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Talking to legislators from New York, Washington, Massachusetts, and New Jersey about what’s under threat, what’s safe, and the strain of it all.
State lawmakers around the country are negotiating budgets for the coming year amid unprecedented uncertainty. Any decisions they make now about how to spend state money may need to be revisited after Congress finishes its budget reconciliation bill, which could hollow out Medicaid, the largest pot of federal funds that most states receive.
On the climate and clean energy front, the Trump administration has been trying to claw back money allocated to states for electric vehicle charging, home energy retrofits, electric school buses, utility bill assistance, and more. Even longstanding tax credits that states rely on to transition to renewable energy are at risk. On top of all this, the president has threatened to sic his attorney general on states with ambitious climate policies.
I wanted to know how all of this was affecting the way the most forward-thinking state leaders on climate were contemplating their next steps. States passed some of their most ambitious policies to fight climate change during Donald Trump’s first term as president, and they are the best chance the U.S. has to continue making progress over the next four years. But if last time the administration was throwing sand in the gears of climate action, this time it’s trying to tear up the road entirely.
After talking to state senators and representatives in Washington, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, it was clear that every faced its own unique set of considerations and challenges, but there were a few recurring themes.
“We’re in this weird no-man’s land,” New York State Senator Liz Krueger told me. Between losing access to funds the state was relying on and uncertainty around how the Trump administration will reshape environmental protection and clean energy tax credits, “the agenda we might have set out for ourselves a year ago does not necessarily jive with the reality we must now confront.”
Krueger was frustrated because New York has been in the process of developing a new revenue-raiser to help pay for climate programs called Cap-and-Invest, but it’s behind schedule. Eventually it will place a cap on carbon emissions from major polluters and charge them fees when they surpass it — but draft rules for the program are more than a year overdue. Governor Kathy Hochul has not said when her administration will get them out, and environmental groups are now suing the state for putting its climate targets at risk.
The delay has been “quite aggravating,” Krueger told me. But at the same time, she’s worried that if and when the regulations are out, the Trump administration will try to shut down the program. Trump signed an executive order in early April directing his attorney general to identify and “stop the enforcement” of state climate programs that “are or may be unconstitutional.” The order specifically called out California’s carbon cap and trade program, which is similar to the one New York is developing.
“I don’t think we should stop moving forward as planned. But I think hanging over us is the concern that the feds will try to stop us,” Krueger said. She hasn’t sensed much appetite in the legislature to propose new climate programs this session, but she said she’s still hoping to get through a bill that she’s sponsored for the past few years requiring utility regulators to develop a strategy to transition buildings away from using natural gas for heating — although again, she wondered aloud if Trump would quickly try to shut it down.
Washington State, on the other hand, already has a cap-and-invest program in place. Representative Joe Fitzgibbon, of Seattle was the most optimistic of the state legislators I spoke to. “Our legal framework for fighting climate change was not predicated on federal dollars,” he told me. Last year, the state spent nearly half a billion dollars raised through that program on a wide range of projects to enhance wildfire prevention, improve energy efficiency in schools and homes, install electric vehicle chargers, and electrify buildings and vehicles. “We’re not backing off on any of our policies or any of our targets,” he said.
Fitzgibbon was unconcerned about the executive order. Legal experts are skeptical that the courts would side with the White House in any challenges to state climate laws. Trump also went after California’s cap and trade law during his first term and lost. “We think it’s bluster. We think it’s him trying to get headlines, and we’re just not inclined to fan the flames,” he told me.
Instead, Fitzgibbon is pushing forward with a bill this session to strengthen the state’s clean fuel standard. Current law requires a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from on-road transportation by 2034, and his amendment would increase that to between 45% and 55% by 2038.
New York is also behind on its goal to procure 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. The state only has power purchase agreements with three offshore wind farms — the small South Fork project, which is already operating, and two larger ones under construction — for a total of 1.8 gigawatts. Then shortly after Krueger and I spoke, the Trump administration issued a stop work order on one of those bigger projects, Empire Wind. Since Trump has also paused federal permitting for new offshore wind projects, Krueger wasn’t sure whether New York officials would even try to solicit for additional contracts. “There’s no good answers,” she said, with a sigh.
Offshore wind is a major element of New Jersey’s plans to cut emissions, as well. But the Trump administration recently pulled the permits for the Atlantic Shores wind farm, the only project serving New Jersey that had said permits.
State Senator Andrew Zwicker told me the sector was already struggling due to rising costs, supply chain issues, and local opposition. Even before Trump came into office, he said, he’s had to fight to keep renewable energy on the agenda. “There is a narrative that we can’t afford renewables, and that the way to go is you need resiliency and redundancy. And the only way to do that is, in our case, with natural gas,” Zwicker told me. He hears that story from Republicans — but also, increasingly, from Democrats. “That’s being driven by the cost of electricity more than it’s being driven by an executive order from Trump,” he added.
