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A zhuzhed-up explanation of the international plastics treaty negotiations you definitely didn't pay attention to this week.
Let’s just admit it: The INC-2 has a pizzazz problem. For one thing, if you’re not in the know, its name could easily be mistaken for the model number of
a large kitchen appliance. Even if you are in the know, it’s difficult to get excited about what is “the second of five U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for Plastics meetings” — even if this one did take place in Paris.
But what the INC-2 lacks in, shall we say, broad public interest appeal, it makes up for in importance, compelling characters, and drama. Yes, I said it: drama!
Here’s everything you need to know about this week’s INC-2 negotiations, which concluded on Friday and have the ultimate aim of creating a first-of-its-kind legally binding global plastics treaty.
This week, over 2,000 participants from 175 countries flocked to the UNESCO headquarters in Paris to debate, lobby, demonstrate, observe, sing, make art, and generally get very little sleep. For many attendees, it was a reunion of sorts: The first Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting (INC-1) was held six months ago in Uruguay; the next, INC-3, will take place in Kenya in November.
Why such a frenetic, globe-trotting schedule? Because the delegates only have until the end of 2024 — technically, just 15 more total negotiating days — to hammer out the specifics of the first international plastic pollution treaty, as directed by the U.N. Environment Assembly last year. If they’re successful, the treaty will be the most important international environmental agreement since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015.
It’s a complicated subject. Campaigns against things like plastic straws and takeout bags have come to be seen by some U.S. activists as distractions, while others have defended plastics’ enormous lifesaving upsides and the fact that a like-for-like replacement of everyday plastics with paper bags could, counterintuitively, skyrocket global emissions (fun fact: the single-use plastic bag was invented as an environmentally friendly alternative to cutting down trees).
But the INC delegates aren’t trying to get rid of plastics altogether, just reduce their use. The U.N. cites data that shows over a third of all plastics are used for “gratuitous” purposes like packaging, including food and beverage containers, which overwhelmingly end up in landfills. Cutting down on wasteful packaging while promoting recyclable and reusable goods could slash 80% of plastic pollution by 2040.
Unfortunately, the world’s plastic problem is only getting worse. Emissions from the making of plastics alone are expected to outpace coal emissions within the decade. By 2040, U.N. projections show conventional plastics, which are made using newly extracted fossil fuels and thus a major part of oil companies’ plans for surviving the energy transition, taking up a whopping 19% of the global carbon budget. And by 2060, the 139 million metric tons of plastic we produce every year could triple unless the world makes changes.
Anti-plastic activists, scientists, and a 55-country bloc of negotiators led by Rwanda and Norway that calls itself the “High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution” are pushing for caps on plastic production. Their argument is that cutting off plastics at the source is the only way to turn off the proverbial “tap” of pollution created during the “full lifecycle” of a plastic item, from the extraction of oil to make it, the energy required to shape it, and its eventual disposal in a landfill or recycling plant. Others are pushing to regulate what chemicals can be used to make plastics. And though it seems far less realistically achievable, a ban on single-use plastics has also been floated, including by the 14-nation Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) group.
\u201chttps://t.co/6SoYwpMWj7\u201d— Cate Bonacini (@Cate Bonacini) 1685601469
\u201chttps://t.co/a2NwIRMFpm\u201d— Cate Bonacini (@Cate Bonacini) 1685601469
The plastic treaty negotiations are breaking into three distinct camps, which I’ll call the “One Big Pledge” group, the “Bespoke Pledges” group, and “Saudi Arabia,” because it’s just Saudi Arabia.
The One Big Pledge group — primarily made up of the members of the 55-country High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution — wants an international, legally binding treaty that will “end plastic pollution by 2040” — however that target may be ultimately defined — by capping new plastic production at a “sustainable level,” likely by targeting single-use plastics; limiting the chemicals that can be used in the creation of plastics in order to reduce health hazards and encourage recyclability; and establish provisions for plastics at the end of their life to maximize reuse rather than leakage into the environment.
In a bit of pre-meeting drama, Japan ditched America to join the High Ambition Coalition, leaving the U.S. as “the only major developed country” that isn’t part of the group. High Ambition Coalition members also include Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Mexico.
