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Putin’s war of aggression has unleashed an emissions-reduction program that is threatening the financial foundation of his regime.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a humanitarian catastrophe. Perhaps 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded, along with 30,000 dead civilians, many cruelly tortured and murdered by the invaders. Vast regions of eastern Ukraine have been utterly laid to waste, and much of the rest badly damaged from the constant bombing of civilian infrastructure — a war crime. Russian forces, meanwhile, have suffered an estimated 180,000 casualties.
However, there is something of a silver lining here. The war has kicked off a crash decarbonization program across Europe, and added big pressure to turn away from fossil fuels across the world. It seems even over the short term the war’s effect on greenhouse gas emissions has been negligible, and will result in major cuts in coming years.
When Putin first ordered the invasion, many predicted that it would be a climate disaster, at least for the first year or so. Without cheap Russian gas, Europe would be forced to turn back to filthy coal to keep the lights on, and emissions would soar. “At least in the short and medium term, this is a disaster for the struggle against climate change … In the short and medium term, I think you’ll see a flight back to coal,” said foreign policy analyst Anatol Lieven when the invasion commenced, and I agreed.
Remarkably, this didn’t happen. As Will Mathis and Akshat Rathi write at Bloomberg, the EU energy strategy has been threefold: buying up as much possible imported liquid natural gas (LNG), mainly from the United States, piling investment into renewable energy, and replacing gas boilers and furnaces with heat pumps. In 2022, solar investment increased 35 percent compared to 2021, wind investment increased 62 percent, and battery storage increased 78 percent. Meanwhile, heat pump installations increased by about a third, which (along with other efficiency measures) enabled a 13 percent drop in gas consumption.
Now, coal use did increase modestly, which is why EU emissions only declined slightly over these two years. But as renewables keep coming online, that coal and some gas will be displaced. Electricity produced by carbon fuels in Europe is projected to drop by a whopping 43 percent in 2023.
This policy mix is quite close to what climate hawks have been demanding for decades now. The EU has proved it can work, and it can be done very quickly.
At any rate, the EU is probably conducting the most frantic decarbonization in the world, with the possible exception of China —though the U.S. did pass the largest climate bill in history last year, the effects of which are only just starting to be felt. But Europe’s panic buying of LNG has put sustained upward pressure on gas prices across most of the world. What’s more, given how it has cut itself off from Russian gas, and how it would take Russia years and billions in spending to replace its export infrastructure, that price pressure will persist for years.
This means that renewables are about to do to natural gas what natural gas did to coal. Back in 2007, coal accounted for half of American utility-scale electricity production. That production figure has since fallen by about 55 percent, mostly thanks to cheap fracked natural gas. But from 2009-2019, the price of wind and solar fell by 70 and 89 percent respectively, and the amount of electricity they produce in the U.S. has roughly tripled since 2015. There is every reason to think that those prices will continue to decline for at least the next decade. In locations with favorable conditions, renewables were already cheaper than gas by 2019 or 2020. Now thanks to Putin, they are much cheaper — 33 to 44 percent cheaper, as of last October. Soon utilities around the world will discover that running their existing natural gas fleets will be more expensive than replacing them with renewables, especially when one factors in the cost of climate change and illness caused by airborne pollution.
Finally, with the ongoing meteoric rise of electric vehicles, that zero-carbon power will start biting seriously into oil consumption. In countries like Norway, it’s already happening.
Again, this story is not all rosy. Price increases have created gas shortages in countries like Pakistan that can’t afford to compete. But even this is showing one of the enormous upsides of renewable power: relative price stability. Renewable power production is somewhat erratic depending on the weather, of course, but most of the expense of wind and solar is in the purchase and installation. Afterwards maintenance costs are predictable and production reasonably easy to forecast, particularly at utility scale.
Carbon power, by contrast, relies on a continual supply of mined commodities traded in a global market where prices can and do gyrate wildly based on the business cycle, discovery or depletion of deposits, movements in financial markets (if not speculator chicanery), and as we’ve learned this year, the lunatic depredations of the dictators who control most global supply.
A lot of American and European firms bet heavily on the belief that cheap gas coming from Russia and American fracking would last forever. That hard-learned lesson will incentivize nations to avoid carbon power to avoid price risk, even if it costs slightly more up-front or requires difficult grid reforms.
It is perhaps a very grim poetic justice that Putin’s monstrous war of aggression has knocked the global carbon fuel market that underpins his regime into rapid and terminal decline. It may be a decade or two before Russia, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and other brutal dictatorships that prop themselves up with carbon profits start facing serious financial pressure. But it will happen, and few nations in history have deserved it more.
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Fire will happen in California. It’s just a question of when and where.
