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The hiking community is usually the biggest supporter of conservation efforts. But sometimes the animal you’re conserving is scary.
Before I learned his name, I knew Joe Scott only as the Bear Guy.
“Oh, and he is an archetypal Bear Guy,” Andrea Wolf-Buck, the communications director of Conservation Northwest, a Washington state conservation nonprofit, wrote me in a follow-up email after the initial oblique introduction. “Joe does not disappoint!”
I was speaking with Wolf-Buck in the first place because, unlike Conservation Northwest, I am not someone who has a Bear Guy on speed dial. To be honest, all I knew about bears at that point boiled down to three things: 1) that I really do not want to get eaten by one, 2) something something something play dead?, and 3) that they brought out extremely strong opinions in the ever-lively Washington Hikers and Climbers Facebook group, a 263,000-member-strong private community prone to long debates over the ethics of geotagging photos, the progeny of large animal tracks, and, evidently, the proposed restoration of grizzly bears in North Cascades National Park on the Canadian border.
A typical comment thread on a post about the latter in recent years has looked something like this:
Stupid idea. Let them roam where they roam. If they end up migrating down here, then so be it.
We do not want grizzly bears in the North Cascades. Keep them where they are. This is a terrible idea.
I think Mother Earth approves. I’m excited about this!
I am a hiker and climber and would prefer not to be killed by a bear.
This is amazing conservation news and a project long in the making to bring them back to their habitat!
I love the N Cascades the way they are.
NO.
I, like many members of the overwhelmingly liberal, animal-loving, granola-munching hiking community in Washington state, am predisposed to anything and everything that has a conservation angle. The fisher restoration? Bring ‘em back! Gray wolves? A majestic animal and a beautiful success story! But guiltily, I’d felt a niggling sense of, well, understanding when fellow outdoor enthusiasts expressed nervousness about the grizzly proposal.
“[T]he thought of grizzlies in the North Cascades sends shivers down many a Northwest hiker’s spine,” Craig Romano, a local guidebook author in favor of the restoration project, has written. “And I know that many of my fellow hikers have no desire to hike in grizzly country — even less so to encourage these bears to return to some of their favorite hiking grounds.”
A view of the North Cascades. “The wildest places are those that have grizzly bears,” said conservationist Joe Scott, “and we derive a great deal of value from that as people.”
Photo by craig kerwien on Unsplash
Though grizzlies (also called brown bears) once numbered in the thousands in the Pacific Northwest, their population was decimated by the Hudson Bay Company's fur operation in the mid 1800s. While hikers send pictures of cinnamon-colored (and deceptively named) black bears to the North Cascades park stewards in excitement every season, the last credible grizzly sighting in the area was in 1996. The grizzly bear — one of the most iconic symbols of the mountain west — is now believed to be functionally extirpated in the North Cascades.
Despite being a conservation horror story, this history has made modern Washington something of an arkoudaphobic hiker’s paradise. The state has all the rugged, breathtaking alpine beauty of places like Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, or British Columbia, but without the accompanying media reports of grizzly attacks. While Washington does have plenty of smaller black bears, they’re skittish and not considered to be much of a threat; precautions like bear spray and bear bells, all necessary in grizz’ country, are frequently dismissed by longtime locals as paranoid out-of-towner behavior. As Conservation Northwest’s Wolf-Buck sympathized with me on a call, “No Washingtonian who goes into the woods is really afraid of a black bear. We know what we’re supposed to do. Grizzly is a different story.”
The latest iteration of the on-again-off-again Washington state grizzly reintroduction process began in 2015 and found an unexpected bipartisan ally in President Donald Trump’s then-secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke. Opposition by the local ranching communities, taken up by Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), sent Zinke backpedaling, and his successor, David Bernhardt, shut down the plan for good. Then last November, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service revived the effort to reintroduce the bears using the Endangered Species Act provision 10(j), intended to “relieve landowner concerns” by giving potential newcomer bears an experimental status of “threatened,” allowing for more management options and relaxing regulations. The public comment period ended in December; now everyone is waiting for the environmental impact statement, which is the next bureaucratic hurdle to clear.
In the meantime, you can count on a Bear Guy to tell it to you straight. “I think the number of human deaths at the claws of grizzly bears [in Yellowstone National Park] totals 11 since 1872,” Scott said. “So there’s your perspective.”
Scott’s real title is international program director of Conservation Northwest; in addition to working on the grizzly program in the North Cascades, he partners with teams in British Colombia on similar grizzly revitalization projects. The programs in B.C. are often led by First Nations groups, who are spiritually, culturally, and even geographically linked to the grizzly; on the southern side of the border, the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe has voiced support for the restoration efforts but did not reply to a request for comment by press time.
