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Earlier this month, an odd little ad began appearing on TVs in Michigan. On first watch, it plays like any other political advertisement you’d see on television this time of year. In it, Michigan governor and Biden surrogate Gretchen Whitmer touts the high-paying electric vehicle manufacturing jobs that the Democratic administration has brought to her state. Watch the spot a few times, though, and it soon becomes clear what it’s missing.
Climate change.
The 30-second ad by Evergreen Action, an advocacy group linked to Washington Governor Jay Inslee, promotes “electric cars that power our economy and our future,” “training Michigan workers for high-paying jobs,” and policies that are “good for our economy.” This is all clearly referencing programs in the Inflation Reduction Act, arguably the most significant piece of climate legislation ever enacted in the United States, and yet the spot doesn’t once mention the one big upside all these upsides have in common. According to new polling that Third Way, a center-left think tank, shared exclusively with Heatmap News, that’s a good thing.
“Climate, as a message, is not going to drive turnout,” Emily Becker, the deputy director of communications for Third Way’s climate and energy team, told me.
While most Americans believe the planet is warming due to human activity and overwhelmingly want the government to do something about it, “climate change” — at least in those words — is almost never their most important issue. According to prior polling by Third Way and confirmed in issue polls run by firms like Pew, voters who say the economy is their No. 1 priority make up a plurality of the electorate, while “climate-first” voters represent a much smaller (and typically, whiter, older, and wealthier) subsection.
The new poll, conducted in mid-May and released on Monday, was done in partnership with Impact Research, a progressive polling firm that also works directly with Biden. What Third Way wanted was a better understanding of when and where climate becomes a make-or-break issue. The results show that just over half of Americans (54%) would back a candidate who views clean energy as a priority. When presented with the hypothetical of picking between a candidate who wants immediate climate action and one who “feels we must address inflation before combating climate change,” the numbers dip; just 40% of respondents said they’d vote for the former candidate, and 47% picked the inflation-busting latter.
Of course, this is a made-up scenario. For one thing, the clean energy build-out is inflation-busting, and lest we forget, the 2024 election is between a candidate who passed the most substantial climate legislation in U.S. history and one who still claims climate change is a hoax. But inflation is the heavy-weight issue in America right now. “People are going to prioritize anything that impacts them personally,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, a strategic communications consultant and the host of the podcast Words to Win By, told me.
Shenker-Osorio said she interprets the candidate question as a victory for climate advocates. Sure, when forced to make a binary, zero-sum choice between climate and inflation, the respondents to this poll chose the latter — but only by 7 points, and with a margin of error of 3.1. Climate advocates have done an “extraordinary job to bring voters into a place where they’re only 7 points underwater on this make-believe question, where somehow tackling corporate price gouging and raising people’s wages can’t be done if we are also tackling climate change,” Shenker-Osorio told me.
Shenker-Osorio did agree, however, that the word “climate” needs to be used carefully, at risk of confusing or alienating voters. “I’m not arguing that the winner here is to say ‘climate change’ over and over and over again,” she said. “I also don’t use that in my messaging. It’s way too abstract.” Shenker-Osorio pointed to phrases like “damage to our climate” instead, and stressed to me that it is important for Democratic candidates and their surrogates to “present a positive vision, which is: the clean energy future is ours for the taking.”
Becker, of Third Way, acknowledged that the question presented a blatantly artificial scenario, but argued that “using measures that can be imperfect can still be revelatory in terms of how individuals think about this issue.” For example, while emissions reduction is an obvious upside of clean energy — it’s literally emphasized in the name! — the polling confirmed that centering discussions of things like solar power and EVs on the high-paying jobs and cost-saving upsides was more productive than opining about saving the planet.
Finding the right balance might not seem too hard, but when you have a 30-second ad spot running in living rooms across Michigan, every single word needs to be high impact. And manufacturing electric cars because they “power our economy and our future?” That’s an upside everyone can agree on.
Los Angeles is on fire, and it’s possible that much of the city could burn to the ground. This would be a disaster for California’s already wobbly home insurance market and the residents who rely on it. Kettle Insurance, a fintech startup focused on wildfire insurance for Californians, thinks that it can offer a better solution.
