From 2019 to 2024, Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) electricity rates rose by 80% and Southern California Edison’s (SCE) by 71%—more than three times the rate of inflation over the same period. The primary cause of this remarkable increase was wildfire: the cost of vegetation management, grid hardening, liability insurance, and contributions to the state Wildfire Fund that California utilities pass through to their customers. PG&E customers now pay an extra $300 to $500 a year for wildfire mitigation.

Last month, Governor Gavin Newsom put forward a package to the Legislature that would have shifted some of that burden from ratepayers to property owners in high-risk areas. Those high-risk homeowners have long paid below-market insurance premiums for two reasons: Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that subjected insurance rate increases to the approval of an elected official; and the right of insurers to recoup uncapped damages from utilities in a process known as subrogation. Newsom’s proposal would have eliminated subrogation for utilities, bringing electricity customers relief and insurance premiums closer to market rate.

Instead of finally requiring homeowners in high-risk areas to pay what it actually costs to insure their homes, Democratic lawmakers rejected Newsom’s proposal to eliminate insurer subrogation under the banner of “preserving utility accountability” and opted for the status quo. In other words, ratepayers will continue subsidizing property insurance for residents of California’s most fire prone areas. Many of these residents are extremely wealthy: a recent Bloomberg analysis finds six of California’s ten highest fire liability zipcodes as determined by FAIR plan exposure are in wealthy enclaves and high-end resort communities including Beverly Hills, Malibu and Lake Tahoe.

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California’s next governor should pick up where Newsom left off and continue attempting to shift some of the wildfire burden from ratepayers to high-risk property owners. There are two important reasons for this.

First, the status quo is unfair to ratepayers. Only 10% of PG&E customers live in what the utility has designated as high fire threat districts—and yet the other 90% pay hundreds of dollars per year to subsidize mitigation and insurance for that small fraction of people. Many of the customers paying this subsidy are low-income households in California’s hot Central Valley, who need lots of air conditioning and are therefore seriously burdened by high electricity rates. A state bullish on affordability and social justice should not be compelling renters in Fresno to subsidize the wildfire risk of wealthy homeowners in Malibu.

Populist utility critics have argued that potential ratepayer burden is not a problem because utilities can simply get their shareholders to pay out damages instead. But that is not how utilities work. Utilities are among the most capital-intensive businesses in the economy and finance their infrastructure with borrowed money. When wildfire liability grows, investors demand higher returns to hold utility debt and equity—and that borrowing premium gets passed on to ratepayers. There is no free lunch.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, parking wildfire liability on utilities is not a cost-effective way to reduce wildfire risk.

Growing wildfire risk in California is the product of many factors aside from ignitions, including climate change, vegetation buildup from poor fuels management, and expansion into the wildland-urban interface (WUI) encouraged by the state’s restrictive urban land use policies and price controls on home insurance under Proposition 103.

Utilities control only one of these factors: ignitions.

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While utilities have made great progress in recent years at reducing ignitions, these efforts can only buy so much wildfire risk reduction. For one, utilities do not start most wildfires in California. CalFire data show they start only 6% of all wildfires in the state, and only 30% of the state’s most catastrophic ones.

There are also diminishing marginal returns to utility wildfire mitigation investment. An analysis by the Breakthrough Institute estimates it is about forty times more expensive to reduce utility ignitions by 95% than to reduce them by 80%. This is because the first 80% of ignitions can be eliminated by cheap operational measures like turning off power lines, while the “last mile” of risk can only be eliminated through the extremely expensive process of burying overhead transmission lines. Yet because of the existential implications of the current wildfire liability architecture, utilities are pursuing this expensive last mile, spending about 8 billion dollars a year on these efforts—a cost that is passed on to ratepayers.

California could be buying a lot more risk reduction for that money. Unlike utility ignition prevention, wildfire mitigation measures like forest management, home hardening, and community fuel breaks all reduce wildfire risk regardless of ignition source. Yet under the current paradigm, these investments are unlikely. When ratepayers underwrite utility mitigation, and insurers cover fire losses without pricing the risk into premiums, the property owners and local governments best positioned to reduce that risk have no market signal telling them to.

Utilities should still be responsible for their negligence—when a utility acts carelessly, its shareholders should pay. But shifting the residual risk of building in fire-prone areas onto ratepayers a hundred miles away is neither fair nor efficient. Newsom was right. His successor should finish the job.

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Last week, Breakthrough’s Executive Director, Alex Trembath, wrote in The Argument that so-called “climate hushing”—Democrats’ retreat from climate change as a central issue—is not a defeat for decarbonization and climate policy, but a return to the quieter, bipartisan, technology-and-abundance politics that actually has a track record of emissions reductions.

In his own words:

“The OG climate deniers were crank scientists who attributed climate change entirely to natural variability (or sunspots) instead of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. Their dubious work was cited at the highest levels of government, including by the Bush administration’s Council on Environmental Quality and, perhaps most notoriously, by the late U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, who suggested in 2003 that global warming was “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

That outright rejection of scientific consensus has largely lost in the court of public opinion: Recent surveys show strong majorities of Americans accepting the reality of climate change. With such denial in retreat, today’s climate activists have a new pejorative specifically for the Democratic elected officials and analysts who are conspicuously less outspoken on climate change during the second Trump era: climate hushing.

These so-called hushers are “meekly shying away from righteous and winnable fights against evildoers,” according to Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. Party moderates are the canonical hushers, at times directly urging Democrats “don’t say climate change,” as Searchlight Institute did last year. But the ranks of the hushers appear to grow larger by the day: The Washington Post recently reported that the word “climate” has vanished almost entirely from public statements by Sen. Ed Markey, a longtime Green New Deal champion who is now locked in a tense primary election against a more moderate challenger.

Democrats’ descent into infighting is most often taken as a sign of retreat for the causes of decarbonization and climate resilience. But that need not be the case.

Indeed, there are reasons to think that climate hushing will promote more ambitious and durable climate action than what came before. Unlocking the next wave of U.S. clean energy will require a return to the bipartisan compromise politics that have historically driven the country’s decarbonization. Maximalist climate activism can only harm these efforts.

In an era when voters are laser-focused on cost-of-living concerns and emerging challenges like artificial intelligence, climate hushing may well be the thing that saves the climate.”

Read the Essay HERE

Alex’s essay stands as an important intervention in the “climate hushing” debates, but its origins reach far further back than the current discourse. For years, Breakthrough has advocated for a quiet climate policy. In 2021, almost the entire Breakthrough staff put together research for a report advocating for a “quiet” climate policy that “swims with the tide of existing sociopolitical institutions and economic growth…uses technology and infrastructure as its main lever, and…disrupts, rather than exploits, political partisanship.”

“Historically, the US government has accelerated decarbonization through strategic investments in technology and infrastructure. Decarbonization of the American economy has depended upon the increasing affordability and scalability of lower-carbon alternatives to incumbent technologies: nuclear power plants, shale gas unlocked by the fracking revolution, solar photovoltaic and onshore wind plants, lithium-ion batteries, and biotechnology and other innovations that have improved the productivity of American agriculture. These were all enabled by decades of sustained, technology-specific research, development, demonstration, and deployment efforts made by the federal and state governments.”

Read the Report HERE

And the idea of quiet climate policy goes even further back. In an essay for Foreign Policy from 2019, Breakthrough Founder and President Ted Nordhaus argued that both carbon pricing and the Green New Deal—popular “solutions” to climate change at the time—wrongly assumed that public concern about climate would be strong enough to sustain a partisan, economy-wide approach to decarbonization. Instead, Ted argued, enduring climate progress needed to be made through quiet policymaking:

“In contrast to most current climate advocacy efforts, which seek to raise the salience of the climate problem in order to motivate politically difficult and economically costly climate action, quiet climate policy seeks to deescalate the political controversies associated with climate change and break up the costs of climate action.

