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Forest ranger firings have already led to some trail closures, but the stakes get much higher than that.
It takes less than an hour to drive from Seattle to Franklin Falls, a beginner-friendly hike that is so popular among locals that it often runs out of parking space by mid-morning in the summer. A winter snowshoeing trip is no less rewarding — the rockface glistens with icicles, and sometimes Franklin Falls itself will freeze, delighting Instagrammers and Frozen acolytes alike.
Those views, though, now sit behind a barricaded trailhead. “Due to the large scale termination of Forest Service employees, Franklin Falls and the Denny Creek Trailhead are CLOSED,” the sign read as of Saturday morning. “This site will reopen when we return to appropriate staffing levels.”
It’s unclear when — or if — that will happen. Last Friday, the Trump administration began laying off thousands of public land managers, including 3,400 new hires to the U.S. Forest Service and 2,300 to the Department of the Interior, about a thousand of whom worked for the National Park Service. Adding insult to injury, the email firing the probationary employees told them they’d “failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills and abilities do not meet the department’s current needs,” despite many having unblemished or even exemplary employment records.
The cuts have placed a staggering strain on the remaining employees at the agencies. “Cutting thousands of National Park Service and Forest Service jobs is like reducing ski patrol during peak season — it may not shut everything down, but it makes access, safety, and the outdoor experience more challenging for everyone,” Ryan Laemel, the chief operating officer of Protect Our Winters, an outdoor recreation environmental nonprofit, wrote to me in a statement.
And there are more existential crises, too, like the cessation of fire risk reduction work, which could result in worse wildfires, and an abrupt halt to decades of ongoing scientific research in the parks, which will leave a gaping hole in our understanding of our own country’s climate and ecosystems. “Public lands aren’t just places to recreate — they are part of the climate solution and hold deep cultural significance, especially for Indigenous communities who have stewarded these landscapes for generations,” Laemel pointed out. Forests and grasslands managed by now-terminated employees “store carbon, protect water sources, and help prevent catastrophic wildfires.”
In Montana, for example, only three full-time workers now maintain all the infrastructure in the Yellowstone and Bozeman Ranger Districts, which cover 1 million acres, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports. “I honestly can’t imagine how the parks will operate without my position,” Alex Wild, a ranger who lost his job at Yosemite, wrote in an Instagram post that more than 150,000 people have liked. “I mean, they just can’t. I am the only EMT at my park and the first responder for any emergency. This is flat-out reckless.”
Stories like Wild’s have struck a chord on social media, where there has been an upswelling of outrage over the public land manager layoffs. Though President’s Day weekend saw general protests across the U.S. against Elon Musk’s idea of efficiency, NOAA firings and USAID workers losing their jobs haven’t, on their own, generated quite the same level of backlash.
Part of that is likely an issue of immediacy: 85% of Americans have vacationed at a National Park, but it’s not necessarily apparent from looking at your iPhone that you’re relying on free NOAA data. But Americans also have an almost cuddly reverence for forest rangers; as one social media user aptly put it, they’re basically the “librarians of the forest.” Eliminate their jobs and face the wrath of everyone who had a childhood dream of wearing a quad-dented straw hat when they grew up.
Neal Clark, the wildlands director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a nonpartisan non-profit leading efforts to protect public lands, told me he thinks the Trump administration is playing a long game with its sabotage of the Forest Service and Department of the Interior. “The bigger point is that when you cut staff from the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the National Park Service — agencies that have been chronically underfunded for decades — the additional lack of capacity and resources is ultimately going to catch up,” he warned. “It’s going to catch up with this administration, and it’s going to catch up to public land users.”
Trailhead closures like that at Franklin Falls are only the very beginning. Maybe this summer you’ll find it difficult to get the river permit you’ve come to expect for your annual family float trip. Perhaps you’ll find you can’t reserve a campsite in a National Park, or maybe the bathroom at your favorite trailhead will be closed or not serviced. Park infrastructure in general will get worse, making visits frustrating and messy; the $23 billion maintenance backlog at the National Parks will balloon into a multi-generational challenge.
Clark suspects this chaos is by design. “It’s intended to decrease the functionality. It’s intended to demoralize dedicated staff,” he said. “Ultimately, the goal is to bolster what has been a long-standing effort by industry and elected officials who back industry to sell off, transfer, or otherwise privatize public lands.”
Despite the incredible unpopularity of land privatization — majorities in every Western state, including conservative strongholds such as Wyoming and Montana, oppose the concept — there has been substantial talk of eliminating public lands by those in and around the Trump administration. By gutting the Forest Service and Department of the Interior, signs of strain will start to show. That, in turn, will “further bolster the argument that these lands would be better managed by the states, or in private hands,” Clark said.
It’s a playbook that is familiar across the government. If there is a silver lining, though, it’s that Americans really do seem energized to defend their access to the outdoors. “Protest. Speak up!” one Zion National Park ranger implored her followers this weekend. “Our nation is only as strong as we all stand together.”
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On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.