Scott had actually overestimated the fatalities he quoted to me: Since Yellowstone was founded, just eight people have been killed by grizzlies inside the park boundary (a ninth unsubstantiated fatality may have occurred in 1907 after someone supposedly poked a bear cub with an umbrella). The home of Old Faithful gets 4.8 million visitors a year; North Cascades, by contrast, is one of the least-visited National Parks, with just 30,154 visitors in 2022. Yellowstone estimates the odds of being injured by a grizzly within its borders are around 1 in 2.7 million visits; in theory, if that ratio held in Washington, it could take almost 90 years before there was even an injury.
Grizzlies are “not like little Tasmanian devils spinning around the landscape, striking hapless humans at random, or some nonsense like that,” Tom Smith, a bear biologist specializing in human-bear conflict, and who is not involved in the North Cascades restoration effort, told me. “There is always some predisposing factor, and the vast majority of those [attacks] … if the persons had done something proactive or differently, they wouldn’t have happened.”
"You don't get to being an old bear by doing stupid things," Tom Scott, a bear biologist specializing in human-bear conflict, told Heatmap. "They don't just jump like a jack-in-the-box out of nowhere to go after people."
Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash
The problem is, there is a lot of bad information out there about grizzlies, which is why people like me — outdoorsy, environmentally minded, sympathetic to conservation efforts — can get caught up in the what-ifs. Many such fallacies are repeated and amplified in those Facebook posts: that the translocation candidates would be other place’s “problem bears” (they wouldn’t be); that we don’t need more meat-eating carnivores roaming the mountains (Cascade grizzlies are heavy plant-eaters); and that we should wait for the bears to come back on their own (cut off from the North Cascades by roads and cities in B.C., they won’t). Even concerns about climate change’s impact on future bears can be assuaged; research shows habitats favorable to grizzlies are only likely to expand as the region warms, in part because bears eat many of the plants that are the first to spring up after wildfires.
Then there is the fact that we’re still years and years away from grizzlies being more than a few needles in a vast 9,800-square-mile haystack. The proposal on the table is to move just 25 bears into the mountains over a 10-year period, with the dream goal of the population reaching perhaps 200 after a century. “I will probably never see a grizzly in the wild in my lifetime in Washington state,” Wolf-Buck told me.
Despite the anxiety on social media, most people are also supportive of the proposal. A May 2016 poll commissioned by Defenders of Wildlife, another conservation nonprofit supporting the bear project, and conducted by Tulchin Research, found 79% of hikers, campers, hunters, and fishers in the state supported the effort. Among all voters, approval was one percentage point better.
Support dips to a still-strong 66% in the eastern, agricultural, and red parts of the state, including Okanogan County, which lies directly to the proposed reintroduction area’s east. “In the community that I am a part of, and in the circles that I typically spend my time in, people are staunchly opposed to having another predator to deal with,” Pam Lewison, a rancher and the director of the Center for Agriculture at the conservative Washington Policy Center think tank, told me, adding that “ultimately, the thought that these are majestic creatures who are more afraid of you than you are them is just not true.”
But grizzlies are “odds assessors,” according to Smith, the bear biologist, and there are simple ways for hikers to tilt the math in their favor. In addition to precautions recreationists should already be taking in black bear country — storing food in bear canisters and never in a tent — the “one thing I don’t see blazoned across every pamphlet that should be there is, you have no business going into bear country without a deterrent,” Smith told me. “I mean, you have no business.” For most people, that just means getting in the habit of carrying bear spray. And hike with friends: “The simplest thing that a person can do, that shows consistent positive results, is hike with two or more people,” Smith added. “I don’t have a single incident in North America where two people calmly stood their ground and the bear touched them.” (Oh, and all that stuff about playing dead? Don’t do that.)
According to Scott, the North Cascades are “probably some of the best grizzly bear habitat on planet Earth.”
Photo by Hunter Reilly on Unsplash
Will there be a learning curve? Of course. But “just like the bears, we’re a highly adaptable species,” Scott told me, pointing out that “people will get used to it: They get used to carrying bear spray, they get used to storing their food in bins, they get used to making noise on a trail, and they get used to leashing their dogs. None of this is all that big of a deal.”