Examples include establishing a federal clean energy standard that would require utilities to gradually transition entirely to zero-carbon technologies over the coming decades. Or government procurement at the U.S. Defense Department and national laboratories could be used to create initial markets for promising small nuclear reactors and geothermal and energy storage technologies. Providing U.S. farmers with technology and incentives to become more carbon efficient could bring huge benefits for the climate, as could government investment to develop zero-carbon technologies for industrial heat and power.

Working toward decarbonization, technology by technology and sector by sector, on a bipartisan basis and through careful negotiation with key stakeholders is the sort of thing that Congress still occasionally manages to do—as recent legislative efforts to support commercialization of advanced nuclear and carbon capture technologies demonstrate.”

Read the Essay HERE

While quiet climate advocacy, or “climate hushing,” has, for years, been the more effective approach to actually passing and enacting policy, it would be a mistake to understand the current climate hush as a tactical and strategic choice amongst the climate-pilled Democrats. Rather, Democrats—and the general public—have retreated on climate mainly because a whole slew of technological, political, and cultural developments have dramatically altered both discourse and the material world. Even before AI became the clear focus of the moment, the political tides had turned on climate.

In an essay from early 2024, entitled “The Era of the Climate Hawk Is Over,” Alex Trembath argued that “the political, economic, and cultural conditions that allowed for climate hawks’ advances over the last decade simply no longer hold.”

“So here we are, at the end of their era, and the signs are unmistakable. Of course the incoming Trump Administration quickly abandoned any talk of net-zero as well as the government’s commitments to the Paris Agreement. But corporate America is also abdicating net-zero commitments en masse. The taboo on criticizing radical climate activism seems to be breaking down. The effort to convert large swaths of the electorate into “climate voters” has demonstrably failed, and poll respondents increasingly identify a striking gap between Democrats’ values and their own on many issues, including climate change. Even segments of climate philanthropy, the ultimate benefactor of much of climate hawks’ activities over the years, are showing signs of adjusting to the new order of things.

The key question today is whether a critical mass of climate hawks themselves are willing to decenter or deescalate climate politics in service of building a lasting political coalition in support of energy abundance and climate resilience. Doing so, for many, would amount to a tacit acknowledgement that the existential claims of the climate movement have been more tactical than substantive. That may be a bridge too far for many or most committed climate hawks.

For everyone else, some cognitive therapy may be in order. Because it’s not just a dead-end strategy, but a dead-end identity. Climate hawks’ substantive and coalitional propositions can simply no longer be defended.

Frankly, the whole project was always a bit of a farce. Climate hawks’ nominal efforts to differentiate themselves and to move past cap-and-trade were almost entirely performative. Bill McKibben’s clarion call to build a climate movement was just an explicit bankshot strategy to fulfill the lost promise of carbon pricing. [David] Roberts’ obsequious genuflections towards environmentalists presaged the climate movement’s total inability to differentiate itself or prioritize among its various camps. The more recent move beyond carbon pricing may have felt like hard-headed realpolitik, but all the latter-day activist campaigns—from divestment to natural gas bans to liability lawsuits to “climate Superfund” bills—are just thinly veiled efforts to raise the price of fossil fuels. For their grand finale, climate hawks took longstanding bipartisan energy and technology policy and transfigured it into hyperpartisan environmental policy.

Those of us who have worked to construct an actual, coherent post-environmentalism have long seen the path of the climate hawk for what it was: a mirage. Efforts to center emissions and climate change meant de-centering innovation, jobs, and resilience—all things that voters of all stripes demonstrably care much more about. “Raising the salience” of climate change was a chimera—psychically intoxicating but politically dangerous. And draping climate policy in the cloth of “Green New Deal” mass employment or “Build Back Better” post-covid industrial policy ultimately couldn’t disguise the old-fashioned environmentalism underneath.”

Read the Essay HERE

With the backlash against artificial intelligence and data centers going full tilt at the moment, much of it centered around dubious environmental claims, I took to the Wall Street Journal opinion page this week to point out some of the remarkable opportunities that the massive build out of AI infrastructure offers America’s electricity grid, clean technology innovation, and the environment. Excerpted below:

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Opposition to artificial intelligence has intensified over the past year. A majority of Americans worry that AI will kill jobs, distrust the information it generates, and doubt that tech leaders will develop the technology responsibly. Opposition has crystallized in environmental concerns about data centers. More than 70% of Americans oppose their construction, and 10 times as many Americans told Pew Research that data centers are bad for the environment than said they are good for the environment.

The environmental movement has jumped on the bandwagon. The National Wildlife Federation calls the AI boom “an environmental justice crisis.” Student activists from the Sunrise Movement stormed the Washington lobbying offices of OpenAI last month, insisting that AI threatened their job prospects and access to clean drinking water.

But what if AI holds the key to a better environment? While concern about data centers focuses on dubious claims about water use, water quality, electricity prices and (somewhat more credibly) short-term carbon emissions, the environmental promise of this moment is being overlooked. AI and the build-out of data centers may offer a generational opportunity to clean up our electricity grid, improve water quality and water-use efficiency, and accelerate technologies to lighten the burden we impose on the planet.

How is this possible when hyperscalers are scrambling to build data centers and often powering them with carbon-emitting natural gas and sometimes even coal? Surging growth in electricity demand historically has accelerated the deployment of clean electricity-generation technology. The golden age of nuclear energy in the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s was a response to the rapid expansion of the grid in the postwar era. Rapid expansion of electricity grids in China, India and other developing countries has supercharged the adoption of solar, wind and batteries globally over the past 15 years. New research suggests this may be happening with the build-out of data centers in the U.S.

Read the Full Essay on WSJ.com

America needs to generate more electricity, and that means transporting more electricity, too. Historically, transporting more electricity has required building transmission lines. But tech companies, environmental groups, and renewables developers are enthusiastically endorsing three grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) that they believe offer faster, cheaper alternatives to the slow, costly work of traditional grid expansion: dynamic line ratings, topology optimization, and advanced power flow control.

At a high level, GETs use digital technologies to give utilities more insight into or control over the grid. Their small price tags and short deployment timelines are making GETs especially popular with policymakers who want to rein in ballooning energy bills while also capturing the economic activity that comes with an expanded, more accessible electric grid. In essence, our elected officials want more energy now, and for a fraction of the price of traditional energy infrastructure.

Organizations from Amazon and Tesla to the Rocky Mountain Institute are telling policymakers that GETs can do just that. They claim that “upgrading” the existing grid network with GETs can expand the grid in under a year with payback periods of weeks or months, potentially yielding over $5 billion in annual production cost savings that would materialize as lower electric bills. According to a research commentary from MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, “supporting [GETs] adoption may be the closest energy policy analog we have today to finding a $20 bill on the table.”

If only it were that easy to undo decades of systemic underinvestment in a transmission network long enough to stretch from Earth to the Moon. GETs are near-term complements to, not substitutes for, an expensive and extensive transmission buildout.

Results from a few case studies and a more nuanced explanation of how GETs work can help policymakers and non-technical members of the public appreciate GETs for what they are: innovations that deserve policy support as tools for grid modernization, not as “non-wires alternatives” to transmission lines.

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Dynamic Line Ratings (DLRs)

Dynamic line ratings are a new class of transmission line ratings—estimates of the maximum amount of electricity a transmission line can carry without overheating. Line ratings are key metrics for transmission operators, since lines that regularly approach their thermal limits need closer monitoring and often trigger new investments in grid expansion studies.

Dynamic line ratings are best understood as the most accurate of 4 rating methods. In order of increasing accuracy, they are: static ratings, seasonal ratings, ambient air ratings (AARs), and dynamic line ratings (DLRs).

Static ratings assign each line with a single maximum value and typically err on the side of caution. Seasonal ratings approximate how colder, windier winter weather cools a transmission line, allowing it to carry more electricity without overheating than it could in summer. AARs look at local weather conditions and calculate ratings based on the recorded temperature. This finer spatial and temporal scale provides more accuracy than the seasonal approach. Lastly, DLRs improve on AARs by measuring both temperature and wind speed in real-time using sensors installed on individual wires. These data are used to calculate a highly accurate, localized rating.

