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When there’s no way out, should we go down?
On August 20, 1910, a “battering ram of forced air” swept across the plains of western Idaho and collided with several of the hundreds of small wildfires that had been left to simmer in the Bitterroot Mountains by the five-year-old U.S. Forest Service.
By the time the wind-fanned flames reached the trees above the mining town of Wallace, Idaho, later that day, the sky was so dark from smoke that it would go on to prevent ships 500 miles away from navigating by the stars. A forest ranger named Ed Pulaski was working on the ridge above Wallace with his crew cutting fire lines when the Big Blowup bore down on them and he realized they wouldn’t be able to outrun the flames.
And so, in what is now wildland firefighting legend, Pulaski drove his men underground.
Sheltering from a forest fire in an abandoned mineshaft was far from ideal: Pulaski held the panicked men at gunpoint to keep them from dashing back out into the fire, and he and the others eventually fell unconscious from smoke inhalation. But even now, more than a century later, there are few good options available for people who become trapped during wildfires, a problem that has caused some emergency managers, rural citizens, and entrepreneurs to consider similarly desperate — and subterranean — options.
“We have standards for tornado shelters,” Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the author of a major ongoing assessment of the deadly 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, California, told me. “We don’t have anything right now for fire shelters.”
That’s partially because, in the United States, evacuation has long been the preferred emergency response to wildfires that pose a threat to human life. But there are times when that method fails. Evacuation notification systems can be glitchyor the alerts sent too late. Roads get cut off and people get trapped trying to get out of their neighborhoods. Residents, for whatever reason, are unable to respond quickly to an evacuation notice, or they unwisely decide to “wait and see” if the fire gets bad, and by then it’s too late. “If you can get out, you always want to get out,” Maranghides said. “But if you cannot get out, you don’t want to burn in your car. You want to have another option and among them — I’m not going to call it a ‘Plan B,’ I’m going to call it the ‘Plan A-2.’ Because we need to plan for those zero notification events.”
One promising, albeit harrowing, option has been TRAs, or “temporary refuge shelters” — typically unplanned, open areas along evacuation routes like parking lots where trapped citizens can gather and be defended by firefighters. Hardening places like schools or hospitals so they can serve as refuges of last resort is also an option, though it’s difficult and complex and, if done improperly, can actually add fuel for the fire.
Beyond that, you start getting into more outside-the-box ideas.
Tom Cova is one such thinker. He has been studying wildfire evacuations for three decades, and when I spoke to him recently to discuss the problem of traffic jams during fire evacuations, he told me that in Australia, “they have fire bunkers — private bunkers that are kind of like Cold War bunkers in the backyard, designed to shelter [people] for a few minutes if the fire’s passing.”
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Cova has even gone on record to say he’d consider one for himself if he lived on a dead-end road in California’s chaparral country. “My family and I would not get in our car and try to navigate the smoke and flames with bumper-to-bumper taillights,” he told the Los Angeles Times back in 2008. “We would just calmly open up, just like they do in Tornado Alley — open the trap door and head downstairs. Wait 20 minutes, maybe less, and come back and extinguish the embers around the home.”
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Bunker-curious Americans can get easily discouraged, though. For one thing, Australia’s bushfires burn through areas fast; if you’re sheltering underground from an American forest fire, you could be in your bunker for considerably longer. For another, there are very few guidelines available for such bunkers and as of yet, no U.S. regulations; even Australia, where there are standards, generally recommends against using fire bunkers except at the highest-risk sites. Then there is the fact that there is almost no existing American fire bunker market if you wanted to buy one, anyway. “You would think more people would have wildfire shelters, but they don’t,” Ron Hubbard, the CEO of Atlas Survival Shelters, told me. “Even when there was a big fire not that many years ago and all those people died in Paradise … it has never kicked in.”
