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Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms brought transportation chaos to Sydney and left 120,000 homes without power • Greece may resort to filling hotel pools with seawater instead of fresh water due to extreme drought • A clipper storm will bring some snow to the Great Lakes and parts of Appalachia today and tomorrow.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Strong winds continue to fan LA fires
Winds in fire-ravaged Los Angeles were weaker than expected yesterday, but are forecast to pick up again today as firefighters continue to battle ongoing blazes. The National Weather Service issued another “particularly dangerous situation” warning indicating extreme red flag fire weather in large parts of LA until 3 p.m. Wednesday. The Palisades fire is just 18% contained, and the Eaton fire is 35% contained. Some 88,000 people are under evacuation orders, and the death toll has reached 25. Conditions are expected to ease tomorrow, but another round of Santa Ana winds could emerge next week, the NWS said.
National Weather Service
2. Trump planning executive orders on energy
Lobbyists for the oil and gas industry widely believe President-elect Donald Trump will issue a suite of executive orders targeting energy policy shortly after his inauguration. According toThe Wall Street Journal, Trump is expected to “instruct agencies to begin unwinding President Biden’s limits on drilling offshore and on federal land.” Other moves to watch for include:
Rolling back tailpipe emissions rules
Resuming approvals for natural gas export facilities
Transforming agencies including the EPA, and the departments of energy and the interior
Trump’s team has apparently discussed his plans with energy industry insiders, but these are not set in stone. “Energy clearly was on the ballot, and we’re going to make the case that energy won,” Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told the Journal.
3. Trump DOE nominee Chris Wright to face Senate confirmation hearing
President-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, is scheduled for his Senate confirmation hearing today at 10 a.m. EST. He will face questions from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Democrats had asked the panel’s chairman, Republican Sen. Mike Lee, to postpone the hearing due to missing paperwork from the Office of Government Ethics that includes financial disclosures. Lee postponed the hearing for Trump’s pick for interior secretary, Doug Burgum, for a similar reason. Wright is currently the CEO for fracking powerhouse Liberty Energy. The Sierra Club called him a “climate denier who has profited off of polluting our communities and endangering our health and future.”
4. Extreme weather ranks 2nd on list of global risks for 2025
The World Economic Forum put out its annual report of global risks ahead of next week’s summit in Davos. Extreme weather events, which were at the top of the list last year, moved down a notch into the second position, below armed conflict. Twenty-three percent of the 900 or so expert respondents ranked state-based armed conflict as the number one risk facing the globe in 2025, whereas 14% chose extreme weather events:
WEF
Last year, 66% of respondents ranked extreme weather as the top risk, and 53% chose AI-generated misinformation. Looking ahead over the next 10 years, the climate crisis looms very large: Experts ranked extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, critical change to Earth systems, and natural resource shortages as the top risks facing the globe through 2035. The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting runs from January 20 - 25. President-elect Trump is expected to give a virtual address on the 23rd.
5. Nobel laureates call for ‘moonshot’ solutions to global hunger
A group of more than 150 Nobel laureates composed an open letter calling on governments to support the development of “moonshot” innovations to avert a looming hunger crisis. The letter warns some 700 million people are already going hungry, and the problem will only worsen as the population grows. The global food shortage has many causes, but the letter cites climate change as a major challenge and calls for “planet-friendly” technologies to boost food production. “We know that agricultural research and innovation can be a powerful lever, not only for food and nutrition security, but also improved health, livelihoods, and economic development,” said Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food Prize Laureate and outgoing U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security. “We need to channel our best scientific efforts into reversing our current trajectory, or today’s crisis will become tomorrow’s catastrophe.”
THE KICKER
Global EV sales were up by 25% last year compared to 2023, according to research group Rho Motion. In the U.S. and Canada, sales rose by 9%, compared to a 40% jump in China.
Hydrogen. What are you even supposed to think about it? If you’ve spent serious time focusing on climate policy, you’ve heard the hype about hydrogen — about the miraculous things that it might do to eliminate carbon pollution from cars, power plants, steel mills, or more. You’ve also seen that hype fizzle out — even as governments have poured billions of dollars into making it work.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse give you a rough guide for how to think about clean hydrogen, which could help decarbonize the industrial — even the molecular — side of the economy by storing energy and helping to make clean steel and chemicals. Do we really need hydrogen to fight climate change? Where would it be useful? And why has it failed to take off in the past? What will Trump and China mean for global hydrogen policy? Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: This is the next crazy thing that I think is just starting to kind of bubble up to the public awareness: Basically, hydrogen itself is not a climate forcer. It doesn’t warm the planet the way methane or [hydrofluorocarbons] or CO2 does. But it does react in the atmosphere in ways that increase the concentration of greenhouse gases.