But, despite frequent claims that DLRs universally unlock new capacity on the grid, more accurate data does not necessarily mean more capacity.

In certain cases, static ratings overestimate capacity, whereas the more accurate rating systems—both AARs and DLRs—demonstrate constrained capacity due to factors not represented in the static systems. A study performed by the AES Corporation—a utility and power generation firm—found that DLRs and AARs correctly identified lower capacity in certain lines—especially lines in less windy areas—than what static rating systems assumed.

For example, in figure 1 below, both AARs and DLRs consistently rated the specific line as lower capacity than the static rating. This line, according to AES Ohio, runs through “a narrow, low-wind and high vegetation corridor,” meaning that there was less wind available to cool down the line. Wind tends to cool a line more than low temperatures, so the lack of wind here made a pronounced difference.

Data from another segment on this 69kV line emphasizes another key feature of DLRs: their benefits are relative, not absolute. Figure 2 compares the line’s DLR and AAR to its seasonal rating, showing the summer-winter transition (upper) and the winter-summer transition (lower). As might be expected from more accurate rating systems, the DLR and AAR don’t see a step change on a single calendar date. But, in this case, AES’s winter rating exceeded the line’s real carrying capacity captured by the more accurate AAR and DLR.

If the real carrying capacity of a line is less than expected using cruder static, seasonal, or ambient air ratings, its dynamic line rating will show inferior performance. This is good. Such information is extremely valuable for grid operators, even if it doesn’t unlock new capacity on a line. This “situational awareness,” in AES’s words, lets the utility know that the segment from Figure 1 may need especially close monitoring or benefit from reconductoring. And the high winter rating in Figure 2 may indicate that AES is systematically overestimating how much electricity its wires can carry in the winter, potentially warranting a reevaluation of how it calculates seasonal ratings. Further, because a transmission line is only as strong as its weakest link, even favorable DLRs on other transmission line segments can be constrained by the conditions of a single quarter-mile swath—a far more nuanced picture than the prevailing view that DLRs unlock capacity for every transmission line they’re deployed on.

Lastly, because the freed-up capacity from DLRs stems mainly from wind chill, DLR potential varies across the nation based on wind speed and topology. The regional spread of potential for wind energy offers a rough estimate for DLR potential. Results from early DLR demos in windy Oklahoma or Texas should not be generalized to the entire nation. But some of the most-cited national estimates do just that. Their results are therefore highly overstated. State and national policymakers should evaluate DLR potential in their own territory before assuming their adoption can miraculously increase grid capacity.

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What About Topology Optimization and Advanced Power Flow Control?

Compared to DLRs, topology optimization (TO) and advanced power flow control (APFC) have seen less adoption in the U.S. or globally [Figure 4]. Still, communication from policymakers and advocacy groups emphasize the ability of TO and APFC to substitute for new energy infrastructure.

When a utility sees a line getting repeatedly congested, that usually prompts a utility to build more transmission to relieve the constraint. While DLRs are praised for their ability to “unlock” more capacity on existing lines, interest in TO and APFC stems from a belief that they will allow operators to circumvent congestion like you would avoid a busy freeway, thereby reducing curtailment of cheap renewables, and lowering production costs without building new lines.

This is nominally true, but overeager estimates leave out the most important limitations.

Traditional grid operations use a grid digital twin primarily for monitoring. TO takes that to the next level, turning grid operation from a mostly reactive role to an active one.

If TO is the brains of grid operation in the digital era, APFCs are its muscles. Power flow control has historically used bulky electro-mechanical devices like breakers that are mostly limited to switching on and off. Their sluggishness is another reason why the role of grid operators has historically been limited, only intervening to avoid significant incidents. APFC capitalizes on recent improvements in power semiconductor technologies to interact with the grid at “grid-speed.” This unlocks a range of new applications, mainly for operators to fine-tune the grid at a much more granular level than what was previously possible.

Figure 5 above shows an example of congestion being rerouted using APFC. In the counterfactual without APFC, the grid operator would likely have curtailed the solar and wind and, in their place, turned on a different generator with ample transmission capacity but that is likely more expensive.

At the same time, the above diagram reveals a limitation of TO and APFC. After APFC activation, three lines are loaded at 98%. In practice, that leaves almost no safety margin. So even though the depicted intervention relieves the constraint (the red wire in Figure 5’s left box), TO software would have tested the intervention, identified it was not safe, and chosen to curtail the renewables instead of putting the grid into an unstable mode. This is a real and documented consideration. The Southwest Power Pool piloted TO software in 2018 and made explicit to reject actions that cause a line to be loaded over 95%.

Additionally, actively interacting with complex electricity flow can easily spiral into unexpected disruptions. This is especially relevant in today’s highly interconnected grid. PJM, the largest grid operator in the country, raises concerns that TO “may shift a problem, or some level of congestion, to another part of the system.” In other words, large-scale adoption of TO in PJM could inadvertently worsen grid conditions for its neighbors. PJM also warns that real-time network changes can distort energy markets, which rely heavily on day-ahead predictions and long-term hedges against the exact congestion that TO and APFC relieve. It’s counterintuitive, but congestion relief isn’t necessarily good if it’s unpredictable and decoupled from the aspects of grid operation that are layered on top of the wires. In other words, TO and APFC need to overcome coordination and economic challenges in addition to those of electrical engineering. So while both technologies show promise when deployed, there remain steep barriers to implementation at scale that often get swept under the rug.

Adding enough excess transmission lines to provide significant headroom and redundancy is a common solution to both constraints. Say that a hypothetical new transmission line was added to the system in Figure 5, decreasing the current lines from being 98% loaded to 70% loaded. With the addition of more transmission, TO might find the APFC intervention safe to pursue, thereby reducing renewable curtailments, lowering production costs, and so on. This dependence is well documented across multiple case studies. Under mandate by California’s SB 1006, Southern California Edison studied feasibility of GETs across its entire service territory. It found zero suitable targets for APFC, citing “insufficient alternative routing options to meaningfully redistribute power” as the first reason for those results. Britain’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) raises that the island country’s “corridor-shaped landmass limits the number of alternative transmission routes available to redistribute power efficiently.”

Put differently, a grid with excess transmission capacity is a key enabler for TO and APFC to be utilized to their fullest potential. Yet these GETs are being misconstrued as ways to avoid the investments needed to build the environment in which they would thrive most.

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Conclusion

Recent years have seen Congress and state legislatures introduce scores of bills focused on studying, subsidizing, and prioritizing the use of GETs over planning new transmission. Meanwhile, the prospects of Congress passing a bipartisan permitting and transmission reform package are getting slimmer by the day.

A more accurate view of GETs treats them as tools for grid modernization, an evergreen pursuit that warrants policy support and private investment in its own right. Contrast this with marketing GETs as near-term solutions to load growth and rising electricity bills that risks collapsing if load growth doesn’t materialize as fervently as expected or if supposed cost reductions from GETs don’t materialize.

Put simply, GETs will benefit from more transmission, and transmission will benefit from more GETs. Policymakers need to pursue both with an acute sense of urgency, understanding that enhancing the grid is nothing more than a stopgap measure until the country can expand it.

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Wildfires and heatwaves have made headlines causing more than €3 billion in damages in Europe this summer. Major fires in France and Spain forced more than 350,000 people to evacuate, capturing global attention and mirroring a severe wildfire season already underway across the Atlantic in the United States and Canada.

Smoke-filled skies, evacuations, and lengthy heatwaves raised concern on both continents. Global coverage was quick to connect these events with rising temperatures and climate change, with headlines like “Extremely scary findings’ show climate crisis is supercharging Europe’s wildfire weather” and “Climate extremes fuel explosive wildfires in Canada and the U.S.”

Climate change is worsening an important driver of wildfire: fire weather. But fire weather is not synonymous with wildfire outcomes. Human land use decisions, accumulating fuel loads, and fire suppression policies play a huge role in transforming how easily fire spreads across the landscape.

