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A pre-print study from smoke researcher Marshall Burke and others shows how fires are eating into air quality gains.
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.
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“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”
President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.
Copper traders and producers have anticipated tariffs on copper since Trump announced in February that his administration would investigate the national security implications of copper imports, calling the metal an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience.”
Trump has already imposed tariffs for similarly strategically and economically important metals such as steel and aluminum. The process for imposing these tariffs under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 involves a finding by the Secretary of Commerce that the product being tariffed is essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.
Copper has been referred to as the “metal of electrification” because of its centrality to a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors. Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average. “Copper, scrap copper, and copper’s derivative products play a vital role in defense applications, infrastructure, and emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced electronics,” the White House said in February.
Copper prices had risen around 25% this year through Monday. Prices for copper futures jumped by as much as 17% after the tariff announcement and are currently trading at around $5.50 a pound.
The tariffs, when implemented, could provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place. Congress took a swipe at the electric vehicle market in the U.S. last week, extinguishing subsidies for both consumers and manufacturers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That will undoubtedly shrink domestic demand for EV inputs like copper, which could make investors nervous about sinking years and dollars into new or expanded copper mines.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to accelerate permitting for and construction of new copper mines, the copper will need to be smelted and refined before it can be used, and China dominates the copper smelting and refining industry.
The U.S. produced just over 1.1 million tons of copper in 2023, with 850,000 tons being mined from ore and the balance recycled from scrap, according to United States Geological Survey data. It imported almost 900,000 tons.
With the prospect of tariffs driving up prices for domestically mined ore, the immediate beneficiaries are those who already have mines. Shares in Freeport-McMoRan, which operates seven copper mines in Arizona and New Mexico, were up over 4.5% in afternoon trading Tuesday.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.