The company, founded in 2020, has thousands of customers across California, and L.A. County is its largest market. These huge fires will, in some sense, “be a good test, not just for the industry, but for the Kettle model,” Brian Espie, the company’s chief underwriting officer, told me. What it’s offering is known as “parametric” insurance and reinsurance (essentially insurance for the insurers themselves.) While traditional insurance claims can take years to fully resolve — as some victims of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire know alltoowell — Kettle gives policyholders 60 days to submit a notice of loss, after which the company has 15 days to validate the claim and issue payment. There is no deductible.
As Espie explained, Kettle’s AI-powered risk assessment model is able to make more accurate and granular calculations, taking into account forward-looking, climate change-fueled challenges such as out-of-the-norm weather events, which couldn’t be predicted by looking at past weather patterns alone (e.g. wildfires in January, when historically L.A. is wet). Traditionally, California insurers have only been able to rely upon historical datasets to set their premiums, though that rule changed last year and never applied to parametric insurers in the first place.
“We’ve got about 70 different inputs from global satellite data and real estate ground level datasets that are combining to predict wildfire ignition and spread, and then also structural vulnerability,” Espie told me. “In total, we’re pulling from about 130 terabytes of data and then simulating millions of fires — so using technology that, frankly, wouldn’t have been possible 10 or maybe five years ago, because either the data didn’t exist, or it just wasn’t computationally possible to run a model like we are today.”
As of writing, it’s estimated that more than 2,000 structures have burned in Los Angeles. Whenever a fire encroaches on a parcel of Kettle-insured land, the owner immediately qualifies for a payout. Unlike most other parametric insurance plans, which pay a predetermined amount based on metrics such as the water level during a flood or the temperature during a heat wave regardless of damages, Kettle does require policyholders to submit damage estimates. The company told me that’s usually pretty simple: If a house burns, it’s almost certain that the losses will be equivalent to or exceed the policy limit, which can be up to $10 million. While the company can always audit a property to prevent insurance fraud, there are no claims adjusters or other third parties involved, thus expediting the process and eliminating much of the back-and-forth wrangling residents often go through with their insurance companies.
So how can Kettle afford to do all this while other insurers are exiting the California market altogether or pulling back in fire-prone regions? “We like to say that we can put a price on anything with our model,” Espie told me. “But I will say there are parts of the state that our model sees as burning every 10 to 15 years, and premiums may be just practically too expensive for insurance in those areas.” Kettle could also be an option for homeowners whose existing insurance comes with a very high wildfire deductible, Espie explained, as buying Kettle’s no-deductible plan in addition to their regular plan could actually save them money were a fire to occur.
But just because an area has traditionally been considered risky doesn’t mean that Kettle’s premiums will necessarily be exorbitant. The company’s CEO, Isaac Espinoza, told me that Kettle’s advanced modeling allows it to drill down on the risk to specific properties rather than just general regions. “We view ourselves as ensuring the uninsurable,” Espinoza said. “Other insurers just blanket say, we don’t want to touch it. We don’t touch anything in the area. We might say, ’Hey, that’s not too bad.’”
Espie told me that the wildly destructive fires in 2017 and 2018 “gave people a wake up call that maybe some of the traditional catastrophe models out there just weren’t keeping up with science and natural hazards in the face of climate change.” He thinks these latest blazes could represent a similar turning point for the industry. “This provides an opportunity for us to prove out that models built with AI and machine learning like ours can be more predictive of wildfire risk in the changing climate, where we’re getting 100 mile per hour winds in January.”
Wildfires have been raging across Los Angeles County since Tuesday morning, but only in the past 24 hours or so has the city’s air quality begun to suffer.
That’s because of the classic path of the Santa Ana winds, Alistair Hayden, a public health professor at Cornell who studies how wildfire smoke affects human health, told me. “Yesterday, it looked like the plumes [from the Palisades fire] were all blowing out to sea, which I think makes sense with the Santa Ana wind patterns blowing to the southwest,” Hayden said.
But with the Eaton fire now raging near Pasadena, northeast of Los Angeles, the air quality across large swaths of the city is deteriorating, Hayden said. That’s because the winds are now carrying a smoke plume as they travel down to the coast. And the situation is still changing rapidly.