Regional land-use histories across Europe illustrate how recent wildfire disasters emerged from specific ecologies, management decisions, and local policy precedent. Understanding the differences in these local drivers and how they interact with global climate change is necessary to better predict, mitigate, and adapt to wildfire risk.

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Why climate seems like a good explanation for severe wildfires

Climate attribution studies show that anthropogenic warming is making fire-conducive weather more likely or more severe. Heat waves can cause vegetation to dry out. Changes in temperature, drought, and precipitation affect fuel moisture, enabling fire to spread more rapidly. In parts of Europe, climate change is also lengthening the period during which extreme fire weather can occur. Observers of the 2026 wildfire season point to burned area in countries like France and Spain being well above the median for this point of the year as evidence of the climate connection.

It’s true that climate conditions, like temperatures, humidity, wind, and precipitation patterns, influence how readily fuels burn. But human activity and land management patterns strongly influence what fuels are available to burn, their structure, and continuity across the landscape. The combination of these factors determines how a fire spreads and how intensely it burns.

At the global scale, satellite records have shown a decline in burned area from wildfires despite rising temperatures. The decline is mainly driven by changes in land-use at the landscape scale, largely due to agricultural expansion and intensification in Africa. The global trend says little about the trajectory of wildfire risk in any particular European country. Wildfire risk is not declining everywhere. But, it does illustrate the broader point that human activity and land management decisions exert enough influence to complicate the narrative that climate change will always lead to a net increase in wildfire activity.

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Land conversion and planted forests near Bordeaux

The record fires seen across Mediterranean Europe this summer, especially in Bordeaux, demonstrate how human land-use decisions have the exact opposite effect, instead exacerbating fire risk.

Bordeaux sits on the northern edge of one of France’s largest forest zones, called the Landes de Gascogne. The landscape is especially prone to wildfire today in part due to a nineteenth-century land transformation and the continued replanting of maritime-pine trees.

Before the nineteenth-century transformation, much of the Landes was wetland, peat bog, and open moorland. Under Napoleon III, a 1857 law directed the development of large swaths of the area. The wetlands were drained and what was a heterogeneous open landscape was replaced with far more continuous forest cover. The land conversion created what is still one of Europe’s largest planted forests with more than one million hectares (2.5 million acres) made up primarily of maritime-pine grown for timber, pulp, and resin. Despite the economic boon, the increased forest continuity came at a cost. As one commenter described, “when you plant millions of the same, fire-adapted tree in even-aged stands, at high density, across a nearly unbroken block of landscape, you’re building a regional-scale fire conveyor belt.”

The vulnerability of this landscape predates modern warming trends. A catastrophic fire in 1949 near Cestas burned roughly 50,000 hectares in a matter of days killing 82 people and remains the deadliest wildfire in French history. Fires burned a record 130,000 hectares over the course of that year’s fire season.

Even more recent fire seasons demonstrate that the same fuel-continuity pattern built by centuries of dense, even-aged pine plantation continues to drive both burned area and evacuation scale. In the summer of 2022, a series of fires near Landiras and La Teste-de-Buch spread through the same forest, burning more than 30,000 hectares. Four years later, fires beginning near Saumos this summer burned 42,000 hectares within five days and forced roughly 220,000 evacuations.

The extraordinary 2026 fire reflects how extreme fire weather helped create conditions for rapid spread on a vast, highly connected forest shaped by more than a century of land-use decisions.

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Agricultural retreat transformed Europe’s fire landscape

Zooming out from France, Europe’s forests are growing. Forest area has increased by about 11% since 1990. Total cropland and grassland declined over the same period. The expansion is driven in part by intentional afforestation and in areas experiencing rural depopulation, abandoned agricultural land has undergone natural forest regeneration.

Especially in many parts of Mediterranean Europe, agricultural and pastoral abandonment is contributing to the expansion of forests, shrublands, and other woody vegetation. One ecological consequence of this is a build up of fuels across formerly managed landscapes. A grazed pasture, orchard, or cultivated field can interrupt the continuity of woody vegetation. Once abandoned, shrubs and young trees may recolonize, eventually connecting areas that were previously separated.

When farmland abandonment leads to a more homogenous landscape, fuel buildup and continuity increases. Landscape-fire simulations suggest that greater abandonment in Mediterranean agricultural landscapes can cause wildfires to become larger, more intense, and more likely to spread. A recent modeling study found that in eastern Spain, replacing active agriculture with abandoned vegetation tripled potential fire size and quadrupled exposure of human infrastructure. Conversely, population shifts from rural to urban areas can reduce the chances of fire ignitions caused by humans.

The balance of these competing forces has changed over time, varying by season and region. For example, from 1985 to 2011, despite increases in forested area, the total area burned annually across Portugal, Spain, southern France, Italy, and Greece declined by just over 300,000 hectares. The annual number of fires also declined overall.

Total burned area reflects the net effect of competing forces, not climate or fuel conditions alone. Land abandonment can increase underlying fire hazard by increasing fuel quantity and continuity, while investments in mitigating the likelihood of a fire starting or spreading (prevention) and quickly quelling fires once started (suppression) simultaneously reduce the amount of land that actually burns. In Mediterranean France, for example, fire size and burned area fell sharply after a strengthened suppression policy took effect in the mid-1990s—even as fuel accumulation and fire-weather hazard increased. Comparing the two decades before and after the suppression policy went into effect found that the number of fires fell about 25 percent and total burned area fell by 60 percent.

Reducing area burned through suppression alone often contributes to a ‘firefighting trap’: when allocating the vast majority of wildfire management resources to fire suppression paradoxically leads to fuel accumulation and continuity. This can ultimately contribute to larger and more severe fires that preclude suppression during extreme fire weather. Recent extreme fire seasons in the EU in 2017, 2022, and 2025 show how fires can overwhelm prevention and suppression efforts. As of August 2026, more than 600,000 hectares had burned in the EU—roughly twice the long term average of the last 20 years for this point in the year.

In response, some countries are putting a greater emphasis on prevention, fuel management, and prescribed fire. In 2017, prevention represented only 20% of Portuguese wildfire-management funding, but by 2021 it was 46%, bringing the share of prevention spending closer to that devoted to suppression and other response activities.

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Beyond the climate change headlines

Decarbonization and climate change mitigation remain essential for limiting future global warming. But even the most aggressive mitigation targets cannot remove the fuels or reduce the vulnerabilities that already exist on the landscape today.

Understanding wildfire requires asking not only how the climate has changed, but how people have changed the land. Weather, fuels, ignitions, suppression, and land-use changes interact differently across landscapes, seasons, and individual fires. Treating recent wildfires as manifestations of climate change alone makes for a simple headline, but a poor explanation of why landscapes burn.

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2026 has been the year of critical minerals for the Trump administration.

In January, the administration’s push to increase U.S. influence over the Arctic circle placed critical minerals at the center of foreign policy by raising the prospect of tapping into Greenland’s rare earth resources. The executive branch continued to show critical mineral ambitions abroad in February by establishing the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE) to replace the Biden-era Mineral Security Partnership as the vehicle for critical mineral trade agreements. Meanwhile, it seemed like a week could not go by without either the Department of Defense or Department of Energy announcing another grant for a critical mineral project.

Congress, on the other hand, saw little action, indicating a more constrained vision for U.S. critical mineral supply chains. In fact, despite introducing dozens of critical mineral-related bills, Congress only enacted a single proposal: H.J. Res. 140 which narrowly repealed the Biden-era mining ban at the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. Beyond that, only a meager few bills passed either chamber in 2026 so far.

Partisan tension combined with the Trump administration’s preference for unilateral action have paralyzed this Congress, leaving it unable to advance its own proposals—let alone forge them into a coherent national critical minerals strategy

Democrats in particular are stuck on the defensive. A long-standing hesitancy to support mineral production leaves simple procedural reforms in limbo like the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act (S.544; H.R.1366) which would expedite the mine permitting process by allowing developers to rearrange parcels of federal land if they need to revise their designs. The Senate first introduced the proposal in 2023 (S.1281) with later iterations adding funding for cleaning up abandoned mines left from operations that ceased before remediation laws came into effect in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, its passage remains unlikely even after this sweetener for environmentalist contingents.