The “Bespoke Pledges” group wants to take what The Washington Post calls a “less stringent” approach by letting countries “come up with their own pledges” — kind of like a children’s arts-and-craft project fair where everyone gets to make their own popsicle stick man, except instead of a popsicle stick man it’s a commitment to ending pollution and there are no penalties if yours sucks.
Some Democrats and assorted celebrities have protested that this approach is kind of lame, but the Biden administration is nevertheless pitching it as being more like the Paris Climate Agreement (which, of course, was notorious among activists for this very aspect of its structure). The U.S. is also insisting that it is being “just as ambitious” as the High Ambition Coalition even as others have deemed its position rather “underwhelming.” Hey, at least the American Chemistry Council likes it?
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia thinks the American plan of “come up with your own pledge and don’t worry about an enforcement mechanism” sounds basically great, but it could go for an even more hands-off treaty, too. Its proposal lists just two suggested “obligations” for signatories: “designing [plastics] for circularity” when possible and agreeing to share recycling tips with other countries.
For delegates, activists, and industry interests departing Paris this weekend, there was a distinct air of anxiety about how much work still lies ahead. Part of the issue was that negotiations in Paris got off to a slow — the rumor in the refillable water bottle fountain line is that it was an intentionally slow — start.
The biggest reason for the delay was an extended debate over the draft rules of procedure. First there was a kerfuffle about how voting blocs like the EU can cast votes on behalf of their member states. But that discussion gave some oil-producing countries like Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Iran an opening to try to revise the rules in a much bigger way: requiring decisions to ultimately have a consensus rather than be put to a vote.
\u201cNo multilateral environmental treaty has ever been negotiated without the option of voting. \n\nBrackets in #INC2 #PlasticsTreaty rule 38 would be a disaster for the planet and the future of environmental governance. \n\nhttps://t.co/HXOvgVjZWr\u201d— Magnus L\u00f8vold (@Magnus L\u00f8vold) 1685436365
The distinction between “voting” and “consensus,” while procedurally in the weeds, is actually a significant one. As the rule is written now, if consensus is not achieved, decisions then go to a vote, which must pass with two-thirds support. Countries that supported the change included Brazil, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela; countries that backed voting as a final option included the U.S., EU, U.K., Canada, Norway, and Senegal, whose delegate explained the issue succinctly and to applause: “Consensus is what kills democracy,” he was reported as saying. “If one or two countries don’t agree, we’re stuck.” Without the option to vote, it’s likely any meaningful plastics treaty will be DOA.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s delegate, Camila Zepeda, was losing her patience at this point: “It’s a waste of time and energy ... We’ve heard arguments at length [that] don’t focus on the essential issue, plastic pollution,” she reportedly said. “Everyone, turn off your microphones, stop your speeches.”
\u201c#PlasticsTreaty: And just like that, another full day was spent disagreeing on rules of procedures in Paris. And still no discussion on plastics pollution \ud83e\udee0\u201d— Laura Mercier (@Laura Mercier) 1685466850
But if it was the intent of major oil-producing states to delay negotiations, it worked. After agreeing to disagree about the rule on Wednesday — essentially kicking the can down the road to INC-3 — states like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Iran continued to raise questions that seemed designed to run out the clock (the Iranian delegate’s concern about observing a reasonable bedtime, at least, was relatable). Mexico’s delegate finally snapped, waving her name placard above her head, scolding her colleagues that it was time to “roll up your sleeves and get to work,” and then grabbed her backpack and walked out of the room:
\u201cAs Saudi Arabia and Russia kept asking for the microphone, Mexico\u2019s delegate waved her name plate, said we have to go to these groups, put her rucksack on and walked out to applause and chants of \u201cMexico\u201d from some observers. Got her way. Session over. #INC2\u201d— Joe Lo (@Joe Lo) 1685479936
Attention then turned to what will likely be a crux of negotiations: the role of recycling and “circularity” in the eventual treaty. Anti-plastic activists are gunning hard for the first of the three classic R’s: to reduce the amount of plastic that gets made, period. Oil and chemical interests, though, wanted to focus on the third R: recycling.