Robinson Meyer: I think specifically that right now, we talk about when methane leaks into the atmosphere. And it may apply to other greenhouse gases, too, but the big one that you tend to hear about is that when methane leaks into the atmosphere from natural gas — and of course, we’re very worried about methane leaks. Because the thing about methane is that it traps a lot of heat, but it breaks down really quickly, right? So it tends to break down, unlike carbon dioxide, which, when you release it into the atmosphere. sticks around for millennia. When you release it into the atmosphere, it captures a lot of heat, but then breaks down into a smaller amount of CO2 after about 20 years.
The issue, and why it breaks down, that — we never talk about this, or we had no need to talk about this until hydrogen — and it’s crazy because the world is a closed system, or a largely closed system, right? Why it breaks down is it reacts with the free hydroxyl radicals floating around in the atmosphere.
Jenkins: Right, OH molecules.
Meyer: Well, what else reacts with OH molecules? Hydrogen. And so if we leak too much industrially produced hydrogen into the atmosphere, it could mess with the rate of breakdown of all methane in the global atmosphere, and thus increase the global warming potential of natural gas.
Jenkins: It makes the methane last, traps more heat, yeah. So let the record show that Robinson Meyer, the journalist, accurately captured the atmospheric chemistry of this process better than Jesse Jenkins, professor at Princeton. Nicely done.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
For more than four years, California has had a law on the books meant to protect homes and buildings during an urban firestorm like the Palisade and Eaton fires. But it’s never gone into effect.
In theory, the policy was simple. It directed state officials to develop new rules for buildings in areas with high fire risk, which would govern what people were allowed to put within the five-foot perimeter immediately surrounding their homes. A large body of evidence shows that clearing this area, known in the fire mitigation world as “zone zero,” of combustible materials can be the difference between a building that alights during a wildfire and one that can weather the blaze.
The new rules — essentially just a list of items allowed in that five-foot zone — were due two years ago, by January 1, 2023. But the California Natural Resources Agency, which is drafting the rules for the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to consider, has yet to even present a proposal. Ask anyone who’s been following this thread what’s taking so long, and they’ll almost certainly point to one thing: politics.
“There’s a ton of science about what to do, but the science has run into challenges with social acceptance, and therefore political acceptance,” Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, told me. People do not want to be told how they can or can’t landscape or furnish or otherwise adorn the outside of their homes. Inevitably, when the rules do come out, you’ll hear about Gavin Newsom coming to take away people’s decks and policing gardens.
No one thinks that zone zero rules, if enacted and adhered to, could have prevented fires in the Pacific Palisades or Altadena or saved every structure in the recent fires’ path. But alongside other fire mitigation strategies, zone zero design can significantly lower the chances of a given building burning, and therefore the chances that a fire will spread to neighboring buildings, and ultimately reduce the risk of fires becoming compounding, devastating disasters. Wara likened it to car safety rules like seatbelts and airbags — people still die in car accidents, but far fewer than would otherwise.
The question now is whether the record-breaking destruction in Los Angeles will be enough to convince people that zone zero rules are effective and worthwhile. Past experience shows the answer is not an obvious yes.
Why homes burn
There are three ways buildings ignite during a wildfire, Yana Valachovic, a forest scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network who specializes in community resilience and the built environment, told me. They are either exposed to burning embers, direct flames, or radiant heat, though most often a combination.
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Embers — hot, hard debris of burned material from a fire — can be carried miles away from their origin by the wind and create new spot fires next to homes. “What happens with those embers is they get thrown at the building, they hit the walls, the siding, and then drop to the base and collect at the base,” Valachovic said, “so you can have not just one, but thousands of embers at the base of our structures.”
Embers can also penetrate buildings through open windows and ventilation systems. If radiant heat from nearby burning structures causes windows to shatter or fall out, that can also create new vectors for embers to enter the home. “Embers find their way,” Valachovic said.