There is one source of funding for climate action that all states have access to that may be more impervious to federal interference. This came up during my call with Michael Barrett, a State Senator in Massachusetts, who asserted that “most of our climate policies don’t require budgeting.” That’s because the legislature has designed many of the state’s clean energy programs — including the buildout of electric vehicle infrastructure, rebates for heat pumps and energy efficiency, and compliance with the state’s renewable energy standard — to be funded by fees on monthly electric and gas bills.
Massachusetts is still really early in its legislative calendar — it operates on a two-year schedule and has barely started holding hearings for bills — but Barrett said there are some strategic shifts the state should make in light of Trump’s actions. For example, Trump has stymied offshore wind development, but Barrett said there was less the president could do to hurt solar. “So if you want to preserve the state’s industrial clean energy capacity,” he said, “you pivot to both behind the meter and in front of the meter solar on the ground, on the roofs, on canopies.” He also advocated for more subsidies for EV charging infrastructure rather than for electric vehicles themselves. “You forgo subsidizing individual drivers,” he said. “Many of them will purchase EVs anyhow, because they can afford to, and you focus on getting the charging infrastructure into the ground.”
All of the other state legislators I surveyed for this piece have similar programs financed through utility bills. In general, utility regulation is an area where state leaders have significant sway. In New Jersey, for example, Senator Zwicker is working on a bill that would require utilities to invest in “grid enhancing technologies,” equipment that enables power lines to transmit more electricity without having to totally replace the line or build a new one. That could go a long way to bringing more renewable energy online in the future. In New York, Krueger’s big priority for this year is to pass her New York Heat Act, which would significantly change how gas utilities are regulated, prioritizing transitioning away from gas to electric heating, and cutting the subsidies that customers pay to expand the gas system.
Though Barrett saw the ability for states to tack the cost of clean energy onto utility bills as reassuring, Zwicker found it concerning. “Every year, I personally have gotten more and more uncomfortable with putting everything on the backs of ratepayers,” he told me. “And we don’t have another model in place right now, so there’s no way to do anything else.”
New Jersey is facing many of the same challenges as New York and Massachusetts. The state’s economy has also taken a downturn, Zwicker told me, and budgets are tight. Governor Phil Murphy has proposed cuts to many areas, including climate spending. Zwicker said one of his big focuses right now is finding money to help low-income customers pay their utility bills, as the Trump administration is attempting to zero out federal funding for a longstanding energy assistance program.
New Jersey does have some money coming in for clean energy through utility bill fees, and it also funds climate action with proceeds from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a program that charges power plant operators for their emissions. (Massachusetts and New York participate as well.)
But Zwicker was deeply concerned about the loss of federal funding and support. “New Jersey just can’t afford to do this by itself,” he told me. Electricity costs there are already among the highest in the country. “This is a national emergency, and the federal government has got to be a strong partner. Regardless of the fight over how we’re producing energy, if we can’t transmit it, if we don’t have a robust grid, that is as basic an infrastructure as is a highway or a bridge. Under this administration, it’s far from clear that they’ll put a penny towards anything around energy, period.”
Even Washington is not quite sitting pretty. Like New Jersey, the state is in a “pretty severe budget crisis,” Fitzgibbon said, and not in a position to backfill lost federal dollars. Its economy has taken a downturn after a post-pandemic spike. One thing the legislature is doing in response is re-allocating money in the budget that in the past had been set aside for technical assistance to help households, businesses, and Tribes apply for government grants — since federal dollars will likely be scarce, anyway. While the state can still make progress with its cap and invest funds, which can’t be re-allocated to other budget lines, grant funding from the Inflation Reduction Act would help the state cut emissions faster and more cost-effectively, he said. Washington was in line to get $71 million for electric vehicle charging and $21 million for truck charging, for example, but the Trump administration is trying to claw back that funding.
At the end of my interviews, I asked lawmakers what they wanted people to know about what it’s like to do their jobs right now. Zwicker emphasized the sheer scale of the challenge of putting together a budget — especially one that advances climate action — under these circumstances. “Being part of a committee to put a budget together is always a challenge,” he said, “but when you add the threat of over a billion dollars of cuts to our school children, up to $10 billion to $14 billion of cuts for healthcare for seniors and the poor, and then you say, we need to continue to push on New Jersey’s clean energy goals, and get ourselves off of our addiction to fossil fuels, it’s an incredibly challenging task.”
Barrett wanted to make it clear that climate progress would continue under Trump. He said that even if Medicaid was gutted, the state’s efforts to cut emissions would suffer less than local public education — again, because so much of it is financed and implemented through utility regulation. “He can do a great deal of harm, but he cannot kill the resistance to climate change,” Barrett said of Trump. “We would have to play catch up in a big way after he left, but I suspect that we’re going to have to play catch up anyway.”
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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.