There’s a reason even countries like Saudi Arabia (and the U.S.) are writing “circularity” into their obligations: proposals that push advanced plastic recycling, with the intent of extending the lifespan of plastics, will allow fossil fuel companies and states to keep extracting oil to make new plastics by taking the attention off the plastic caps being mulled by the High Ambition nations. There also isn’t an agreed-upon meaning of the term “circularity,” Inside Climate News points out, meaning countries and companies can use the eco-friendly buzzword without being nailed to a commitment they don’t intend to keep.
Additionally, there are lots of valid concerns about advanced recycling, from the heavy energy and emissions output required to extend the lifespan of plastics to the current technological inability to minimize the dangers of toxic chemicals produced in the process.
Some players have also have stressed that all the attention on recycling alone is too limited. “To focus on plastic waste in this treaty would be a failure because you have to look at plastic production to solve the crisis — including the extraction of fossil fuels and the toxic chemical additives,” Dr. Tadesse Amera, the co-chair of the International Pollutants Elimination Network, told Spain’s El País.
A global agreement on how to handle plastic pollution was still clearly a ways off on Friday as the conference wound down. But by the end of the week, the delegates could celebrate genuine progress toward formulating objectives, obligations, and implementation tactics, and had additionally mandated a zero draft text of the treaty be written by the chair, which will be considered at INC-3. Activists applauded the step, which due to the delays, had not been a given.
There remain major hurdles to clear, however. If there is a single major takeaway from INC-2, it’s that oil-producing countries are becoming worried enough about the treaty’s direction that they’re beginning to drop the cooperative veneer and drag their heels. Even a relatively “underwhelming” plan like United States’ voluntary pledge proposal could potentially be at risk of failing if the consensus group ultimately wins out. “We may have to conjure up some additional days to finalize these talks,” one participant told the Earth Negotiations Bulletin on Wednesday. A hypothetical “INC-6” entered the vocabulary.
In the meantime, the delegates, lobbyists, activists, and observers are on their way back to their respective countries to catch up on sleep, detox from all the chocolate that was consumed, and prepare for INC-3 in Nairobi in November. The clock is ticking but if there is a glimmer of hope for the anti-plastics team, it’s that the oil interests are outnumbered. As Yvette Arellano — the founder and executive director of the Houston-based environmental justice group Fenceline Watch — told me by email from the ground in Paris, “They know once this starts going, it’s only gonna catch more public interest and global momentum.”
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Half of all Americans are sweating under one right now.
Like a bomb cyclone, a polar vortex, or an atmospheric river, a heat dome is a meteorological phenomenon that feels, well, a little made up. I hadn’t heard the term before I found myself bottled beneath one in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, where I saw leaves and needles brown on living trees. Ultimately, some 1,400 people died from the extreme heat in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon that summer weekend.
Since that disaster, there have been a number of other high-profile heat dome events in the United States, including this week, over the Midwest and now Eastern and Southeastern parts of the country. On Monday, roughly 150 million people — about half the nation’s population — faced extreme or major heat risks.
“I think the term ‘heat dome’ was used sparingly in the weather forecasting community from 10 to 30 years ago,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Brett Anderson told me, speaking with 36 years as a forecaster under his belt. “But over the past 10 years, with global warming becoming much more focused in the public eye, we are seeing ‘heat dome’ being used much more frequently,” he went on. “I think it is a catchy term, and it gets the public’s attention.”
Catching the public’s attention is critical. Heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the U.S., killing more people annually than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or extreme cold. “There is a misunderstanding of the risk,” Ashley Ward, the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University, told me. “A lot of people — particularly working age or younger people — don’t feel like they’re at risk when, in fact, they are.”
While it seems likely that the current heat dome won’t be as deadly as the one in 2021 — not least because the Midwest and Southeastern regions of the country have a much higher usage of air conditioning than the Pacific Northwest — the heat in the eastern half of the country is truly extraordinary. Tampa, Florida reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday for the first time in its recorded history. Parts of the Midwest last week, where the heat dome formed before gradually moving eastward, hit a heat index of 128 degrees.
