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Why permitting reform could break the political alliance that produced America’s most significant climate law
The U.S. climate coalition is under serious strain.
The tension has been brought to a head by last month’s debt-ceiling compromise, which enacted a variety of reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act and exempted the long-debated Mountain Valley Pipeline from federal environmental review. While environmental groups have decried the concessions as “a colossal error … that sacrifices the climate,” clean-energy trade groups are praising them “an important down payment on much-needed reforms.” This gulf now threatens to disintegrate the political alliance that, less than a year ago, won the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), its most tangible accomplishment and by far the country’s most significant climate law.
The differences over permitting reform aren’t just a disagreement about tactics. Rather, they reflect fundamental changes within three of the most important factions within the climate coalition — the environmental movement, the clean energy industry, and the Washington-centric group I’ve termed the green growthers. Facing these changes and their implications is critical to preserving the political foundations of federal climate action.
Ever since passage of the IRA unlocked massive fiscal resources for decarbonization, the climate coalition has been split on how best to put that money to work. While nearly everyone recognizes the need to substantially increase the pace at which clean energy infrastructure gets deployed, division centers on the question of permitting reform. To even name the debate is to invoke a factional diagnosis: the view that environmental laws are hobbling decarbonization by preventing clean energy infrastructure from getting built quickly enough — or even at all. This perspective has rapidly gained momentum across a bipartisan community that includes self-styled centrists within the climate coalition.
Permitting reform is unraveling the climate coalition because it reawakens a fundamental, unresolved disagreement over how to decarbonize. Its timing adds to these tensions: bipartisan legislation to curtail national environmental law has arrived, not accidentally, just as the clean energy industry has become most capable of splitting from the broader climate coalition that helped create it.
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The oldest faction in today’s climate coalition, and the most diffuse, is the environmental movement. Its mainstream wing has roots in the principles of preservation, and its largest organizations have spent multiple generations fighting for clean air and water, and ecologically healthy lands and species.
Its environmental justice wing, by contrast, emerged as racial justice activists combined civil-rights and environmental-protection principles to address historically unequal pollution burdens that have concentrated health risks and environmental damages in disempowered communities of color. Only in the last few years, after decades of discoordination, disinterest, and exclusion, have preservationist institutions become more attentive to the legacy of environmental racism. The movement has now coalesced, however incompletely, around a broader and more inclusive environmental vision.
Though preservationist and environmental-justice approaches can still lead to different priorities, the new environmental movement is at its most unified when it opposes fossil fuel production. The movement’s history of civil disobedience and legal combat have taught it to keep fossil fuels in its crosshairs — not only because of the social and environmental harm fossil fuel projects cause, but also because fights against fossil fuels mobilize the public, clarify the stakes, and yield tangible improvements for local communities and environments.
Though both wings of the environmental movement fought hard for the IRA, the law does almost nothing to directly constrain fossil fuel production. Instead, the IRA largely aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions not by preventing those emissions, but rather by boosting the production and use of low-carbon energy — along with generous subsidies for storing carbon dioxide, often in conjunction with oil production or fossil fuel combustion. Accordingly, the environmental movement has redoubled its efforts to pair the law’s clean energy subsidies with new fossil fuel restrictions.
The environmental movement’s discomfort with a subsidies-only approach to decarbonization is probably better known than the shifting politics of the clean energy industry. As the new environmental movement has coalesced, clean energy has matured into a fully-fledged industry, both in the U.S. and around the world. Until the past few years, the nascent clean energy industry wielded little political muscle, depending instead on the political support and lobbying assistance of environmental groups. Not that long ago, renewable energy was more expensive, less familiar to regulators, and supported by fewer subsidies than fossil energy systems. As a result, clean energy companies depended heavily on the environmental movement’s political support to survive and grow.
Over the past half a decade, technological progress and policy victories achieved in coalition with the environmental movement have vaulted key technologies like wind, solar, and batteries into commercial maturity. Those gains are now locked in. The IRA provides at least 10 years of new federal clean energy tax credits, ending the boom-and-bust cycle of short-term extensions that held the clean energy industry together for most of the previous two decades. With falling costs and fiscal tailwinds, the clean energy industry no longer relies on the environmental movement’s lobbying muscle for commercial success.
The clean energy industry’s maturation has led to more profound differences with the environmental movement that eclipse a simple re-alignment in relative power. As the clean energy industry has grown, it has come to share the fossil energy industry’s preference for more permissive regulatory regimes and fewer environmental protections. In the pre-commercial era, climate-conscious jurisdictions like California drove clean energy development through supportive environmental policy. In recent years, though, the clean energy industry has grown faster and profited more in places like Texas, and for the same reason the fossil fuel industry has: because Texas offers open markets and few restrictions on energy development. As the clean energy industry’s policy priorities have shifted, its growing lobbying apparatus has followed suit, leading groups like the American Clean Power Association to collaborate with fossil fuel companies in pursuit of environmental deregulation.
Activists and policymakers focused on rapid, massive clean energy development make up a third critical faction of the national climate movement. Many in this group work in and around the Biden administration and have come to the climate fight not from the environmental movement, but from other areas such as industrial policy, national defense, some strands of organized labor, and electoral politics. They have brought their prior priorities — job creation, domestic manufacturing, and stable energy prices — to their climate politics. In the wake of the IRA, they remain focused on lowering the remaining barriers to rapid clean energy development.