Indeed, any regulatory reform to U.S. mineral production may ultimately need a home in a grander permitting bargain that Democrats feel sufficiently supports renewable energy. Chances for that, however, are dwindling as the 119th Congress nears its lame duck session and Democrats—hoping to protect renewables projects from Trump administration cancellations—eye their chances for a better bargaining position after midterm elections.

Meanwhile, oversight concerns over Trump administration spending on critical minerals projects deter Democrats from advancing proposals that authorize the executive branch to wield any additional financial support like the SECURE Minerals Act (S.3659; H.R.7126) which would buffer mineral producers from market volatility by strengthening market liquidity and trading in conjunction with physical commodity storage and financial support tools.

Thankfully, three proposals stand a chance of passing this Congress with bipartisan support:

• Reauthorization of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Mapping Resource Initiative;

• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act reforms that facilitate extraction of critical minerals from industrial waste; and

• Reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank.

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The United States is experiencing a once-in-a-generation surge in demand for the equipment that makes the electric grid. Driven by the replacement of aging infrastructure and growing electricity consumption from data centers, new manufacturing, and home electrification, America wants more grid components than its electro-industrial base can supply.

The symptoms of this supply-demand asymmetry are especially pronounced for transformers. U.S. transformer imports and prices doubled from 2019 to 2025, and lead times ballooned so much that some utilities are placing orders five years in advance. Grain-oriented electrical steel (GOES) is one of the key bottlenecks.

Every transformer on the grid runs on a core made of GOES, from the large power transformers (LPTs) that carry over 90% of the nation’s electricity to the 60 to 80 million distribution transformers feeding energy to homes and businesses. GOES prices doubled from 2020 to 2024, and U.S. imports of GOES transformer cores quadrupled from 2018 to 2025.

Yet domestic production remains constrained by the production capacity of a single steel mill. Located 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, the Butler Works mill—owned by Cleveland-Cliffs—is America’s only domestic source of grain-oriented electrical steel.

Conventional economics suggests the solution to America’s GOES shortage is simply to expand supply, perhaps by expanding Butler Works or by building a new steel mill. But the metallurgy says otherwise.

Across multiple metrics, GOES made by Butler Works is inferior to GOES made in nations like Japan and Korea. Because GOES imports and domestic GOES are non-substitutable, an expansion of existing production capacity would increase U.S. supply for a good that much of the U.S. market doesn’t want. The U.S. government has the resources and statutory authority to make meaningful progress toward onshoring transformer supply chains, but it is essential that support be directed at expanding production of the right kind of GOES rather than expansion without accompanying modernization.

Specifically, Cleveland-Cliffs GOES is too narrow for many LPT core manufacturers. It tops out at 920mm wide, while the market prefers at least 932mm and increasingly looks for widths over 1000mm. Manufacturers can fuse two pieces together, but the discontinuity at the seam can introduce new energy losses, and precision welding for thousands of paper-thin GOES laminations adds sizable labor costs.

Additionally, in distribution transformer cores, Cleveland-Cliffs GOES loses up to 39 percent more energy than GOES from Japanese steelmakers Nippon and JFE. This stems from a technique invented by JFE in the 1970s that, to this day, is only used by Nippon, JFE, and Korean steelmaker POSCO.

Japanese GOES loses substantially less energy than American GOES because Japanese steelmakers JFE and Nippon use more advanced processing technologies than Cleveland-Cliffs, the sole U.S. manufacturer of GOES

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The process lets these East Asian mills etch grooves into the GOES sheets that reduce energy losses; then, after sheets are wound into a core, they treat the core with heat to relieve mechanical stress from core winding and reduce energy losses even further. In contrast, the older etching process used at Butler Works makes grooves that deform if exposed to the temperatures needed for the heat treatment step, also known as annealing. As a result, Butler Works doesn’t anneal its GOES and misses out on the resulting improvements to energy efficiency.

The quality gap separating U.S. and foreign GOES has existed for decades, but protectionist policies and a quarter-century of stable electricity demand kept awareness of the problem confined to a few federal investigations on antidumping duties, countervailing duties, and Section 232 tariffs. The U.S. GOES dilemma only recently began making headlines thanks to new load growth and an aging electric grid that are driving a surge in demand for transformers.

Due in part to its technical nature, federal actions haven’t addressed the full scope of this problem. For instance, the Department of Defense recently ordered $400 million of GOES from Cleveland-Cliffs—a purchase agreement that nominally supports GOES production but does nothing to enable production of the right kind of GOES sought by domestic manufacturers of LPT and distribution cores.

Meanwhile, Section 232 tariffs and Liberation Day tariffs treated GOES—a highly differentiated, specialty good—as if it were an interchangeable commodity. Section 232 tariffs in 2018 initially applied only to GOES imports but not imports of manufactured goods containing GOES, including transformer cores. Firms responded by importing foreign GOES to Mexico and Canada, minimally manufacturing them into laminations or cores, then exporting them duty-free to the US.

U.S. imports of transformer cores grew over 400% from $126 million in 2018 to $524 million in 2025. The increase can be linked to a loophole in Section 232 tariffs on GOES, implemented in March 2018, as well as new electricity demand from data centers, manufacturing, and residential electrification.

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At the same time, US transformer manufacturers could only serve domestic demand for energy-efficiency by importing foreign GOES at a steep tariff premium. With GOES accounting for about 20 percent of a transformer’s total cost, these tariffs pushed up raw material prices for the US transformer industry. Rather than protecting American manufacturing, tariffs burdened it with a structural disadvantage.

The loophole that excluded GOES-derived goods was filled recently in August 2025, but its damage to the domestic transformer industry is already done. The emigration of transformer supply chains has made grid expansion more expensive and import-dependent.

U.S. imports of transformer cores grew over 400% from $126 million in 2018 to $524 million in 2025. The increase can be linked to a loophole in Section 232 tariffs on GOES, implemented in March 2018, as well as new electricity demand from data centers, manufacturing, and residential electrification.

Thankfully, the GOES bottleneck should not be too difficult to solve. A coordinated strategy that invests in domestic manufacturing and reforms trade policies would yield significant and swift returns by driving down the costs of transformers, electricity, and a modernized grid.

The cost of Butler Works retrofit or a modern greenfield GOES mill both fall in the range of $1-2 billion—a drop in the bucket compared to the $1.2 trillion in infrastructure spending authorized by IIJA and the half a trillion in loan authority of the Energy Dominance Financing (EDF) Office. New GOES projects announced in recent years qualify for the Innovative Clean Energy Loan Guarantee Program (Sec. 1703), as they would use “new or significantly improved technologies” and the reduced energy losses from more high-permeability GOES would “avoid, reduce, utilize, or sequester air pollutants or GHGs.” Just as easily, the Energy Dominance Financing Program (Sec. 1706) can fund GOES modernization, as such a project would “support or enable the provision of known or forecastable electric supply at time intervals necessary to maintain or enhance grid reliability or other system adequacy needs.”

Be it through EDF, U.S. Export-Import Bank, or Section 303 of the Defense Production Act, any office financing U.S. GOES production will have to coordinate investment strategy with the White House, Department of Commerce, and U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). Historical implementation of antidumping and countervailing duties and recent Section 232 tariffs merely placed levies on imported GOES and derived products without bridging the production quality gap. Tariffs can act as effective tools to protect a nascent industry from more mature, cheaper competitors, but the current moment chiefly calls for targeted investment over protectionism. Immediate tariff relaxation would allow grid modernization to proceed faster and at a lower cost to U.S. manufacturers, utilities, and ratepayers. The U.S. should not consider reinstating tariffs until modernized GOES production capacity has entered operation and navigated successfully down the cost curve.