Worst of all, though, have been the accompanying record-breaking overnight temperatures, which Ward told me were the most lethal characteristics of a heat dome. “When there are both high daytime temperatures and persistently high overnight temperatures, those are the most dangerous of circumstances,” Ward said.
Although the widespread usage of the term “heat dome” may be relatively new, the phenomenon itself is not. The phrase describes an area of “unusually strong” high pressure situated in the upper atmosphere, which pockets abnormally warm air over a particular region, Anderson, the forecaster, told me. “These heat domes can be very expansive and can linger for days, and even a full week or longer,” he said.
Anderson added that while he hasn’t seen evidence of an increase in the number of heat domes due to climate change, “we may be seeing more extreme and longer-lasting heat domes” due to the warmer atmosphere. A heat dome in Europe this summer, which closed the Eiffel Tower, tipped temperatures over 115 degrees in parts of Spain, and killed an estimated 2,300 people, has been linked to anthropogenic warming. And research has borne out that the temperatures and duration reached in the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”
The link between climate change and heat domes is now strong enough to form the basis for a major legal case. Multnomah County, the Oregon municipality that includes Portland, filed a lawsuit in 2023 against 24 named defendants, including oil and gas companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, seeking $50 million in damages and $1.5 billion in future damages for the defendants’ alleged role in the deaths from the 2021 heat dome.
“As we learned in this country when we took on Big Tobacco, this is not an easy step or one I take lightly, but I do believe it’s our best way to fight for our community and protect our future,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement at the time. The case is now in jeopardy following moves by the Trump administration to prevent states, counties, and cities from suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages. (The estate of a 65-year-old woman who died in the heat dome filed a similar wrongful death lawsuit in Seattle’s King County Superior Court against Big Oil.)
Given the likelihood of longer and hotter heat dome events, then, it becomes imperative to educate people about how to stay safe. As Ward mentioned, many people who are at risk of extreme heat might not even know it, such as those taking commonly prescribed medications for anxiety, depression, PTSD, diabetes, and high blood pressure, which interfere with the body’s ability to thermoregulate. “Let’s just say recently you started taking high blood pressure medicine,” Ward said. “Every summer prior, you never had a problem working in your garden or doing your lawn work. You might this year.”
Air conditioning, while life-saving, can also stop working for any number of reasons, from a worn out machine part to a widespread grid failure. Vulnerable community members may also face hurdles in accessing reliable AC. There’s a reason the majority of heat-related deaths happen indoors.
People who struggle to manage their energy costs should prioritize cooling a single space, such as a bedroom, and focus on maintaining a cool core temperature during overnight hours, when the body undergoes most of its recovery. Blotting yourself with a wet towel or washcloth and sitting in front of a fan can help during waking hours, as can visiting a traditional cooling center, or even a grocery store or movie theater.
Health providers also have a role to play, Ward stressed. “They know who has chronic underlying health conditions,” she said. “Normalize asking them about their situation with air conditioning. Normalize asking them, ‘Do you feel like you have a safe place to go that’s cool, that you can get out of this heat?’”
For the current heat dome, at least, the end is in sight: Incoming cool air from Canada will drop temperatures by 10 to 20 degrees in cities like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with lows potentially in the 30s by midweek in parts of New York. And while there are still hot days ahead for Florida and the rest of the Southeast, the cold front will reach the region by the end of the week.
But even if this ends up being the last heat dome of the summer, it certainly won’t be in our lifetimes. The heat dome has become inescapable.
On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: New York City is once again choking on Canadian wildfire smoke • Torrential rain is flooding southeastern Slovenia and northern Croatia • Central Asia is bracing for the hottest days of the year, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent all week.
In May, the Trump administration signaled its plans to gut Energy Star, the energy efficiency certification program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star is extremely popular — its brand is recognized by nearly 90% of Americans — and at a cost to the federal government of just $32 million per year, saves American households upward of $40 billion in energy costs per year as of 2024, for a total of more than $500 billion saved since its launch in 1992, by the EPA’s own estimate. Not only that, as one of Energy Star’s architects told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange back in May, more energy efficient appliances and buildings help reduce strain on the grid. “Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier told Jeva. “We need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it.”