Hubbard is technically in the nuclear fallout shelter business, though he’s found a niche market selling a paired-down version of his marquee survival cellar, the GarNado, to people in wildfire-prone areas. “How many do I sell a year? It’s not a lot,” he admitted. “I thought it would have been a lot more. You’d think I’d have sold hundreds of them, but I doubt — I’d be lucky if I sell 10 in a year.” Another retailer I spoke to, Natural Disaster Survival Products, offers “inground fire safety shelters” but told me that despite some active interest, “no one has bought one yet. They are expensive and not affordable for many.”
Installing a Wildfire Bunkerwww.youtube.com
Hubbard stands by his bunker’s design, which uses a two-door system similar to what is recommended by Diamond, California’s Oak Hill Fire Safe Council, one of the few U.S. fire councils that has issued fire bunker guidance. The idea is that the double doors (and the underground chamber, insulated by piled soil) will help to minimize exposure to the radiant heat from wildfires, which can reach up to 2,000 degrees. It’s typically this superheated air, not the flames themselves, that kills you during a wildfire; one breath can singe your lungs so badly that you suffocate. “Imagine moving closer and closer to a whistling kettle, through its steam, until finally your lips wrap themselves around the spout and you suck in with deep and frequent breaths,” Matthew Desmond describes vividly and gruesomely in his book On the Fireline.
This is also why proper installation and maintenance are essential when it comes to the effectiveness of a bunker: The area around the shelter needs to be kept totally clear, like a helicopter landing pad, Hubbard stressed. “You’d be stupid to put a fire shelter underneath a giant oak tree that’s gonna burn for six hours,” he pointed out.
If there is “a weakness, an Achilles heel of the shelter,” though, “it’s the amount of air that’s inside it,” Hubbard said. Since wildfire shelters have to be airtight to protect against smoke and toxic gases, it means you only have a limited time before you begin to risk suffocation inside. You can extend the clock, theoretically, by using oxygen tanks, although this is part of the reason Australia tends to recommend against fire bunkers in all but the most extreme cases: “Getting to a tiny bunker and relying on cans of air in very unpleasant conditions and being unable to see out and monitor things would be a very unpleasant few hours,” Alan March, an urban planning professor at the University of Melbourne, once told the Los Angeles Times.
Private fire bunkers, with their limited capacities, can start to feel like they epitomize the every-man-for-himself mentality that has gotten some wildfire-prone communities into this mess in the first place. Something I’ve heard over and over again from fire experts is that planning for wildfire can’t happen only at the individual level. NIST’s Maranghides explained, for example, that “if you move your shelter away from your house, but it’s next to the neighbor’s house, and your neighbor’s house catches on fire, preventing you from using your shelter, you’re going to have a problem.” A bigger-picture view is almost always necessary, whether it’s clearing roadside vegetation along exit routes or creating pre-planned and identifiable safety zones within a neighborhood.
To that end, bunkers are far from a community-level solution — it’s impractical to have a cavernous, airtight, underground chamber by the local school filled with 1,000 oxygen tanks — and they’re not a realistic option for most homeowners in rural communities, either. Beyond requiring a large eyesore of cleared space for installation on one’s property, they’re expensive; Hubbard’s fire shelter starts at $30,000, and that’s before the oxygen tanks and masks (and the training and maintenance involved in using such equipment) are added.
The biggest concern of all when it comes to wildfire bunkers, though, might be the false sense of security they give their owners. Evacuation notice compliance is already a problem for fire managers; by some estimates, as many as three-quarters of people in wildfire communities hesitate or outright ignore evacuation notices when they are issued, even when not immediately evacuating is one of the most dangerous things you can do. But by having a shelter in one’s backyard, people may start to feel overconfident about their safety and linger longer, or decide outright to “shelter in place,” putting themselves and first responders in unnecessary danger.
As far as Hubbard is aware, no one has actually ridden out a wildfire in one of his shelters yet (people tend to install them, and then he never hears from them again). But there have been reported cases of homemade fire bunkers failing, including a retired firefighter who perished in a cement bunker on his property with his wife in Colorado’s East Troublesome fire in 2020.