Fire mitigation experts promote two strategies for reducing vulnerability, and they go hand in hand. The first is home hardening, which could mean building with fire-resistant materials but also includes smaller but effective actions like covering air vents with fine mesh screens and sealing gaps to try to block embers. The second is creating so-called “defensible space,” or a buffer around the building, where any vegetation is carefully selected and managed to slow the spread of fire to and from the building. California divides defensible space into three different zones: Zone one extends from 5 feet away from the structure to 30 feet, and zone two goes out to 100 feet away. Then, of course, there’s zone zero.
The state has had regulations on the books to require at least 30 feet of defensible space in high-risk areas since 1965, and it updated the standards to establish a two-zone system in 2006. In both cases, the rules were “really framed around, how do you interrupt flames running at the building?” said Valachovic. The regulations included thinning trees and removing lower branches, clearing some trees that were closer to homes, clearing dead wood and litter, and pruning branches that hang over buildings. But they still allowed for vegetation right up against the house.
Since then, wildfire post-mortems have found that this scenario of flames burning a path to a building is not a primary driver of structure loss. “It was missing the point,” Valachovic told me of the previous rule structure. “What we’ve seen now for the last decade is that embers are really driving our home loss issue, and so we’re basically allowing all this vegetation and combustible material to be present in the zone that is really very vulnerable.”
In August 2020, after Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in California due to an explosion of wildfires, the state legislature passed AB 3074, which finally sought to bridge the gap by creating a new, “ember-resistant zone” — zone zero. Had the rules been implemented under the timeline mandated by the law, new homes would have had to comply beginning in 2023, and existing homes would have had to comply beginning in 2024. Like the earlier defensible space rules, they would have applied to homes located in parts of the state designated as Fire Hazard Severity Zones. These are generally areas that you might think of as the “wildland-urban interface,” where homes abut wildland vegetation like forests or scrublands, but others extend into more urban areas. Almost all of the burned area in the Pacific Palisades, for instance, would have been subject to the rules, while only a small portion of the homes in Altadena are in the zone.
Why “zone zero” is political
When I reached out to the California Natural Resources Agency to ask if there was an updated timeline for the regulations, one of the first things that Tony Andersen, the Deputy Secretary for Communications, told me, was not about the timeline but about the ultimate cost of compliance.
“We recognize there are costs associated with doing this work around homes and structures,” Andersen told me via email, “and we are focused on identifying options for financial assistance as well as education and outreach to help owners prepare and prioritize mitigations.” He then noted that the rulemaking was a “complex process” that the agency wanted to get right, and said it aimed to present a draft proposal to the Board “as soon as is feasible, most likely in the coming months.”
Andersen’s response illustrates one of several tensions that have made it difficult to write the zone zero rules — and will ultimately make them difficult to implement. If the rules say you can’t have a wooden deck, for example, or you can’t have a fence that touches the building, homeowners could face costly retrofits. And despite witnessing the horror of destructive wildfires, many homeowners don’t want to switch their wooden fence for a metal one, or replace their bushes with gravel.
Five feet might sound like a negligible amount of space, but people are attached to the aesthetics of this zone. Homeowners have become used to “softening” the line where the walls meet the ground by filling it in with vegetation, Valachovic told me. “We really developed this idea that we don’t visually want to see our foundations,” she said. “From a fire defense perspective, this idea that we have combustible material basically ringing our houses and our structures, that is problematic.”
Several people I interviewed for this story asked if I had seen a documentary about the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California called Bring Your Own Brigade. The film captures a series of city council meetings in 2019, when officials were considering updating local building standards. They weigh a number of ideas that would reduce the risk of embers collecting on top of, inside, or next to homes, including eliminating gutters and requiring roof overhangs and a five-foot setback for any combustible material.
At the time, the Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history, killing 85 people, displacing more than 50,000, and destroying more than 18,000 structures. But during a public hearing, community members lashed out at the potential cost, warned that new standards would prevent displaced residents from moving back, and decried the aesthetic implications.
“Paradise is an individualistic town,” one person says. “That’s part of the charm and the quirkiness. We don’t need consistency and uniformity.”
In another scene, a city councilmember asks Paradise Fire Chief John Messina to narrow down the list to just one rule that would make the community more fire resistant. “That five-foot barrier around your house is extremely important,” he replies. “That would be the No. 1 thing out of all of this that I would say would defend your home the best and have the most impact.” Shortly after, the council votes down the measure.