Any LPTs and distribution transformers installed on the grid today will, in all likelihood, remain in service through 2060 or beyond. The nation’s electric grid for the remainder of the 21st century ought to run on high-efficiency transformers built using the best electrical steel technology can make in 2026. Over coming years, data centers, power plants, and manufacturing facilities will need faster access to best-in-class LPTs, and tens of millions of the country’s distribution transformers operating past their expected lifespan will require replacement. The limitations of GOES production at Butler Works loom large in the mind of the domestic transformer industry, as they must for any Congress or Administration serious about revitalizing America’s transformer supply chain.

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On June 3, a three-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas, was found with fly larvae feeding on a wound. While the calf recovered, the case reopened a chapter of agricultural history that Americans had largely forgotten: New World screwworm, a parasitic fly whose larvae eat the living flesh of cattle, wildlife, pets, and occasionally people.

The United States eradicated screwworm in 1966, partnering with Mexico and other countries to eventually kill off populations throughout Central America. Yet the fly lived on in South America and managed to cross back into Panama in 2023, spreading north until it reached Texas this summer. By late July, the state had reported more than 40 cases in cattle, dogs, and other animals.

To eradicate the fly again, the government began releasing millions more flies from planes and ground stations. This counterintuitive approach is known as the sterile insect technique, now used for a variety of pests. Factories rear enormous numbers of the target insect, sterilize them, and release them into the wild. When a wild female mates with a sterile male, she produces no offspring. Flood an area with enough sterile males for long enough and the population collapses.

Now genetic engineering could make this strategy far more powerful. In June, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted emergency authorization and proposed commercial approval for NovoFly, a genetically engineered, male-only strain of New World screwworm developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and North Carolina State University. While not yet used, USDA plans to incorporate the fly into its sterile insect program as it builds out its new Texas facility. EPA is also reviewing a gene-edited fruit fly, Knockout SWD, designed to suppress Spotted-wing drosophila, one of the most damaging pests of berries and cherries.

Both products turn an insect’s reproductive biology against it. They are living insecticides that search for their own targets without the risks of chemical insecticides. If scientists and regulators can bring these systems from research facilities to the field, they could transform pest control well beyond screwworm.

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Developing the trojan fly

The sterile insect technique began with what the New York Times Magazine referred to as “the single most original thought of the 20^th century.” In 1937, USDA entomologist Edward Knipling proposed controlling screwworm by releasing so many sterile males that wild females would struggle to find fertile mates. His colleague Raymond Bushland later developed a way to use X-rays to sterilize screwworm pupae while still preserving their ability to fly and mate. USDA soon tested and scaled up the approach, building screwworm rearing factories, creating systems to release the insects from aircraft, and launching a massive eradication campaign. By 1966, screwworm was gone from the United States.

The method works particularly well with screwworm as the females generally mate only once. A sterile male, however, can mate several times per day, suppressing the population.

The sterile insect approach can be effective for other insects too. Programs have since targeted Mediterranean fruit fly, Mexican fruit fly, melon fly, tsetse fly, pink bollworm, codling moth, and other pests.

Regardless of the insect, there has always been a fundamental biological challenge: the females. Sterile insect programs must ensure no fertile females are released. Screwworm facilities handle this by sterilizing the females too, which requires higher levels of radiation than optimal for the males. Programs for other insects sometimes separate and kill the females. Either way, rearing and feeding them is a waste of resources and complicates operations.

Genetic engineering can now handle some of those logistical challenges itself.

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Building a better bug trap

The engineered NovoFly contains a genetic switch that kills female embryos. In the breeding colony, workers add tetracycline to the insects’ diet which allows the females to survive and the colony to reproduce. The generation of insects produced for release aren’t so lucky. Without the tetracycline, the female embryos die and the batch develops almost entirely into males, which are still sterilized.

Producing only males could roughly double the number of useful insects generated by a factory and may allow a lower radiation dose, enabling the released males to be more competitive with wild flies.

The other engineered fly under development, Knockout SWD, uses genetics to handle both sex selection and sterilization. The underlying method is called precision-guided sterile insect technique, or pgSIT. It relies on two genetically engineered breeding that produce sterile offspring they mate with one another.

One line carries Cas9, a protein that acts like a pair of molecular scissors. The other carries guide RNAs, short molecules that provide Cas9 with a target in the genome. When the two lines are crossed, their offspring inherit both the scissors and the target for them. Cas9 then cuts genes required for normal female development and male fertility. The females fail to develop normally, while the surviving males are sterile.

Researchers are now trying to extend this precision sterilization approach to screwworm. The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research committed $150,000 this summer toward a project with Agragene and North Carolina State University to use CRISPR to produce sterile males without irradiation.

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Replacing spraying with egg-laying

Genetic biocontrol, the broader approach that these techniques fit under, gives farmers, ranchers, and other pest managers an alternative to spraying chemical insecticides.

Putting aside the risk some insecticides pose to farmworkers and ecosystems, spraying them is expensive and a logistical pain. Consider the Spotted-wing drosophila. Unlike most fruit flies, which lay eggs in damaged or rotting fruit, Spotted-wing drosophila cuts into healthy, ripening berries and cherries and deposits its eggs inside where the larvae will be protected from insecticides once they hatch.

Growers therefore spray preventively during ripening and harvest, often spraying weekly and rotating among different insecticides to slow the evolution of resistant flies. Unfortunately, some populations of flies have already evolved resistance to several classes of insecticides—pyrethroids and spinosyxns including spinosad, a mainstay of both conventional and organic production.

PgSIT, like other sterile insect technique programs, would allow growers to spray less often by suppressing and potentially eradicating fly populations before they start damaging crops. That can save growers money and also spare bees, predatory insects, and other organisms that might otherwise be harmed by conventional insecticides.

Many of those benefits can be seen in past sterile insect programs such as one that targeted the pink bollworm. For decades, the moth was one of the most destructive pests of cotton in the American Southwest. A program that combined sterile moth releases with cotton varieties genetically engineered to produce insecticidal Bt proteins effectively eradicated the moth. Arizona’s pink bollworm population fell from more than 2 billion in 2005 to zero in 2013, and growers were able to reduce insecticide treatments against all cotton pests by 82 percent, saving more than $500 million. Beneficial insects recovered as well, further helping farmers control pests with fewer sprays.

Genetically engineered insects could extend this success to pests that remain impractical to control with conventional sterile releases. Researchers have developed and studied self-limiting diamondback moths, a pest of cabbage, broccoli, and other brassicas, whose female offspring die after engineered males mate with wild females. A similar system for fall armyworm, one of the world’s most destructive crop pests, has been widely tested and even approved for commercial use in Brazil. Just this August, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) announced a nearly $2.5 million grant, matched by the Almond Board of California, to develop male-only navel orangeworms, the most destructive pest for California’s tree nut growers. And USDA is supporting further genetic-control research on various fruit flies, the spotted lanternfly, and other agricultural pests.

Some female-lethal systems could provide a second benefit: reversing the spread of insecticide resistance. Unlike pgSIT males, which are sterile, males in these systems can father surviving sons. If the males carry insecticide- or Bt-susceptible genes, their sons reintroduce susceptibility into the wild population even as their engineered sisters die and reduce their population, as several studies have demonstrated with the diamondback moth. It is a distinct strategy from sterile-insect control, but one that could help preserve the useful life of both chemical insecticides and insect-resistant crops.

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Driving a population to collapse

Genetic biocontrol’s potential extends far beyond farms. Government agencies, including around the US, still rely heavily on insecticides to suppress mosquito species that transmit dengue, Zika, West Nile virus, and other diseases. Repeated spraying is expensive, often misses breeding sites, exposes non-target insects, and selects for resistance.

Researchers have already adapted pgSIT to Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species that primarily spreads dengue and other viruses in urban areas. Other self-limiting engineered mosquitoes have reduced local Aedes populations in field trials.