Ask me one thing I love about living in Los Angeles and there’s a good chance I’d say, Because it’s wild. The giant city park near us is no flat, grassy plane for picnicking and Frisbee, but a rugged expanse of coyotes and the occasional mountain lion, God rest his soul. Outside my window loom the San Gabriel Mountains, loaded with hiking trails.
This is a place integrated with nature. People hike after brunch. But, as we must say at times like this, there is a cost to that.
The skies are dark today after two enormous wildfires sprang up overnight, sparked and fueled by ferocious Santa Anas. The winds, which blow hot air from the inland Great Basin toward the ocean, typically bring unseasonably warm days and fire danger in autumn. This January incident brought gusts as high as 100 miles per hour that rattled our windows and downed trees across town.
First came the fire in the Pacific Palisades, the area between the city’s ritzy western beach towns and the oft-burning hills of Malibu. The Palisades fire turned into a beast in a hurry as tens of thousands of people abandoned their homes and parts of Santa Monica went on high alert. Bulldozers bulldozed abandoned cars to make way for fire trucks.
Later in the evening, a second blaze began in Eaton Canyon, whose waterfall makes it one of the busiest hiking destinations in town. Eaton spread quickly in the dry mountains above Pasadena, forcing evacuations and alerts in the cities like Altadena and La Cañada Flintridge and creating a dark cloud of smoke over the San Gabriel Valley. At Caltech, where I work, the campus is wind-beaten and classes are canceled, as they are at plenty of area school districts.
L.A. woke up Wednesday morning to find itself between two fires. And those two enormous events, each of which has consumed thousands of acres by now, aren’t the end of it. Another major wildfire broke out north of the city near Santa Clarita. Smaller blazes have popped up all around town like a cruel game of Whack-a-Mole — in Pasadena, in Culver City, and close to here, by Dodger Stadium. Mercifully, most of these flare-ups were extinguished before they could spread.
In social media posts, residents are recommending to each other the excellent Watch Duty app that tracks fires as they develop. To have that on your phone this week is to be barraged by messages about new evacuation orders and new fires blazing up. With the whole region bone-dry and the gusts unrelenting, the city suddenly feels like a minefield. Any expanse of tree or scrub could be the next one to catch fire. As I watched out my window last night to see the mountain flames dance in the distance, a power line explosion in the foreground darkened part of a neighborhood across the river.
Such gloom was already a signature part of late summer and autumn in California, when the months of near-zero precipitation create a tinderbox in the hills and the mountains. Now, wildfires are seasonally unbounded. No significant rain has fallen in November or December. That, plus, an extremely hot and dry summer, led to the parched conditions that combined with freak winds to set the city ablaze during what used to be a wet month.
This is the way of things now. During the past two winters, El Niño conditions dropped heavy rainfall around Los Angeles that added snowpack to the mountains and eased drought conditions in the area. This winter we haven’t been so fortunate. In a climate-changed L.A. with less rain during its rainy season, the delicate balance of the city starts to tilt out of balance. It’s harder and harder to have neighborhoods in and up against the mountains, when wildfires seem to come so much more often.
These events inevitably trigger a wave of “How could you live in such a place?” Of course, you could ask the same thing of the tornadoes that sweep through where I’m originally from, or the hurricanes of the Gulf Coast. Every place has its disasters, and major wildfires are growing more common everywhere, not just in California. Retreat is an illusion.
What matters, here and elsewhere, is resilience. Not just the psychological kind that means we recover and come back, but the practical, logistical kind, like decentralized electrical grids that are less vulnerable to natural disasters and help people keep the lights on when the worst happens. We must build for the unexpected now that the freak cataclysm isn’t a freak event anymore.
Will this renewable energy powerhouse become the first state to ban renewable energy?
There’s a nascent, concerted effort to make Oklahoma the first state to ban new renewable energy projects. And it’s picking up steam.
Across the U.S., activism against wind and solar energy has only grown in intensity, power, and scope in tandem with the recent renewables boom. This is in direct contrast to hopes many in the climate movement had that these technologies would become more popular as they entered communities historically hostile to the idea of switching away from fossil fuels. If anything, grassroots angst toward the energy transition has only surged in many pockets of the country since passage of the nation’s first climate law – Inflation Reduction Act – in 2022.
Nowhere is this more true than Oklahoma, which on paper resembles a breadbasket of possibilities for the “green” economy. Oklahoma is the nation’s third largest generator of wind energy, home to a burgeoning solar energy sector, a potential hydrogen hub, and maybe even the nation’s first refinery for cobalt, a rare metal used in electric vehicles. Yet yesterday, hundreds of people flocked to Oklahoma City, filled a giant hall in the state’s capitol building to the brim, and rallied for the state’s governor Kevin Stitt to issue an executive order to stop new wind and solar energy facilities from being built.