At 6:30 p.m. Pacific time on Wednesday, the historic core of L.A. registered an air quality index of 105, according to the AirNow fire and smoke map, part of the federal government’s national air quality index. Anything over 100 is considered unhealthy for sensitive groups such as asthmatics. In Pasadena and East Los Angeles, the AQI was in the high 180s, 190s, and even the low 200s, which ranks as “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy” for everyone.
The AirNow map is a joint effort of the Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program and the Environmental Protection Agency, incorporating smoke plume data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s satellites, Hayden said.
It also shows readings from the EPA’s permanent air quality monitors set up across Los Angeles. And it includes data from cheaper, commercial sensors — from manufacturers such as PurpleAir — that people can set up in their homes and backyards. The AirNow site also calibrates the data from those commercial sensors so that they can be more accurately compared to the government’s more robust and scientific air quality sensors. (Many websites that display the PurpleAir data do not calibrate the data in this way, he said, which can lead to faulty readings.)
“We’ve been so successful that cleaning up our air through the Clean Air Act and other state-level activities that the air has been getting better for decades,” Hayden told me. “Now, with the growth of these huge wildfires emitting large amounts of pollution, that has undone some of the progress of all this awesome work over this past decade.
“It’s amazing what we can do when we choose to do so,” he said. “But it shows there’s more work needed to be done of how do we protect communities from this current and growing threat of not just wildfires, but the smoke from those wildfires as well.”
The Greater Los Angeles area is awash in smoke and ash as multiple fires burn in and around the city. It’s too soon to assess the overall pollution impacts from this rare January event, but we know the smoke is filled with tiny particles known as PM2.5, one of the most pernicious public health villains, associated with increased risk of respiratory and heart disease and premature death.
Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency tightened the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for PM2.5 for the first time since 2012. The South Coast Air Quality District, which contains Los Angeles, is known for having some of the worst air quality in the country. State officials have already deemed it to be out of compliance — and that’s without even counting pollution from major wildfires. But new research raises questions about whether complying with the new standard will even be possible in many places due to the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires.
Marshall Burke, who published the not-yet-peer-reviewed findings in December, is a Stanford University researcher who has spent the past several years investigating how wildfires have affected PM2.5 exposure in the U.S. In a 2023 paper published in Nature, he and his co-authors found that over just six years, wildfire smoke eroded decades of air quality improvements throughout the country. The trend was particularly bad in Western states, of course — some of which saw more than half of their gains erased. The pre-print of the new paper updates those findings to include data from 2023. But it also goes deeper on what this means in light of the new air quality standards. The authors find that 34% of air monitoring stations registered PM2.5 above the regulatory limit because of smoke in at least one of the last five years.
Technically, wildfire smoke is completely unregulated. Jurisdictions can request to exclude “exceptional events,” such as days when PM2.5 spiked due to wildfire, from their calculations. But as the “smoke season” has grown longer and more places experience more days with degraded air quality due to smoke, local officials have not been requesting more exemptions. The researchers analyzed applications for exemptions since 2019, and found that they were more common on days with higher levels of wildfire smoke, but were still infrequent overall.
One reason might be that local pollution control officers don’t always recognize when smoke has pushed pollution over the limit on a particular day versus other factors. There is also a “substantial resource burden involved” in demonstrating the influence of wildfire smoke on ambient air quality, the paper says. Also, as smoke becomes more commonplace, it may be more difficult for officials to make the case that a given smoke event is “exceptional.”
In any case, if this low rate of applications for exemptions continues, many more regions may find themselves to be out of compliance with the new PM2.5 standard.
In the paper’s discussion section, the researchers posit that as wildfire smoke continues to get worse, either of two possible scenarios could play out. In the first, air quality districts affected by smoke get better at applying for exemptions and therefore achieve compliance with the Clean Air Act, even as local air quality and public health deteriorate. In the second, they find other ways to stay in compliance with the standards, such as by tightening pollution caps on power plants and factories. “Such mitigation could be cost effective in many regions where abatement costs remain low relative to the benefits of further air quality improvements,” the authors write, “but could become onerous if wildfire smoke concentrations continue to grow, as is expected under a warming climate.”
The first scenario is bleak, and the second comes with a pretty big caveat. But those aren’t the only options — we can also reduce the risk of wildfires with better land-use planning and management. Unfortunately, promising strategies like controlled burns can push PM2.5 levels over the standard, and those are not exempt from reporting the way that wildfires are — creating a perverse incentive not to do them.