Gene drives occupy a more powerful and less reversible branch of the same research. Rather than disappearing when releases stop, they bias inheritance so that an engineered trait can spread through a population. In one landmark experiment, a CRISPR drive targeting a gene required for female development spread through large indoor populations of the mosquito species that transmits malaria and caused them to collapse within several generations. Yet no insect gene drive has been released. Because they are designed to persist and spread, they require a different level of ecological assessment, regulatory oversight, and public consent than self-limiting systems, which has slowed progress.

Nonetheless, gene drives and other types of genetic control could eventually be applied to other pests that make people sick. Researchers are developing the genetic tools that would be needed to control ticks. The work remains perhaps a decade or more behind mosquitos, according to Dr. Gulia-Nuss who leads a lab focused on ticks and mosquitos at University of Nevada, Reno. Ticks’ longer life cycle and need to feed on a live host make sterile release less practical. But once genome engineering techniques are better established for them, it may be possible to develop gene drives to suppress their populations—perhaps first for cattle fever ticks, which have shorter lifecycles, but eventually for the species that carry Lyme disease and cause alpha-gal syndrome.

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Engineering the needed research and regulations

The original screwworm campaign succeeded because the Department of Agriculture supported it from research through scale-up. It funded the initial research, but also worked to improve the sterile insect technique and to conduct the actual rearing, dispersal and monitoring of the flies.

The next generation of genetic biocontrol needs a similar level of institutional commitment. NovoFly grew out of decades of USDA research and collaboration with North Carolina State. PgSIT emerged from university research supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and other public funders. Private companies can build upon this foundational research to develop products. But they need the government as a partner in developing insect factories and studying ecological impacts.

Public R&D will remain critical to improving genetic biocontrol and also extending it to more species. Many are too difficult to genetically engineer and study in field trials for companies to take the risk to invest in them.

Regulators play a critical role as well. EPA’s review of NovoFly and Knockout SWD could establish a clear pathway for other companies to follow, helping unlock financing and interest in the field. It lays out many of the key questions regulators must know: How often do females survive the production process? How often are released males fertile? What steps are being taken to ensure breeding lines can’t escape? How well do released males compete with wild males? How far do they disperse? Wherever possible, EPA should make it clear what evidence it needs, what types of studies are needed to establish it, and what protocols must be followed for deployment.

The return of the New World screwworm has brought with it an old lesson. Pest control doesn’t have to involve spreading a poison and hoping it reaches the target. Sometimes the best insecticide for the job is one that hatches and flies away, leaving little trace and no descendants.

Scientists with the U.S. government invented that approach nearly a century ago. Genetic engineering can now make it cheaper, more scalable, and useful against many more pests. Realizing that promise will require patient research, support for operational scale-up, and regulations designed to let innovations move as quickly as the insects they’re designed to stop.

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This is the second part of a two-part essay. Part I argued that public power transmission can only earn public trust if it’s anchored to public resources with tangible public benefit: clean, firm power. It found a model in the Pacific Intertie, the 1960s federal project that linked Northwest hydropower to California energy demand by anchoring transmission to a public resource, segmenting ownership among utilities, and disciplining the arrangement with a public-benefit yardstick. Part II applies that template to the transmission problems of today.

Read Part I HERE

Today’s calls for a federally-supported transmission buildout largely aim to tap into hypothetical private wind and solar resources across the nation. Those resources come with a lobby—Big Tech and other corporate consumers, as well as renewables investors themselves—that’s looking to socialize their costs and optimize their portfolios even, or especially, if that means restructuring markets. Powering the Pacific Intertie, on the other hand, were specific hydropower resources in the public domain, free of a private beneficiary. Those resources met direct needs by distant customers in the form of firm power; no volatile, open market for balancing purposes required.

Today’s progressive demands should similarly anchor new interregional transmission to new generation resources for clear public benefit. Now what’s needed is a resource that’s not limited to the last drops of untapped hydropower; one that offers direct benefit to receiving utilities and to the public, as clean, firm power; one that locals love and that can be deployed as an anchor in public power systems across the nation.

America has one resource that fits the bill: nuclear power. And the federal government already has a public power utility with the institutional capacity to build and operate it as an anchor for new interties into other territories: the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In the past I’ve argued in these pages and elsewhere that TVA was the right utility to lead a nuclear revival in America, if only Congress would unlock its financial constraints. The case then was about reindustrialization and decarbonization.

Now the need is slightly different. Hyperscalers are driving up demand forecasts across the country and are willing to pay a premium. What’s really needed by utilities to serve them and to meet resource adequacy requirements is clean, firm power—not anywhere, but everywhere. That’s not just about advancing the development of artificial intelligence. Since everyone is tied into the same grid, it’s also about harnessing that load growth to put downward pressure on prices. Expediting nuclear development has its benefits, too, of course.

A National Anchor Power Program would cut through the thicket that constricts both interregional transmission and nuclear power. Federally supported nuclear power, built, hosted, and run by a public power utility, with a share of the output delivered outward over new interregional HVDC transmission lines into neighboring utility territory. Public power expanded beyond public power’s current borders.

Making the program work without stealth deregulation, without being guided by any private industry’s particular interests, and with buy-in from the public, utilities, states, and the hyperscalers footing the bill is the challenge. The history of the Pacific Intertie provides some lessons to solving it.

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Casting the anchor lines

Presented with the anchor program idea, the likely question at the top of one’s mind is who pays for the interregional lines? Following the model of the Pacific Intertie, it’s whoever owns each segment.

TVA owns the segment in its territory—the HVDC line up to its border and the source converter station. It finances the segment through its own bonds, and it recovers the costs not from Valley ratepayers but through the wholesale export on the line. The receiving utility owns the AC delivery infrastructure on its side—the substations, the reinforcements, the last miles to its data centers—in its ordinary state-regulated rate base, earning its ordinary return. And the long middle of the HVDC line—the stretch that runs beyond TVA’s borders and across whatever states lie between—is owned by a federal anchor authority. As for who pays for the anchor line, its costs are recovered not from either utility’s ratepayers but from the hyperscaler customers who contracted for the anchor power.

Segmentation means no drawn-out fight at FERC over the allocation of costs and benefits, and no stealth deregulation. Rather than statutorily expanding the anchor utility’s borders—sure to be a heavyweight political fight—the middle segment is owned federally, and not by any new public utility, simply a federal holding entity. That setup retains the anchor utility’s control of dispatch along the line; more on that later.

Given their history with interregional transmission, why would investor-owned utilities cooperate with the program? Because the anchor program aligns with their commercial interest, instead of breaking it apart. A participating utility retains its retail relationships with hyperscaler customers, and it expands its rate base and therefore its profits with its share of the line. The utility’s local generation isn’t stranded since the anchor power is additive to meet growing demand, a precondition for the line’s proposal. And because the power is firm, exactly what the hyperscaler customers need, there’s no operational burden of flexible balancing placed on the utility, as would have been placed on TVA with the failed Clean Line dispatching intermittent wind power into its territory.

With these federally directed transmission lines, why should the public trust they aren’t being fleeced in order to benefit a particular private lobby? Primarily because the lines tap into a public generation resource—detailed in the next section—rather than speculative private ones whose investors would love to socialize costs. On the other end, the hyperscalers benefit from the clean, firm power delivery, to be sure, but all the ratepayers in the same territory benefit from that power too. They get the retail price depression of utility load growth and the capacity value of firm power, but without their utility adding the massive costs of a nuclear plant onto the books and into their rates.

There’s another key lesson from the Pacific Intertie in establishing public trust: yardstick pricing. To initiate an anchor line the program office would identify a potential hyperscaler load center, do the tricky siting work to plot a pathway to it, and estimate the costs. That results in a yardstick delivery price for hyperscalers to pay. The receiving utility would need to propose a viable AC segment in its territory whose cost can match that price. If the utility isn’t playing ball, the program office can threaten to develop a different anchor line, to a different utility, instead. The program office initiates projects and wields the yardstick to discipline costs, in contrast to today’s status quo of years-long competitive processes to solicit proposals from merchant developers.

Where the program differs most from the Pacific Intertie, however, is the anchor itself.