That value has clearly resonated with lawmakers on the Hill. Legislators tasked with negotiating appropriations in both the Senate and the House of Representatives last week proposed fully funding Energy Star at $32 million for the next fiscal year. It’s unclear how the House’s decision to go into recess until September will affect the vote, but Ben Evans, the federal legislative director at the U.S. Green Building Council, said the bill is “a major step in the right direction demonstrating that ENERGY STAR has strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.”
A worker connects panels on floating solar farm project in Huainan, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The United States installed just under 11 gigawatts of solar panels in the first three months of this year, industry data show. In June alone, China installed nearly 15 gigawatts, PV Tech reported. And, in a detail that demonstrates just how many panels the People’s Republic has been deploying at home in recent years, that represented an 85% drop from the previous month and close to a 40% decline compared to June of last year.
The photovoltaic installation plunge followed Beijing’s rollout of two new policies that changed the renewables business in China. The first, called the 531 policy, undid guaranteed feed-in tariffs and required renewable projects to sell electricity on the spot market. That took effect on June 1. The other, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and mandated that new distributed solar farms consume their own power first before allowing the sale of surplus electricity to the grid. As a result of the stalled installations, a top panel manufacturer warned the trade publication Opis that companies may need to raise prices by as much as 10%.
For years now, Fortescue, the world’s fourth-biggest producer of iron ore, has directed much of the earnings from its mines in northwest Australia and steel mills in China toward building out a global green hydrogen business. But changes to U.S. policy have taken a toll. Last week, Fortescue told investors it was canceling its green hydrogen project in Arizona, which had been set to come online next year. It’s also abandoning its plans for a green hydrogen plant on Australia’s northeastern coast, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“A shift in policy priorities away from green energy has changed the situation in the U.S.,” Gus Pichot, Fortescue’s chief executive of growth and energy, told analysts on a call. “The lack of certainty and a step back in green ambition has stopped the emerging green-energy markets, making it hard for previously feasible projects to proceed.” But green hydrogen isn’t dead everywhere. Just last week, the industrial gas firm Air Liquide made a final decision to invest in a 200-megawatt green hydrogen plant in the Netherlands.
The Trump administration put two high-ranking officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on administrative leave, CNN reported. The reasoning behind the move wasn’t clear, but both officials — Steve Volz, who leads NOAA’s satellites division, and Jeff Dillen, NOAA’s deputy general counsel — headed up the investigation into whether President Donald Trump violated NOAA’s scientific integrity policies during his so-called Sharpiegate scandal.
The incident from September 2019, during Trump’s first term, started when the president incorrectly listed Alabama among the states facing a threat from Hurricane Dorian. Throughout the following week, Trump defended the remark, insisting he had been right, and ultimately showed journalists a weather map that had been altered with a black Sharpie market to show the path of the storm striking Alabama. NOAA’s investigation into the incident concluded that Neil Jacobs, the former agency official who backed Trump at the time and is now nominated to serve as chief, succumbed to political pressure and violated scientific integrity rules.
In March, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill to repeal the state’s climate law and scrap the 2030 deadline by which the monopoly utility Duke Energy had to slash its planet-heating emissions by 70% compared to 2005 levels. Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation. But on Tuesday, the GOP majorities in both chambers of the legislature plan to vote to override the veto.
Doing so and enacting the bill could cost North Carolina more than 50,000 jobs annually and cause tens of billions of dollars in lost investments, Canary Media’s Elizabeth Ouzts reported. That’s according to a new study from a consultancy commissioned by clean-energy advocates in the state. The analysis is based on data from the state-sanctioned consumer advocate, Public Staff.
For years, a mystery has puzzled scientists: Why did Neanderthal remains show levels of a nitrogen isotope only seen among carnivores like hyenas and wolves that eat more meat than a hominid could safely consume? New research finally points to an answer: Neanderthals were eating putrefying meat garnished with maggots, said Melanie Beasley, an anthropologist at Purdue University. “When you get the lean meat and the fatty maggot, you have a more complete nutrient that you’re consuming.”
Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.
What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.
By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.