Then the Bear Guy said something that surprised me: that maybe we should be a little bit nervous outdoors. Maybe Washingtonians’ laxity is what is unnatural, the wildlife population long ago brought to a bloody heel by us. But is that actually what we want our state’s remaining wild lands to be — human playgrounds? “Some people want it, but I think most people don’t,” Scott said. “All the marketing for the outdoor crap and all this stuff — it’s all about adventure. Well, you want adventure? Here you go. Guaranteeing your safety is not adventure.”
There is still much work ahead: more studies; more research; more proposals; more letters to Congress; more outreach to the state’s ranchers, who are concerned about their livelihoods and the stresses on animals they care about; and, especially, more education of those who want to enjoy the beauty of Washington state but are a little bit uneasy about sharing that space with newcomers.
Which, to an extent, maybe we ought to be. As a wise Bear Guy once told me, “we might not necessarily be the boss out there, and that’s a good thing.”
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From the Inflation Reduction Act to the Trump mega-law, here are 20 years of changes in one easy-to-read cheat sheet.
The landmark Republican reconciliation bill, which President Trump signed on July 4, has shattered the tax credits that served as the centerpiece of the country’s clean energy and climate policy.
Starting as soon as October, the law — which Trump has dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — will cut off incentives for Americans to install solar panels, purchase electric vehicles, or make energy efficiency improvements to their homes. It’s projected to raise household energy costs while increasing America’s carbon emissions by 190 million metric tons a year by 2030, according to the REPEAT Project at Princeton University.
The loss of these incentives will in part offset the continuation of tax cuts that largely benefit wealthy Americans. But the law as a whole won’t come close to paying for those cuts in their entirety. The legislation is expected to swell federal deficits by nearly $3.8 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. This explosive deficit expansion could make it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, possibly further constraining energy development.
President Trump has described the law as ending Democrats’ “green new scam,” and conservative lawmakers have celebrated the termination of Biden-era energy programs. The law is particularly devastating for programs encouraging electric vehicle sales, as well as wind and solar energy deployment.
But the act is more complicated than a simple repeal of Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. In one case, Trump’s big law ends a federal energy incentive that has been in place, in some form, since the 1990s. In others, Republicans have tied up existing energy incentives with new restrictions, regulations, and red tape.
Some parts of the IRA have even remained intact. GOP lawmakers opted to preserve Biden’s big expansion of incentives to support nuclear energy and advanced geothermal development. That said, the Trump administration could still gut these tax credits by making them effectively unusable through executive action.
It can be confusing to keep the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s many changes to federal energy law in your head — even for experts. That’s why Heatmap News is excited to publish this new reference “cheat sheet”on the past, present, and future of federal energy tax credits, compiled by an all-star collection of analysts and researchers.
The summary takes each clean energy-related provision in the U.S. tax code and summarizes how (and whether) it existed in the 2000s and 2010s, how the Inflation Reduction Act changed it, and how the new OBBBA will change it again. It was compiled by Shane Londagin, a policy advisor at the think tank Third Way; Luke Bassett, a former Biden administration official and Senate Energy committee staffer; Avi Zevin, a former Biden official and a partner at the energy law firm Roselle LLP; and researchers at the REPEAT Project, an energy analysis group at Princeton University. (Note that I co-host the podcast Shift Key with Jesse Jenkins, who leads the REPEAT Project.)
You can find the full summary below.
On presidential proclamations, Pentagon pollution, and cancelled transmission
Current conditions: Over 1,000 people have evacuated the region of Seosan in South Korea following its heaviest rainfall since 1904 • Forecasts now point toward the “surprising return” of La Niña this fall • More than 30 million people from Louisiana through the Appalachians are at risk of flash flooding this weekend due to an incoming tropical rainstorm.
The Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky.Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
President Trump on Thursday signed four proclamations allowing certain highly polluting industries to bypass regulations established by the Biden administration. In addition to chemical manufacturers that help produce semiconductors and medical device sterilizers, the proclamations singled out coal-fired power plants and taconite iron ore processing facilities for two years of exemptions. Taconite is a low-grade iron ore primarily mined in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and northern Minnesota, which is then processed for use in the production of iron and steel. Trump justified the move by arguing that compliance with the current emissions rule for coal-fired power plants raises the “unacceptable risk” of shutdowns, “eliminating thousands of jobs, placing our electrical grid at risk, and threatening broader, harmful economic and energy security effects,” while the iron processing emissions rule “risks forcing shutdowns, reducing domestic production, and undermining the nation’s ability to supply steel for defense, energy, and critical manufacturing.”
