers participating in the initiative pledge to support the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. BlackRock’s departure is significant because it’s the largest asset manager in the world, but so far it “has not prompted others to follow,” Reutersreported. More than 325 signatories managing more than $57 trillion are still signed on to NZAMI. BlackRock is currently being sued by 11 Republican-led states over ESG investing practices.
“Climate change poses one of the greatest risks to our global economy and the long-term investments BlackRock’s clients rely on,” said Ben Cushing, campaign director for the Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign. “Membership in voluntary alliances sets an important baseline, but to truly fulfill its fiduciary duty to long-term investors, BlackRock must support real-world decarbonization through stronger shareholder voting and by directing capital toward industries that mitigate systemic climate risks. If BlackRock won’t do that, its clients should find a different asset manager that will.”
Coming later today (probably): President Biden will release short-term guidance on clean fuel tax credits, two sources toldReuters. But the final rules will be left to the incoming Trump administration, meaning “biofuel companies and their legislative backers will have to wait to see if Trump will back the plan on the highly anticipated guidelines on new clean fuel production tax credits aimed at the airline and biofuel industries.” The tax credits were supposed to come into effect on January 1 to help spur on production of sustainable aviation fuels.
China is reportedly planning to build a massive solar power station in space to harness the sun’s energy and beam it back to Earth. A Chinese scientist told the South China Morning Post that super-heavy rockets will be launched to build the station, which will be “another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth.” Space-based solar power is a “tantalizing” way to generate clean energy from the sun around the clock, and many countries are investing in R&D on the idea. The European Space Agency estimates sunlight is 10 times more intense at the top of the atmosphere than on Earth’s surface, but “in order to generate optimal, economically-viable levels of solar power, the required structures need to be very large, both on Earth and in space.” NASA noted that researchers would need to figure out how to build these large structures in orbit, then make sure they can operate autonomously. Plus, manufacturing costs would be extremely high. “Moving all that mass into orbit would require many sustained missions to carry infrastructure into space,” NASA said. China’s electricity demand rose by 6.4% in 2023, and the country is leading in clean energy investments. According to the International Energy Agency, China commissioned as much solar power in 2023 as the entire world did in 2022.
“While it would take an act of God far stronger than a fire to keep people from building homes on the slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains or off the Pacific Coast, the city that rebuilds may be smaller, more heavily fortified, and more expensive than the one that existed at the end of last year. And that’s just before the next big fire.” –Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the economic devastation of the LA fires
Recovering from the Los Angeles wildfires will be expensive. Really expensive. Insurance analysts and banks have already produced a wide range of estimates of both what insurance companies will pay out and overall economic loss. AccuWeatherhas put out an eye-catching preliminary figure of $52 billion to $57 billion for economic losses, with the service’s chief meteorologist saying that the fires have the potential to “become the worst wildfire in modern California history based on the number of structures burned and economic loss.” On Thursday, J.P. Morgan doubled its previous estimate for insured losses to $20 billion, with an economic loss figure of $50 billion — about the gross domestic product of the country of Jordan.
The startlingly high loss figures from a fire that has only lasted a few days and is (relatively) limited in scope show just how distinctly devastating an urban fire can be. Enormous wildfires thatcover millions of acres like the 2023 Canadian wildfires can spew ash and particulate matter all over the globe and burn for months, darkening skies and clogging airways in other countries. And smaller — and far deadlier fires — than those still do not produce the same financial roll.
It’s in coastal Southern California where you find large population centers areas known by all to be at extreme risk of fire. And so a fire there can destroy a whole neighborhood in a few hours and put the state’s insurance system into jeopardy.
One reason why the projected economic impacts of the fires are so high is that the structures that have burned and the land those structures sit on are very valuable. Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Santa Monica contain some of the most sought-after real estate on planet earth, with typical home prices over $2 million. Pacific Palisades itself has median home values of around $3 million, according to JPMorgan Chase.
The AccuWeather estimates put the economic damage for the Los Angeles fires at several times previous large, urban fires — the Maui wildfire in 2023 was estimated to cause around $14 billion of economic loss, for example — while the figure would be about a third or a quarter of a large hurricane, which tend to strike areas with millions of people in them across several states.
“The fires have not been contained thus far and continue to spread, implying that estimates of potential economic and insured losses are likely to increase,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote Thursday.
That level of losses would make the fires costlier in economic terms than the 2018 Butte County Camp Fire, whose insured losses of $10 billion made it California’s costliest at the time. That fire was far larger than the Los Angeles fires, spreading over 150,000 acres compared to just over 17,000 acres for the Palisades Fire and over 10,000 acres for the Eaton Fire. It also led to more than 80 deaths in the town of Paradise.
So far, around 2,000 homes have been destroyed,according to the Los Angeles Times,a fraction of the more than 19,000 structures affected by the Camp Fire. The difference in estimated losses comes from the fact that homes in Pacific Palisades weigh in at more than six times those in rural Butte, according to JPMorgan.
While insured losses get the lion’s share of attention when it comes to the cost impacts of a natural disaster, the potential damages go far beyond the balance sheet of insurers.
For one, it’s likely that many affected homeowners did not even carry insurance, either because their insurers failed to renew their existing policies or the homeowners simply chose to go without due to the high cost of what insurance they could find. “A larger than usual portion of the losses caused by the wildfires will be uninsured,” according to Morningstar DBRS, which estimated total insured losses at more than $8 billion. Many homeowners carry insurance from California’s backup FAIR Plan, which may itself come under financial pressure, potentially leading to assessments from the state’s policyholders to bolster its ability to pay claims.
AccuWeather arrived at its economic impact figure by looking not just at losses from property damage but also wages that go unearned due to economic activity slowing down or halting in affected areas, infrastructure that needs to be repaired, supply chain issues, and transportation snarls. Even when homes and businesses aren’t destroyed, people may be unable to work due to evacuations; businesses may close due to the dispersal of their customers or inability of their suppliers to make deliveries. Smoke inhalation can lead to short-, medium-, and long-term health impacts that take a dent out of overall economic activity.
The high level of insured losses, meanwhile, could mean that insurers’ will see less surplus and could have to pay more for reinsurance, Nancy Watkins, an actuary and wildfire expert at Milliman, told me in an email. This may mean that they would have to shed yet more policies “in order to avoid deterioration in their financial strength ratings,” just as California has been trying to lure insurers back with reforms to its dysfunctional insurance market.
The economic costs of the fire will likely be felt for years if not decades. While it would take an act of God far stronger than a fire to keep people from building homes on the slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains or off the Pacific Coast, the city that rebuilds may be smaller, more heavily fortified, and more expensive than the one that existed at the end of last year. And that’s just before the next big fire.