Even Pulaski’s celebrated escape down the mineshaft resulted in tragedy. Though the forest ranger is remembered as a hero for his quick thinking and the 40 men he saved from the Big Blowup, the stories tend to gloss over the five men who either suffocated or drowned in the shallow water in the mine while unconscious from the smoke.
Some things just don’t change over 100 years: You will always have the greatest chance of surviving a fire by not being in one at all.
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On Musk vs. Trump, tech emissions, and V2G charging
Current conditions: Polar air could deliver Australia’s most widespread snowfall in years this weekend • Toronto and Montreal have some of the worst air quality in the world going into Friday due to smoke from the Manitoba fires • Global average concentrations of CO2 exceeded 430 parts per million in May, the highest level in millions or possibly tens of millions of years.
Elon Musk’s criticisms of the Republican reconciliation bill triggered a very public falling out with President Trump on Thursday. Earlier this week, just days after his Oval Office send-off from the government, Musk took to Twitter to slam Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” bill, which he claimed would “massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.” By Thursday, Musk was calling for Congress to kill the bill, and his criticisms had escalated: “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” he tweeted. Trump responded by telling reporters on Thursday afternoon that “Elon and I had a great relationship — I don’t know if we will anymore,” touching off a back-and-forth on social media that culminated in Musk claiming Trump is “in the Epstein files,” a reference to Jeffrey Epstein.
The conflict also sent “the value of Tesla shares into a freefall,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote in his accounting of the breakup. The company’s stock was down 14% by the time the dust settled, erasing $153 billion from Tesla’s market value in the company’s biggest one-day drop on record. “The whole thing is idiotic,” Wayne Kaufman, the chief market analyst at Phoenix Financial Services, said, per Bloomberg. “People in these kinds of positions should know better than to act like kids in junior high.”
Indirect emissions from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta rose 150% in the three years between 2020 and 2023 due to the energy demands of artificial intelligence, a new report by the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union found. Amazon saw the most significant jump in emissions, up 182% in 2023 compared to 2020, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145%, and Alphabet at 138% over the same periods. In total, 166 digital companies reviewed by the report contributed just under 1% of all global energy-related emissions in 2023.
Indirect emissions, also called scope 2 emissions, account for those from “purchased electricity, steam, heating, and cooling consumed by the company.” However, the report also found that nearly half of the companies it examined have committed to achieving net-zero emissions goals, with 51 companies setting ambitious deadlines of 2050 or earlier. Twenty-three of the companies in the report already operated on 100% renewable energy in 2023, up from 16 in 2022. You can read the full report here.
Renault Group
Renault Group announced Thursday that the Dutch city of Utrecht is officially the first in Europe to debut a vehicle-to-grid car-sharing service. The program, called Utrecht Energized, was announced last fall, with Renault supplying an initial 500 electric models featuring V2G bidirectional charging technology, allowing the cars to charge using clean energy and also feed power back into the grid during times of high demand.
Utrecht was already one of Europe’s “most progressive renewable-energy cities,” per the announcement, with 35% of its roofs equipped with solar panels. “To manage the grid with a high proportion of renewables requires a system that quickly adapts to the changes in energy generation and consumption,” Renault wrote in its announcement, adding that the bidirectional cars in the program can deliver 10% of the flexibility to balance Utrecht’s wind-and-solar-generated electricity during peak times. Although the program is the first of its kind in Europe, similar programs are also underway in China, Japan, and Australia, Autoevolution writes.
Battery cell maker Envision Automotive Energy Supply Co. announced a work stoppage on Thursday of the construction of its manufacturing plant near Florence, South Carolina. “AESC has informed the state of South Carolina and our local partners that due to policy and market uncertainty, we are pausing construction at our South Carolina facility at this time,” spokesman Brad Grantham said in a statement, per the South Carolina Daily Gazette. The pause jeopardizes 1,600 new jobs and a planned $1.6 billion investment in the facility by the Japan-based company. The state’s Republican Governor Henry McMaster, a Trump ally, acknowledged that “the tariffs are going up and down” and some projects are “being paused,” but added, “Let things play out, because all of these changes are taking place. So, I’d say, relax if you can.”
