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Meanwhile, fire season has begun.
There is basically no original way left to complain about Congress. Bemoaning our elected officials is the most American of pastimes; pretty much as long as we’ve been a country, we’ve been cringing at the people who run it.
Lately, though, things have felt bleakly unfunny. Gerrymandering and tribalism have cleaved Congress into warring halves, making bipartisanship politically suicidal. The three-week House Speaker vacancy last fall exposed the legislative branch as the most dysfunctional it’s been in its quarter-millennium of existence. Lawmakers accomplished less in 2023 than any other time in the past 50 years, and experts predict 2024 will be even worse.
It’s a bad time to be someone who needs a bill passed, in other words. Like, say, a federal wildland firefighter.
Back in 2022, in the flush times after the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, President Biden allotted $600 million toward increasing the pay of federal firefighters, who made as little as $13 an hour at the time. The BIL boost was not insignificant: it bumped the starting wage to $15 an hour, and current firefighters received an annual pay increase of up to $20,000 that was retroactive to the year before.
The raise had always been intended to be temporary, serving as a “bridge for two years as the administration works with Congress on longer-term reforms,” the Biden administration explained at the time. That ran out last September — just in time for the government to implode spectacularly.
Congress had actually been working on a permanent fix last summer, the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act. A rare bipartisan piece of legislation, it was introduced by Arizona’s Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema and would mean a lasting increase to the base pay for Forest Service and Department of the Interior wildland firefighters, plus add new premium pay for those who respond to high-hazard fire incidents.
The bill cruised through the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on a 10-1 vote, with only Republican Rand Paul concern-trolling about the deficit. But it never even made it to committee in a Republican-controlled House obsessed with spending cuts. “There was a window where it could have been brought up for a vote that they pretty much missed,” Riva Duncan, a wildland firefighter of more than 30 years who serves as the executive secretary of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an industry advocacy group, told me.
Since the temporary pay bump expired in September, Congress has extended firefighters’ salaries three times using continuing resolutions, which means that every few months, there are headlines about how the force is on the brink of losing half their pay. The current supplement — and funding for the government more broadly — is set to expire March 8, and Congress will probably bridge it with a fourth extension as the bill continues to flounder and the larger budget fights continue.
Meanwhile, the 2024 fire season is already starting to heat up. Several states were under red flag warnings on Monday and Tuesday, with smoke from wildfires in the Great Plains and south drifting as far as New York City. And it’s February. Things will only get worse as the spring dries into the summer.
For the 17,000 or so firefighters affected, the uncertainty means their lives hang in a sort of limbo. Retirement accounts are suspended until Congress can work out a solution. Additionally, “a lot of people who have tried to get a loan, whether it’s for a vehicle or to buy a house or to move and pay rent — they can’t count on the supplement,” Duncan said. “So that really affects them, not having a plannable income.”
Needless to say, “morale is pretty low right now,” Duncan went on. It’s not an appealing time to be a federal firefighter, particularly when many state and private firefighting agencies can offer you actual financial stability (not to mention wages that are often higher). According to an assessment by the National Federation of Federal Employees, as much as half of the 11,000-strong Forest Service firefighters corps could start to look for other work if a permanent fix doesn’t happen soon. And if that comes to be, then “communities will burn, and people will die,” NFFE National President Randy Erwin warned in a statement last summer.
That’s because federal firefighters do things that other crews, simply, can’t. “The federal government … provides advanced-skill units not offered by state or private entities, such as hotshot crews, smokejumpers, rappellers, helitack crews, and wildland fire modules” — that is, specialist teams that are critical for fighting fires in this new era of extreme weather — Colorado’s Democratic Congressman Joe Neguse, the co-chair of the Bipartisan Wildfire Caucus, wrote in a letter last fall.
Retirements and defections from skill-based work like firefighting are especially damaging because with every senior departure goes the kind of on-the-job expertise that green new hires can’t replace. But that’s if there are new hires in the first place. Rumors abound that the agencies are struggling to fill their openings even this late in the training cycle, with a known vacancy rate of 20% in the Forest Service force alone.
To help its remaining workers make ends meet, the Forest Service has been paying firefighter wages out of its fire suppression fund, which is usually used on actual fires. In the DOI, the stopgap money comes from its preparedness fund, which is intended for day-to-day expenses. That has been working in the short term. But “if we have a big fire season, which in an El Niño year, usually we do — we know that there’s a lot less snow in the Rockies and the Sierra this year — then that pot of money for suppression, it’s not bottomless. It is a finite pot of money,” Duncan said. Agencies and lawmakers think, “‘Well, they’re making it work, so they don’t really need a permanent pay raise,’” she added. “But this is not a tenable situation.”
Each year, an average of 17 wildland firefighters die in the line of duty. Climate change doubled the number of large fires in the West between 1984 and 2015. And last year saw the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history in a place that wasn’t supposed to burn.
Firefighter pay, by all appearances, should be the rare issue on the Hill that lawmakers more or less agree on. No one wants to see communities burned to the ground, cities filled with smoke, or the people who risk their lives to contain such dramatic natural disasters go underpaid. The bill is about as close to a no-brainer as you can get in these divisive times, and Duncan feels sure that if it went to a vote, it would pass. But Congress remains distracted and obstinate. As long as the permanent bill is stalled and continuing resolutions are used as short-term fixes, federal firefighters will continue to feel undervalued or, worse, forgotten.
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.