Michael Wara, who recalled the scene to me over the phone, said a similar thing happened when the fire chief in his community in Mill Valley tried to get the city council to adopt zone zero rules. “The word got out in the community that this crazy fire chief was going to make us rip up our front yards,” he said. When the council convened for a vote, more than a thousand people showed up to oppose it. The council ended up passing it as a voluntary measure.
To Wara, part of the problem is the language used to communicate these ideas with the public. “Zone zero” and “hardening” conjure a bunker mentality, he said. “I do not want my family to live in a bunker that is hardened to attack. I want my family to live in a home that is welcoming.”
He also thinks the state can reach a compromise, like allowing succulents and other fire-resistant greenery in zone zero. The rules don’t have to turn these areas into gravel and concrete wastelands to be effective.
Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department
The Los Angeles County Fire Department recently included photos in a notice to homeowners about defensible space rules and the upcoming zone zero regulations that illustrate how landscapes might strike that balance. The images feature stone walkways immediately next to homes, followed by raised beds made of metal and concrete containing attractive landscaping. Not quite “quirky” and “charming,” but far from a barren dystopia.
Where insurance fits in
Despite the delay in implementing zone zero, California has tried to pitch it as part of a strategy to solve the state’s insurance crisis. In 2022, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara enacted new rules requiring insurance companies to provide discounts to homeowners who do home hardening retrofits and create defensible space.
“That’s terrific,” Dave Jones, the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lara’s predecessor as insurance commissioner, told me. “But you don’t get the discount if they won’t write you the insurance.”
Jones said the bigger issue is that the models insurance companies use to decide whether or not to write a policy do not account for fire mitigation efforts. A homeowner could take every action on the list for home hardening, create a zone zero, live in a community that’s investing in aggressive fuels reduction, and so on, and insurance companies could still deny them coverage. Last year, Jones wrote a bill that would have required companies to change the models they use to determine coverage to account for mitigation. Several insurance industry trade groups opposed the bill, arguing that it was “premature and impossible to implement given the real-world data constraints,” and that it was “inconsistent” with the state’s efforts to “restore a healthy and competitive insurance market.” It didn’t pass.
If following zone zero guidelines meant having a shot at getting insurance, maybe people would be more open to doing it, Jones argued to me. But as things stand, that’s not the case. “I don’t think the failure is so much in the state developing the standards as it is in the lack of political courage to stand up to the insurance industry and say, hey, look, enough is enough. We’re going to pass a law to require your models to account for this.”
This past year, the California legislature passed a law giving existing homes three years, instead of just one, to comply with zone zero rules once they are finalized, whenever that is. And if the regulations are finalized this year, it’s possible that some of the rebuilt structures in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena will have to meet them.
Ultimately, Valachovic sees hope in fire mitigation work. The narrative that climate change is driving these destructive wildfires can make people feel helpless. But there are so many low-cost, simple things people can do to reduce their exposure. “I just feel like we have a moral imperative to share practical, reasonable actions that people can take to make a difference, and to know that with that, the odds improve substantially.”
The first veto of Joe Biden’s presidency, in March 2023, came on a bill that would have overturned a Department of Labor rule allowing retirement funds to consider environment, social, and governance factors — commonly known as ESG — when making investment decisions. At the time, it seemed like a good representation of where the issue stood: Though there was a conservative backlash against ESG investing, much of which revolves around whether companies are incorporating climate risks into their planning, the backlash was more bark than bite. ESG not only seemed here to stay, it was gaining in prominence as more investors and Wall Street firms realized they could no longer ignore the effects of climate change on the economic prospects of the companies they were funding.
Less than two years later, the picture looks rather different — at least politically. There is still over $3 trillion invested in ESG funds worldwide, the vast majority of it in Europe. But here in the U.S., the backlash has only grown stronger, and with Donald Trump’s election, there has been a Wall Street stampede away from public commitments to assess climate risk as a key component of investment decisions. There’s no way to know how much long-term effect this change will have on emissions, but the reversal in the public stance of the financial sector has been swift and intense.
Let’s begin with the banks. In the space of a month, the six largest banks in the United States — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan — all pulled out of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, an international United Nations-sponsored group under which member banks commit to pursuing net-zero carbon emissions from their lending and investments by 2050.