The proclamations allow industries to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency standards that predate former President Joe Biden’s tenure. Trump justified the pause by claiming the former administration had mandated compliance with “standards that rely on emissions-control technologies that have not been demonstrated to work.” Researchers have previously found that air pollutants related to coal power plants cause nearly 3,000 attributable deaths per year. Taconite iron ore processing facilities produce harmful acid gases, including hydrogen chloride and hydrogen fluoride, as well as mercury, which have been linked to numerous adverse health effects.
Separately, the House passed Trump’s $9 billion rescissions package late last night, which includes cuts to international climate, energy, and environmental programs like the Clean Technology Fund. Republicans Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio joined Democrats in objecting to the bill. Trump is expected to sign the package Friday. An additional rescissions package is expected “soon.”
The Pentagon’s 2026 budget will enable the Department of Defense’s planet-warming emissions to grow by an additional 26 megatons, or about the equivalent of 68 gas power plants, a new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute found. The U.S. military was already the single largest institutional polluter in the world due to its “vast global operations — from jet fuel consumption and overseas deployments to domestic base maintenance,” as well as its manufacturing of weapons and vehicles, the think tank notes. With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Pentagon’s budget will exceed $1 trillion in 2026, representing a 17% increase over 2024. Its emissions, in turn, could grow to the point that if the DOD were its own country, it’d be the 38th largest polluter in the world, producing more CO2 emissions than the Netherlands, Bangladesh, or Venezuela. But “the Pentagon’s true climate impact will almost certainly be worse” than what the researchers found, The Guardian notes, “as the calculation does not include emissions generated from future supplemental funding such as the billions of dollars appropriated separately for military equipment for Israel and Ukraine in recent years.”
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New York’s Public Service Commission decided Thursday against moving forward with a major transmission project that would have had the capacity to deliver at least 4,770 megawatts of offshore wind power to New York City by the early 2030s. The commissioners said they were unable to justify “charging ratepayers for the multibillion-dollar project when feds are stymying” offshore wind, New York Focus’ Colin Kinniburgh reported on Bluesky. “We will continue to press forward regarding infrastructure needs for offshore wind in the future once the federal government resumes leasing and permitting for wind energy generation projects,” PSC chair Rory Christian said.
The canceled Public Policy Transmission Need determination was not specific to a particular offshore wind project, but rather was intended to match New York’s general offshore wind ambitions when it was approved in 2023. But as Heatmap has previously reported, Trump’s crusade against offshore wind has been a “worst case scenario” for the industry since day one, and, per ABC News 10, effectively “eliminates any reason for building new power lines in the first place.”
Microsoft has inked a deal to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of durable carbon dioxide removal from Vaulted Deep, a waste management startup, for an undisclosed amount. The companies boasted that the deal, which runs through 2038, represents “the second-largest carbon removal deal to date.” Vaulted Deep, an Xprize Carbon runner-up, diverts organic waste from landfills and incinerators by injecting it into wells thousands of feet underground using fracking technologies, which it says ensures over 1,000 years of durability, TechCrunch reports. Since Vaulted’s launch in the summer of 2023, the Houston-based company has removed 18,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Microsoft, meanwhile, has slipped behind its 2020 goal to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it generates by the end of the decade due to its rush to build out data centers.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s reorganization and downsizing are set to continue, with the agency offering another round of buyouts and early retirements to staffers in offices it aims to restructure, Politico reports. Among the affected offices are the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, which the EPA said it seeks to tweak to “better address pollution problems that impact American communities by re-aligning enforcement with the law to deliver economic prosperity and ensure compliance with agency regulations,” as well as the Office of Land and Emergency Management, which works on Superfund and disaster response issues. The Office of Research and Development, the Office of Mission Support, and the Office of the Chief Financial Officer are also affected.
Separately, in a preliminary decision earlier this week, the agency moved to block the state of Colorado from closing its six remaining coal-fired power plants by 2031. Colorado was attempting to codify the retirement dates in its Regional Haze Plan, which is typically used to protect the air quality of federal wilderness and national parks; however, the EPA rejected the proposal, according to CPR News. “We believe that the Clean Air Act does not give anybody the authority to shut down coal generation plants against the owner’s will,” Cyrus Western, the administrator of EPA Region 8, said. Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate for the Center of Biological Diversity’s environmental health program, claimed the EPA’s move shows the limits of what climate-conscious states can do on their own. “We may have state rules, but they won't be federally approved,” Nichols told CPR.
“There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.” —Heatmap Pro’s Charlie Clynes, in conversation with Jael Holzman about his new project tracking all of the nation’s county-level restrictions on renewable energy.
New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.