Record-fast snowmelt in the western United States could be cueing up a particularly severe fire season, The Guardian reports. Despite some states, including California, seeing above-average snowfall this winter, all western states already have below-normal snowpacks, indicative of a rapid melt rate that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described in a recent special notice as “not normal.” Additionally, a third of the states in the West are in “severe” drought or worse, the highest proportion in more than two years. Combined with a forecast for above-average summer temperatures, the “quickly depleting mountain snows will limit summertime water availability in streams and rivers throughout the West, and may kick off a potential feedback loop that could intensify and expand the current drought,” The Guardian writes, singling out the Pacific Northwest as especially vulnerable to wildfires as a result.
A Ginko tree at the Miaoying Temple in Beijing. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
A study of 50,000 trees in China found that thousands of endangered varieties have been preserved for centuries within the walls of religious sites and temples. “The researchers found that the density of ancient trees inside the temples was more than 7,000 times higher than those outside temples and in the wild,”Nature writes. Eight of the tree species identified by the researchers can only be found on temple grounds.
SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” contends Johannes Ackva of Founder Pledge.
Johannes Ackva likes a contrarian bet. Back in 2020, when he launched the climate program at Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to philanthropic causes, he sought out “surgical interventions” to support technologies that didn’t already enjoy the widespread popularity of wind turbines and solar panels, such as advanced nuclear reactors and direct air carbon capture.
By late 2023, however, the Biden administration’s legislative sweep was directing billions to the very range of technologies Ackva previously saw as neglected. So he turned his attention to shoring up those political wins.
The modern climate movement came into its own demanding that the world stop shrinking from inconvenient truths. But as polls increasingly showed the 2024 election trending toward Republicans, Ackva saw few funders propping up advocates with any influence over the GOP. Founders Pledge pumped millions into Deploy/US, a climate group where former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida served as the top adviser, which then distributed the money to upward of 30 right-leaning climate groups, including the American Conservation Coalition and the Evangelical Environmental Network.
The bipartisan gamble paid off. In April 2024, Founders Pledge received an anonymous $40 million donation to bolster its efforts. Now an anonymous donor has granted Founders Pledge’s climate fund another $50 million, Heatmap has learned.
Founders Pledge declined to say whether the money came from the same unnamed source or separate donors. But the influx of funding has “radically transformed our ability to make large grants,” Ackva told me, noting that the budget before 2024 came out to about $10 million per year.
“The word exponential is overused,” he said. “But that’s roughly the trajectory.”
Amid the so-called green freeze that followed the Trump administration’s rollback of climate funding, Founders Pledge has joined other climate philanthropies in stepping in to back projects that have lost money. When Breakthrough Energy shuttered its climate program in March, Founders Pledge gave $3.5 million to serve as the primary funding for the launch of the Innovation Initiative, started by former staff from the Bill Gates-backed nonprofit.
Ackva said his organization is looking to invest in climate efforts across the political spectrum. But Founders Pledge’s focus on right-of-center groups wasn’t an election-year gimmick.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” he said. “That’s not an authentic way to build a civil society ecosystem.”
As Republicans in Congress proceed with their gutting of green funding, including through Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Ackva said it’s too soon to say whether the political strategy is paying off.
“If you think of grantmaking as making bets, some bets exceed others sooner, but that doesn’t make them bad bets,” Ackva told me. “Ultimately, philanthropy cannot define how a given policy goes. You can adjust the probabilities, maybe level the bets. But obviously it’s larger forces at play that shape how the One Big, Beautiful Bill gets made.”
The Senate may save or even expand parts of the IRA that support baseload power, e.g. nuclear and geothermal. But regardless, Ackva said, climate advocates are making a mistake training their focus so intently on the fate of this one law.
