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The Hughes Fire ballooned to nearly 9,500 acres in a matter of hours.
Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
The island is home to one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world.
Kettle offers parametric insurance and says that it can cover just about any home — as long as the owner can afford the premium.
The Santa Ana winds are carrying some of the smoke out to sea.
A pre-print study from smoke researcher Marshall Burke and others shows how fires are eating into air quality gains.
Low-flow showerheads, electric heaters, and, of course, wind turbines all came in for a drubbing.
President-elect Donald Trump’s first press conference after yesterday’s certification of his election win (four years to the day since the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots) was never going to be a normal one. And so it proved that Trump’s wide-ranging comments at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday hit some familiar climate and energy falsehoods alongside some eyebrow-raising new ones, the largest-scale of which was probably his threat to reverse President Biden’s newly announced drilling ban.
Biden signaled his move to permanently ban new offshore oil and gas drilling yesterday along most U.S. coastlines. The 625 million acres covered by the ban would include the entire East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California, and parts of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska. “I will reverse it immediately,” Trump remarked of the ban. “It’ll be done immediately. And we will drill, baby, drill.” He also added that “we’re going to be drilling a lot of other locations,” and used the opportunity to call the energy transition “the green new scam,” an old favorite of his.
While Trump’s threats were alarming, they’re also most likely empty. The drilling ban would be considered permanent under the law, and Trump would not be able to simply reverse it without the approval of Congress.
In addition to his comments on drilling, Trump briefly criticized Biden’s “love” of electric cars, and once again claimed that his administration was “going to be ending the electric car mandate quickly, by the way,” the lack of such a mandate notwithstanding. “This guy loves electric, and we don’t have enough electricity,” he said. “And then we have AI where we need more.” Trump isn’t necessarily wrong about “more” AI energy demand, and in case he’s reading this, we have a bit of recommended background for him on the topic.
Lest you think that Trump forgot his most beloved renewable energy talking point, he reiterated his hatred for wind power by adding, “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built.” He noted “they don’t work without subsidy. … You don’t want energy that needs subsidy,” and repeated his blatantly false and conspiracy-driven claim that “the windmills are driving the whales crazy,” noting that offshore wind caused the beaching of “two whales” in a “17-year period.” As a reminder, Lauren Gaches, the director of NOAA Fisheries Public Affairs, previously told Heatmap that “there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales.” (Also worth noting: The oil and gas industry has long benefited from generous tax subsidies.)
Trump also went on to shout out … gas heaters? He claimed that Biden “wants everybody to have an electric heater instead of a gas heater,” adding that gas heaters are “much less expensive,” “work much better,” and don’t make you “scratch and itch.” It’s not clear whether was talking about heat pumps or electric resistance heaters, both of which are powered by electricity. But gas furnace sales have been outpaced by heat pumps for several years running, with no widespread itch issues we can find. Trump also put low-flow showerheads on blast: “It’s called rain, comes down from heaven. And they want to do, no water comes out of the shower.” This hasn’t been true of low-flow shower heads for some time now, as my colleague Jeva Lange reported last summer, which are “specifically designed to ‘push out water that feels like a higher pressure even with a lower flow rate.’”
In conclusion, there is no time like the present to peruse Jeva’s fact-check of Trump’s climate and energy claims. We’re going to be hearing a lot more of them in the coming years.
Americans love their public lands — particularly Americans living in the West, where easy access to the region’s undeveloped forests, mountains, rivers, deserts, and lakes is a point of identity and pride. But on Friday, in its first action as a voting body, the House of Representatives for the 119th Congress approved a rules package that reintroduces a provision making it easier for lawmakers to cede control of federal lands to local authorities. That, in turn, could result in vast swaths of the West being opened up to drilling or auctioned off to private owners, according to critics.
“It’s an obscure provision that [Congress] is using to essentially obfuscate the paving of the way towards selling off federal public lands,” Michael Carroll, the BLM Campaign Director at the Wilderness Society, told me of the rulemaking maneuver.
Republicans have tried this before. In 2017, during the party’s trifecta, the House approved a rules package with a near-identical provision that essentially declared that public lands do not have a budgetary value that needs to be accounted for when they’re sold, streamlining potential handovers. New Mexico Democratic Representative Raúl Grijalva described the provision at the time as allowing Congress to “give away every single piece of property we own, for free, and pretend we have lost nothing of any value.”
Utah Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz subsequently attempted to take advantage of the provision by introducing legislation that would have transferred 3 million acres of Western federal land to state control — a bill that was met by so much opposition from hunters, anglers, and his own furious constituents that he ultimately withdrew it.
The provision briefly disappeared from the rules packages of the 116th and 117th Congresses, when the House was controlled by Democrats, then reappeared again in 2023, when Congress was split but the House was in Republican control. But to advocates for public lands, the provision’s inclusion in the 119th Congress’ rules seems like a mere extension and more like a tactical teeing-up for the incoming Republican trifecta. “Utah politicians aren’t stupid. They learn from their mistakes,” Carroll said.
He described an anticipated three-pronged approach to land privatization headed into 2024: the judiciary route, with the Supreme Court poised to decide whether or not to hear a Utah lawsuit over the constitutionality of federal control of BLM lands later thisweek; the legislative route, which began with Friday’s rule package; and the administrative route, with Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who supports Utah’s lawsuit, under a directive to increase drilling. “It’s all backed up by the amount of money that the state of Utah appropriated to support their lawsuit — $20 million that they didn’t have that last time,” Carroll added.
He doesn’t expect Republicans to sit around twiddling their thumbs, either. In 2017, the “Trump administration was pretty new to governing and the levers of power.” He expects in 2024 “we’re going to see, in the next two weeks, legislation that moves to privatize public lands.”
“We need to hear Republicans when they say, ‘Drill, baby drill,’” Carroll went on. “That has real consequences for federal public lands.”