At the same time, the Cram Fire can also be read as a precursor. It was routine, maybe, but also large enough to require the deployment of nearly 900 fire personnel at a time when the National Wildland Fire Preparedness Level is set to 4, meaning national firefighting resources were already heavily committed when it broke out. (The preparedness scale, which describes how strapped federal resources are, goes up to 5.) Most ominous of all, though, is the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for “Dirty August” and “Snaptember,” historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires.
National Interagency Coordination Center
“Right now, we’re in a little bit of a lull,” Jessica Neujahr, a public affairs officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, acknowledged to me. “What comes with that is knowing that August and September will be difficult, so we’re now doing our best to make sure that our firefighters are taking advantage of having time to rest and get rejuvenated before the next big wave of fire comes through.”
That next big wave could happen any day. The National Interagency Fire Center’s fire potential outlook, last issued on July 1, describes “significant fire potential” for the Northwest that is “expected to remain above average areawide through September.” The reasons given include the fact that “nearly all areas” of Washington and Oregon are “abnormally dry or in drought status,” combined with a 40% to 60% probability of above-average temperatures through the start of the fall in both states. Moisture from the North American Monsoon, meanwhile, looks to be tracking “largely east of the Northwest.” At the same time, “live fuels in Oregon are green at mid to upper elevations but are drying rapidly across Washington.”
In other words, the components for a bad fire season are all there — the landscape just needs a spark. Lightning, in particular, has been top of mind for Oregon forecasters, given the tinderbox on the ground. A single storm system, such as one that rolled over southeast and east-central Oregon in June, can produce as many as 10,000 lightning strikes; over the course of just one night earlier this month, thunderstorms ignited 72 fires in two southwest Oregon counties. And the “kicker with lightning is that the fires don’t always pop up right away,” Neujahr explained. Instead, lightning strike fires can simmer for up to a week after a storm, evading the detection of firefighting crews until it’s too late. “When you have thousands of strikes in a concentrated area, it’s bound to stretch the local resources as far as they can go,” Neujahr said.
National Interagency Coordination Center
The National Interagency Fire Center has “low confidence … regarding the number of lightning ignitions” for the end of summer in the Northwest, in large part due to the incredible difficulty of forecasting convective storms. Additionally, the current neutral phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation means there is a “wide range of potential lightning activity” that adds extra uncertainty to any predictions. The NIFC’s higher confidence in its temperature and precipitation outlooks, in turn, “leads to a belief that the ratio of human to natural ignitions will remain high and at or above 2024 levels.” (An exploding transformer appears to have been the ignition source for the Cram Fire; approximately 88% of wildfires in the United States have human-caused origins, including arson.)
Periodic wildfires are a naturally occurring part of the Western ecosystem, and not all are attributable to climate change. But before 1995, the U.S. averaged fewer than one megafire per year; between 2005 and 2014, that average jumped to 9.8 such fires per year. Before 1970, there had been no documented megafires at all.
Above-average temperatures and drought conditions, which can make fires larger and burn hotter, are strongly associated with a warming atmosphere, however. Larger and hotter fires are also more dangerous. “Our biggest goal is always to put the fires out as fast as possible,” Neujahr told me. “There is a correlation: As fires get bigger, the cost of the fire grows, but so do the risks to the firefighters.”
In Oregon, anyway, the Cram Fire’s warning has registered. Shortly after the fire broke out, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a statewide emergency with an eye toward the months ahead. “The summer is only getting hotter, drier, and more dangerous — we have to be prepared for worsening conditions,” she said in a statement at the time.
It’s improbable that there won’t be a megafire this season; the last time the U.S. had a year without a fire of 100,000 acres or more was in 2001. And if or when the megafire — or megafires — break out, all signs point to the “where” being Oregon or Washington, concentrating the area of potential destruction, exhausting local personnel, and straining federal resources. “When you have two states directly next to each other dealing with the same thing, it just makes it more difficult to get resources because of the conflicting timelines,” Neujahr said.
By October, at least, there should be relief: The national fire outlook describes “an increasing frequency of weather systems and precipitation” that should “signal an end of fire season” for the Northwest once fall arrives. But there are still a long 68 days left to go before then.