“It’s kind of the only thing that’s being discussed,” he said.
Meanwhile the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set for reauthorization next fall. The Energy Act of 2020 is slated for renewal this year. And funding for the Department of Energy is up for debate as the White House now pushes to expand the Loan Programs Office’s lending authority for nuclear projects by $750 million.
“Those are things we would see as at least as important as the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ackva said.
Given those deadlines, Ackva said he expected other donors to press advocates for plans last year on how to sway Republicans toward more ambitious bills this Congress. But after former Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket last year, he said he’d heard from his grantees “that they were asked what they were going to do with a Harris trifecta.”
“Everyone was betting on Harris to win,” he said. “There’s a very strong ideological lean among climate funders to a degree that was frankly a little bit shocking.”
The partisan divide over climate wasn’t always so pronounced. In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, ran on a more ambitious decarbonization platform than what President Barack Obama proposed in the White House.
There are dueling — though not mutually exclusive — narratives about how the American climate movement over-indexed on one side of the political spectrum. Both stories start in 2010.
The version liberals and leftists will find familiar is one that blames fossil fuel megadonors such as Charles and David Koch for aggressively promoting climate denial among Republican lawmakers.
The version told by Ted Nordhaus, the founder of the Breakthrough Institute think tank where Ackva got his start years before joining Founders Pledge, starts with the failure of the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill to pass through Congress.
When the legislation “went up in flames in 2010,” Nordhaus told me, a bunch of environmental philanthropies hired Harvard professor Theda Skocpol to author a 145-page report on what triggered the blaze.
“The report concluded that the problem is we were too focused on the technocratic, inside-the-Beltway stuff,” Nordhaus summarized. “We needed to build political power so the next time there’s an opportunity to do big climate policy, we would have the political power to put a price on carbon.”
Out of that finding came what Nordhaus called the “two-pronged, boots-on-the-ground” era of the movement, which backed college campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and also efforts to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline.
Reasonable people could debate the fiduciary merits of scrapping investments in natural gas companies or the value of blocking oil infrastructure whose cancellation spurred more shipments of crude on rail lines that face higher risk of a spill or explosion than pipelines. But once supporting fossil fuel divestment or opposing pipelines became the key litmus tests activists used to determine if a Democrat running for office took climate change seriously, the issue became more ideological.
“That made it impossible for any Democrat to become a moderate on climate, and made it impossible for any Republican to be a moderate on climate,” Nordhaus said. “The Republican Party has its own craziness and radicalism, but a bunch of that is negative polarization.”
To fund an effective “climate right,” Nordhaus said, Founders Pledge should seek out groups that don’t explicitly focus on the climate or environment at all.
“I’d be looking at which groups are all-in on U.S. natural gas, which has been the biggest driver of decarbonization in the U.S. over the last 15 years; which groups are all in and really doing work on nuclear; and which groups are doing work on permitting reform,” Nordhaus said. “That’s how you’re going to make progress with Republicans.”
I asked Ackva where the line would be for funding an eco right. Would Founders Pledge back groups that — like some green-leaning elements of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party or allies of France’s Marine Le Pen — support draconian restrictions on immigration in the name of reducing national emissions from the increased population?
“That would not be appropriate,” Ackva told me. “When we say we’re funding the eco right, like when we’re funding groups on the left or in the center, the things they are proposing don’t need to be exactly the things we will be prioritizing, but they need to be plausible, high-impact solutions.”
To Emmet Penney, a senior fellow focused on energy at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, it’s an obvious play. The green left that has long dominated climate policy debates “is premised on aggressive permitting and environmental law that makes it impossible to actually build anything useful toward addressing the things they’re most afraid of.”
“It’s become clear to anyone who wants to build anything that what the environmental left has to offer simply doesn't work,” he told me. “Naturally, more centrist organizations who might not even otherwise be slated as right-wing now look that way and are becoming increasingly attractive to people who are interested in building.”