While Trump’s election may have been the tipping point, it comes after an organized campaign waged at the state level over the past couple of years, as Republican attorneys general have pressured and threatened the finance industry into abandoning its efforts to contribute to the mitigation of climate change.
In the spring of 2023, 23 Republican AGs threatened the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (like the NZBA, a UN-sponsored group) with antitrust action, saying it was pursuing “an activist climate agenda.” Companies began leaving, and a year later, the group disbanded. The effort against the banking alliance followed a similar pattern: Threats of legal action from Republican attorneys general, followed by a pullback from the banks.
Like insurance companies and banks, investment firms are clearly feeling the pressure. BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, recently pulled out of the Net-Zero Asset Managers Initiative, a group similar to those for insurers and banks, citing “legal inquiries from various public officials.” That included a lawsuit filed by Texas and 10 other Republican states, alleging that BlackRock and other firms were unfairly harming the fossil fuel industry with their investment decisions. This week, the NZAMI released a statement saying that in response to “different regulatory and client expectations,” it is launching an internal review, and meanwhile “suspending activities to track signatory implementation and reporting” of climate goals.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have been issuing reports and press releases condemning the “woke ESG cartel,” which they claim consists of “left-wing activists and major financial institutions that collude to impose radical environmental, social, and governance goals on American companies.” After the election, those Republicans now control both houses of Congress, as well as the White House.
So it’s a good bet that the pressure on the finance industry from Washington will only increase, especially with a new administration that combines dismissal of climate change with an eagerness to bring corporations to heel. In many cases, key administration positions will be staffed by former employees of the very fossil fuel companies that oppose real climate action, or at least by their allies. One vivid example: Lee Zeldin, Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, revealed in disclosure forms that he was paid tens of thousands of dollars to pen op-eds attacking ESG investing. His forms list only the PR firms that paid him, not the clients on whose behalf they did so.
These pullbacks from climate pledges are clearly motivated by fear, and may even be taken with regret by some of the CEOs making the decisions. If that is the case, however, it is not a universal sentiment. The Financial Timesreports that “Some Wall Streeters also feel able to embrace making money openly, without nodding to any broader social goals. ‘Most of us don’t have to kiss ass because, like Trump, we love America and capitalism,’ one said.”
Here’s the kicker: These alliances that are now wavering began with few requirements in order to bring in as many participants as possible; only later would companies have to meet more reporting and emissions goals. But “as accountability mechanisms started to come into play, at the same time we started to see the conservative backlash against it,” Tensie Whelan, founding director of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, told me. Now, “they’re all running scared.”
Though some critics charge that ESG is mostly about greenwashing, many financial actors — banks, asset managers, investors — have embraced greener investing because it is both good for the planet and good for business. If a company is exposed to climate risk but fails to account for it in its long-term strategy, that company is probably a bad investment. Investments incorporating sustainability considerations tend to perform as well or better than ordinary investment vehicles — the S&P 500 ESG Index, for instance, has outperformed the standard S&P 500. And a study by HIP Investor showed that public pension funds in blue states that incorporated ESG factors have generated higher returns than red-state funds that eschewed them.
“I would hope and assume that at some point there will be some class-action suits” against states that have turned away from ESG investing, and in so doing cost taxpayers money, Whelan said. In 2024, 17 Republican-run states passed bills restricting ESG investments with state funds, while eight Democratic states passed pro-ESG bills.
When banks or investment firms abandon climate alliances or pull back from climate goals in other ways, they nearly always put out statements reiterating their commitment to reducing emissions. While those might be sincere, the most important message is that the threats and pressure are effective. And that’s what has become so clear: Conservatives are energized and emboldened to roll back corporate efforts to address climate change, and are using every tool they have — legislation, litigation, threats, public pressure campaigns — to destroy those initiatives.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of room for pressure from the other side. Whelan notes that blue states “are very adamant about having key sustainability criteria” in their investments, and as younger generations accumulate more wealth, they are more likely to demand sustainability where they put their money. As for Wall Street responding to political pressure by backing away from its climate goals, “this retrenchment is unfortunate,” Whelan told me, but “I do think it’s temporary, and I think they know that. Because they’re not stupid.”
National Weather Service
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Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department