These often center-left climate actors have only cohered into a distinct faction in the past five years, as enthusiasm for so-called “supply-side progressivism” has given them a common language with which to articulate a set of climate solutions founded on proactive government support for private reindustrialization. For some green growthers, deregulation is a necessary precondition to decarbonization, and since many also believe that clean energy will — with the IRA’s help — outcompete fossil fuels, they see fewer risks to reforming environmental law than the environmental movement does.
In part, the conflict over permitting reform has grown bitter because the term gets used to refer to many different policy proposals. Depending on the speaker and the audience, it can mean sweeping changes to how environmental laws govern new infrastructure projects; tailored tweaks to environmental review; more resources to strengthen administrative capacity and expedite permitting reviews; or changes to the process for building transmission lines and connecting power plants to the grid. This tangle of meanings has undermined the climate coalition’s ability to negotiate its internal differences and prioritize consensus solutions to the challenge of rapid clean-energy development.
More fundamentally, though, the environmental movement, the clean energy industry, and the green growthers are clashing over permitting reform because it has forced them to confront their ongoing disagreement about how to achieve decarbonization.
To many in the environmental movement, and especially on the climate left, most permitting reform proposals double down on what they see as a worrying tenet of the IRA: its dependence on competition and market dynamics to slash fossil fuel production. The environmental movement is familiar from long experience with this kind of market thinking, which promises that present development and the damage it entails will eventually unlock future benefits. As the environmental movement as a whole has become more concerned with historical pollution burdens, that bargain looks worse, and less trustworthy, than ever.
Many permitting reform proposals, including the newly-enacted language of the debt-ceiling deal, exacerbate these concerns by targeting the environmental movement’s oldest and most effective legal tools for defeating fossil fuel projects. At the same time, these proposals still omit any of the constraints on fossil fuels that the environmental movement believes necessary for decarbonization.
The environmental movement has responded with deployment-focused proposals of its own that aim to speed clean energy development without weakening environmental law. However, even the most straightforward of these proposals — such as appointing a fifth commissioner to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — have repeatedly been deprioritized by clean-energy groups and green growthers. In the wake of the debt ceiling deal, which included none of the environmental movement’s reform priorities but substantially weakened environmental review, the movement is mobilized and angry.
To the green growthers, by contrast, rapid decarbonization cannot happen without permitting reform. According to the IRA’s market-decarbonization logic, the best and most politically plausible way to drive fossil fuels out of American energy markets is to displace them with cheaper and more abundant clean energy. At the same time, events such as the gas-price shock of 2021 — and its damage to Biden’s popularity — has reinforced their existing belief that suppressing fossil fuel extraction without first creating massive new clean energy production will risk serious political backlash. This theory of change has led green growthers to be simultaneously sympathetic to the clean energy industry’s deregulatory wishlist, and skeptical of the environmental movement’s focus on constraining fossil fuel production.
These factions’ divergent theories of decarbonization have offered a wedge to those within the climate coalition who believe rapid, effective clean energy development has become incompatible with rigorous environmental and social protections. Anti-coalitional voices, especially within portions of the clean energy industry, increasingly see permitting reform as an opportunity to split the climate coalition, excising the environmental movement from the climate coalition and creating a new, climate-inflected industrial alliance.
Most green growthers understand that such a split would deprive the existing coalition of its popular wing at a critical moment, threatening the political viability of climate progress. Though the growthers believe that the IRA’s clean-energy manufacturing boom will build a powerful new political coalition in favor of decarbonization, that coalition does not yet exist.
Environmental protection, by contrast, is extremely popular across America today, and the environmental movement has repeatedly proven its ability to mobilize public support. Though the clean energy industry no longer needs the environmental movement’s political muscle to turn a profit, the climate coalition as a whole may struggle to maintain political support for decarbonization without it, especially as climate change destabilizes the country’s energy systems and the right continues to oppose rapid decarbonization.
To understand why, you don’t need to look farther than Texas, which is something of a proving ground for the three factions’ competing beliefs about how deregulation may shape decarbonization.
In recent years, Texas provided strong evidence for the clean energy industry’s assertions that, whatever the environmental and social costs, less regulation can speed the deployment of renewable energy. It likewise bolstered green growthers’ claims that cheap, plentiful renewables can displace fossil energy.
But suddenly, Texas is also proving the environmental movement’s counter-argument. The state’s legislature has just created a new set of generous rules and tax subsidies that support new gas-fired power plants while hampering clean energy development. Though state lawmakers are transparently motivated by gas-industry lobbying and culture-war fixations, they have justified the legislation by arguing that Texas’ increasingly unreliable grid needs more gas plants to keep the lights on.
Such claims, however dishonest, will only grow more plausible to many voters as climate-exacerbated disasters and the energy transition itself strain infrastructural systems in the years to come. Without permitting structures or robust state environmental laws, Texan climate activists are ill-equipped to fight a possible new wave of gas plants, and Texas’ future decarbonization is now in peril.
Whereas last year, Texas’ clean energy boom seemed likely to continue driving fossil fuels out of the market and emissions down, now Texas’ new IRA-style subsidies and weak environmental protections look more likely to leave the state with more energy production of all kinds. Though Texas will continue to add clean energy, its decarbonization remains in doubt.
Permitting reform is threatening the national climate coalition because it cuts to the heart of a longstanding philosophical disagreement about what it will take to actually achieve decarbonization. It has arrived as the climate coalition’s major factions are transforming in ways that themselves sharpen the conflict. Good-faith advocates of decarbonization in all camps should be concerned that, in the wake of the debt-ceiling deal, a new round of fractious permitting-reform fights will split the climate coalition into separate camps with irreconcilable theories of climate action.
The result, though ideologically purifying, would be politically disastrous.
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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.