“Welcome Oklahoma, for braving the cold out there into this very warm and receiving Capitol. And y’know what? Our warmth today was not brought to us by green energy,” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond told the rally audience.
It’s exceedingly likely these folks won’t get an executive order any time soon. Oklahoma Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, has embraced these technologies as job creators. “Oklahoma is an oil and gas state through and through, but we also generate about 47% of our electricity from renewable sources,” he wrote on X in August. “I just don’t think the government should pick winners and losers or force us to choose between one or the other.” Weeks ago, he signed a memorandum of understanding between the state and the nation of Denmark to collaborate more on wind energy.
But the political gusts are blowing in the direction of a ban. Exhibit A: Drummond, who it’s rumored may run to replace Stitt and who at the rally pledged to work with legislators to pass a bill ending the deal with “quasi-socialist” Denmark. The rally also featured Oklahoma’s Education Secretary Ryan Walters, whose name has also been included in gubernatorial chatter.
This uprising in Oklahoma has been happening for quite some time, without much fanfare due to a persistent and pernicious news desert problem in the state (and many others). Like other states, it is becoming more commonplace for towns and counties there to face pressure to support moratoriums against developing new projects, and GOP lawmakers are also increasingly facing primaries over offering any support to wind or solar energy, or even just remaining neutral on whether projects get built. One such casualty in the last election cycle was Kevin Wallace, the GOP chair of the Appropriations and Budget Committee in the statehouse, who was dethroned by a political newcomer – Jim Shaw, who ran heavily on anti-renewables policies, including a statewide moratorium.
“It’s a groundswell,” said Pam Kingfisher, an environmental activist in northeast Oklahoma. Kingfisher is a Democrat but she has her own concerns with the environmental impacts that wind turbines could have in her community, the town of Kansas. So she’s grateful for this uprising.
“They’re attacking their own people and being very effective and I’m standing back going, ‘hey yes, take them on.’”
Suffice it to say, these activists feel emboldened by the primary wins and Trump’s election. Charity Linch, chair of the Oklahoma chapter of the Republican National Committee, told me she doesn’t believe the “pro-renewable Republican” will exist much longer in the state.
“I don’t believe that’s going to continue in Oklahoma,” Linch told me. “If they haven’t figured it out yet, they will very soon.”
Linch is the proud founder of Freedom Brigades, a grassroots network of activists with members in several states. The Freedom Brigade chapters for two counties conflicted over wind – McIntosh and Pittsburg – were instrumental in organizing the rally. Linch said Freedom Brigades also helped support some of the successful primary challengers in this past election cycle, and that her members were partially responsible for the Oklahoma GOP censuring Sen. James Lankford last year over a bipartisan border deal in Congress – causing the bill to die.
From talking to Linch, it’s clear to me that renewable developers should pay close attention to the Oklahoma uprising. So should Washington, because as talk in Congress proceeds toward changing the Inflation Reduction Act, rest assured some of these people will contact their members of Congress when the time comes. And you should expect the same from the myriad of anti-renewables activists in other states fighting solar and wind projects in their own backyards.
Getting Red In The Face
Why is this rebellion happening in Oklahoma? Well, if you ask Oklahomans, they’ll count the reasons.
Activists involved in planning the rally told me the biggest reason for the uproar was that solar and wind projects aren’t bringing the ample jobs developers and policymakers promise, making their presence in communities more difficult to stomach. Others point to environmental concerns, from the impacts these projects can have on species to the chemicals used to make them. Like Saundra Traywick, a donkey farmer who attended the rally and author of a Change.org petition supporting a state renewables ban that has more than 3,000 signatures. The petition claims wind turbines present “hazards to the health, safety, and welfare of the people.”
“They resort to calling us names instead of listening to us,” Traywick told me. “None of us wanted to get involved in any of this. We didn’t want to be involved in politics. These are farmers that are dealing with freezing temperatures,” referencing the temperature outside the rally.
There’s a serious issue of tribal opposition, given a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that found nearly half of all lands in Oklahoma fall under some form of tribal sovereignty. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explained last year, this means developers may also need to get mineral rights approvals from tribal government bodies. Two weeks ago, a federal judge ordered the removal of 84 wind turbines on those grounds, stating the developer Enel Green Power failed to get adequate permission from the Osage Nation.
Some involved in this push for a renewables ban are also open about another rationale: They want to help oil and gas production, a key source of employment in the state.
“Why are we as a state being forced to fund our own demise essentially, with our federal taxpayer dollars, to prop up an industry that’s literally killing the backbone industry of our state, which is oil and gas?” Shaw said on Breitbart’s Conservative Review podcast in December.
To anyone who believes, as the vast majority of scientists say, that climate change is real and to avert catastrophe we must quickly build an energy grid that produces far fewer carbon emissions, these may all look like terrible reasons.
But if you don’t believe that climate change is real, or you believe it’s an overrated problem… renewables are just a much harder sell.
“Most of us do not believe we need to reduce our CO2 to begin with,” NeAnne Clinton, an activist fighting a large NextEra solar-plus-battery project in Garfield County, Oklahoma, told me. “We know that it’s a scam and we don’t support it. And we don’t support using our taxpayer money for something that we didn’t have a voice in.”
Cheyenne Branscum, chair of Sierra Club’s Oklahoma chapter, told me it is difficult for supporters of renewable energy to counter this insurgent populist movement against the sector. Part of the dilemma is that environmental activism itself is seen by many of the state’s most red-blooded Republicans as a “radical” act, so if climate advocates were to organize counter protests it would likely backfire. When asked how her organization and others could best deal with the anti-renewables sentiment rising in her state, she talked about education programs – not confrontation.
“We’re not going to change anything at the state capital,” Branscum told me. “All a counter rally is going to do is make them have more opportunities to make us into a meme. They’re going to have some angry picture out there with a sign and be labeled some crazy radical that doesn’t care about their community. And it is unfortunately a hurdle.”
The Sooners’ Warning Shot
The Oklahoma rebellion should be cold comfort for anyone who buys into one of the implicit political principles behind the country’s first climate law – the Inflation Reduction Act.
Whether folks in D.C. want to admit it or not, the American anti-renewables revolution is rising up as Donald Trump retakes the White House and it is going to try and make its own impact on the Inflation Reduction Act. While much ado has been made about how the overwhelming majority of monetary benefits from the IRA are supporting investments in Republican-controlled states, as veteran lobbyist Frank Maisano put it to me last year, “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,” Maisano said, “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.”
What if many Republican constituents simply don’t like these new investments, in spite of the promises of jobs or tax benefits? What happens if Republicans in Congress are primaried simply for allowing solar and wind to keep getting federal tax breaks?
None of this surprises Nathan Jensen, a Texas University professor specializing in resource politics, who believes Oklahoma will only be the first to face a movement for a state-wide ban on new renewables. Just look at Texas where, like Oklahoma, the energy sector has become a panacea for wind and solar energy but many GOP policymakers have turned on economic development packages for new renewables. A state-wide ban hasn’t been discussed yet, but Jensen can imagine the idea gaining traction.
Jensen said he believes the organizing on platforms like Facebook only tells part of the story. Clearly, he says, a lot of people are joining that cause because the industry’s grown large enough that people are hearing from the farm or town next to theirs about solar and wind projects. And whether climate advocates want to hear it or not, these people are not loving what they’re hearing. Solar and wind projects don’t create that many jobs after they’re built. They do create a flurry of construction, but that’s a form of labor that leaves when it’s done and is often resented by neighbors, leading to disputes over dust, noise, or water. Then there’s the tax abatements for developers, which aggrieved residents see as taxpayer dollars going to large companies without their say – precisely the message gaining traction in Oklahoma.
This means places that seem safe for renewable developers are no longer safe and companies need to be really careful about how they approach community benefits. It’s not something you can just say – you really need to deliver what you promise.
“I know there’s a lot of news about organized anti-solar, which clearly happens, but also there’s this organic opposition that happens where it’s like, ‘You’re asking for how much from our school district?’” Jensen said. “Some of it is organized Facebook groups against solar but I think there is a lot of frustration.”
The Palisades, Hurst, and Eaton fires now spreading across Los Angeles are yet another reminder that our rapidly changing climate now acts in unprecedented ways, with hurricane-force winds, longstanding drought, and a host of other factors contributing to blazes that have so far caused two deaths, the evacuation of thousands, and mounting property damage. The following images are at once shockingly new — it is, after all, January in Los Angeles — and numbingly familiar.
Smoke from the Palisades Fire billow over the Los Angeles skyline Tuesday.Eric Thayer/Getty Images
The Palisades Fire burns near homes amid a powerful windstorm.Mario Tama/Getty Images
An onlooker takes photos as the Palisades Fire burns.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Traffic backs up on Sunset Boulevard as people attempt to evacuate from the Palisades Fire Tuesday.Apu Gomes/Getty Images
Police officers help people evacuate along Sunset Boulevard.Apu Gomes/Getty Images
A firefighting aircraft drops a fire retardant on the Palisades Fire Tuesday.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Houses burn in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood Tuesday night.Eric Thayer/Getty Images
Roughly 50 miles to the northeast, the Eaton Fire burns in Sierra Madre.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Wind bends palm trees as the Eaton Fire moves through Altadena.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Flames attack the fireplace of a home in Pacific Palisades Tuesday night.Eric Thayer/Getty Images
Sparks fly from the wheel of a burned school bus as the Eaton Fire moves through Altadena on Wednesday morning.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images