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Nuclear-powered anchors

With the experience of Vogtle still fresh, concerned onlookers are likely to worry that new nuclear plants mean ballooning cost overruns that enrich shareholders by soaking ratepayers. How does the anchor program dispel that concern?

For one, there’s no shareholders in the plant who profit from the investment itself; there is only the anchor public power utility to own the plant, TVA. But that doesn’t mean cost overruns aren’t still possible, of course, so TVA ratepayers need protection.

Again taking the yardstick as inspiration, the anchor utility works with the federal anchor office—as well as any experts outside the government—to develop a cost estimate for the plant. By standardizing the project for multiple anchors, that engineering and administrative work pays off over time. The result is a yardstick acquisition price for the plant that the anchor utility, TVA, pays upon completion. There’s a guaranteed limit to what its ratepayers cover.

Who absorbs the cost overrun risk, then? The federal government finances the construction on its own balance sheet and then sells the plant at the acquisition price. Overruns don’t merely fall on federal shoulders, though. The first slice of it is covered by the anchor utility, to keep its construction disciplined. The bulk of the overrun after that falls on an anchor reserve fund that’s seeded by the anchor program’s hyperscaler customers. The federal government handles tail risk overrun after that.

The hyperscaler customers fill up the reserve fund before the anchor plant ever turns on to deliver them power, much like utility “construction works in progress” financing charges average-joe customers in advance. The Searchlight Institute and Groundwork Collaborative both envision hyperscaler-funded grid upgrades; the former with a carrot and the latter a stick. Here’s how the anchor program applies the “hyperscalers pay” principle to the generation resource.

One might wonder whether this insurance isn’t just another subsidy for nuclear developers. The reason is that the whole program is only available to publicly-owned anchor utilities. That’s a modern take on the New Deal preference for public entities like municipalities and electric coops: instead of power from public resources offered more cheaply to public consumers, it’s cost overrun protection for public builders only.

In contrast, recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation, the Accelerating Reliable Capacity Act, would offer federal backing for a portion of overruns even when the builder profits from the plant. Applicants propose a cost and the government says yay or nay to limited overrun insurance—unlike the anchor program’s government-authored yardstick price. Nuclear proponents have good reason to support the ARC Act. Utility executives and even some utility regulators have explicitly conditioned new nuclear projects on the passage of such a policy. But the Vogtle experience of Georgia Power shareholders profiting from cost overruns—more capital expense means more returns—makes a blanket federal insurance program a difficult pill to swallow for many.

Imagine now a potential pilot project for the anchor program: twin AP1000 reactors built at TVA’s dormant Bellefonte site in northern Alabama, sending clean, firm power over a line stretching 250 miles into metro Atlanta to serve Georgia Power’s booming data center corridor. At Vogtle, Georgia households provided the financing with construction-works-in-progress charges for over a decade before the plant ever generated a single watt, while Georgia Power profited all along. Under the anchor program, those households get the load growth of the data centers and the capacity value of the firm power without the gamble of a construction megaproject in their rate base. Serving them public nuclear power would be fitting recompense.

The anchor program largely inherits from the Pacific Intertie its approach to cost allocation and recovery. But there are still questions confronting the 2026 program that weren’t relevant to the setup in 1964, back before RTOs and NEPA.

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New challenges on the wire

Columbia River hydropower is seasonal—more flow after winter snow melts, less flow in dry seasons—and Northwest demand peaks in winter while Southwest demand peaks in summer. The seasonal bidirectional exchange of power was therefore essential to the design of the Pacific Intertie. Bonneville didn’t just export hydropower; it imported surplus fossil-fueled power from utilities.

A nuclear-powered anchor line would engage in no such exchange. The contracted flow is constant: clean, firm power at all hours, in all seasons, committed to hyperscalers.

One of the whole justifications of interregional transmission expansion, however, is reliability during grid stress events. During exactly such an event, Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, TVA had to issue the first rolling blackouts in its history. A new DOE National Transmission Needs Study demonstrates that “the majority of transmission congestion costs are concentrated in only 5% of the hours,” such as in winter storms. “While interregional transmission can enable the exchange of lower-cost electricity throughout the year,” the study puts it, “it can provide even greater value during those peak periods, which are the hours driving resource adequacy needs.”

How to incentivize the reliability benefit of that sort of interregional transmission has remained a puzzle for decades. The status quo rests on merchant developers recovering costs from energy revenues—the failed Clean Line project into TVA for example, or the Champlain Hudson Power Express line from Quebec to New York City. If a line is to offer emergency exchange during grid stress, however, it can’t also be filled up with regular energy sales as those examples. Advocates like Grid Strategies warn that interregional lines must instead recover costs via cost-of-service regulation, which invites all the FERC cost allocation battles between utilities that Order 1920 tries to mitigate, or via some other means.

The anchor program can solve the puzzle—a public means to recover costs for interregional transmission capacity reserved for emergencies. If an anchor corridor delivering clean, firm power from TVA to PJM reserved some capacity for reliability, perhaps on a parallel line that makes use of the same siting process, then that could be called upon for emergency exchange, in either direction, during the next Elliott. And the hyperscalers, as major causers of grid contention today, fund the bulk of the extra capacity; the federal government and the two connected utilities split the rest as mutually beneficial cost of service.

An anchor line crossing into an RTO territory like PJM raises new questions though. Consider another nuclear project at TVA’s dormant Yellow Creek site and an anchor line connecting it to Dominion’s territory in North Virginia—the world’s largest market for data centers, and part of PJM. The natural pressure on such a transmission project would be to integrate TVA into PJM, giving the latter dispatch control over a public power resource in the former.

To keep existing market structures isolated, particularly on the public power side, the anchor program relies on HVDC technology. There’s precedent here, too: Texas’s ERCOT has long retained its unique market structure, which is distinct from that of the Texas utility territories outside it, because it crosses seams not with AC but with controllable HVDC lines. It’s a core part of the solution to stealth deregulation, but it raises operational questions too.

An HVDC anchor line includes a converter station that injects power into the receiving utility’s local AC network. Ordinarily it’s the utility’s control over that station that confers dispatch authority to the RTO. In the anchor program, though, the anchor utility retains control over that remote station. To supersede the RTO’s authority, the program requires federal ownership of the middle segment of each anchor line—from the anchor territory to the receiving territory, including the converter station. Dispatch is delegated to the anchor utility, giving TVA control over power injected into PJM.

The anchor line is segmented into three owners for cost recovery, each recovering its own segment through its own mechanism: TVA through its wholesale export contract, the receiving utility through its ordinary regulated rates with the costs assigned to the hyperscaler, and the federal middle through delivery charges. There are three owners and three regulators but one payer: every dollar of the firm power delivery lands on the hyperscalers who contracted for it. In operations, though, the segmentation vanishes. TVA dispatches the link end to end, converter to converter, as a single public power machine.

With costs and operations sorted, one more terrain of political struggle against the anchor program remains: the land.

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Public power on the ground

We’ve assumed for the anchor program so far that steel can be put in the ground if the money and control problems are solved. Conflicts over land use, however, pose yet another political challenge, one that a progressive appeal to public ownership doesn’t resolve either.

Just a few months ago, TVA withdrew plans for a transmission line across Tennessee after a local farmer, John Gregory, organized in opposition. In addition to selling livestock, Gregory and his wife run a “farm school” on the property that the 100-foot clearance for the line would have plowed right through. A TVA surveyor dismissed the concern entirely, he told AgWeb. As recourse Gregory exercised political voice not through the kind of procedure targeted by abundance but through old-fashioned politicking, with a social-media megaphone to political leaders.

The crucial step for Gregory was recruiting MAGA country star John Rich to the cause. Rich’s organizing and outreach last year forced TVA to abandon a gas-and-batteries plant elsewhere in the outskirts of Nashville, a project that required not just new transmission lines but new pipelines. Eventually TVA decided to just sell the property. As part of his protest, Rich wrote and released a new song on YouTube, “The Devil and The TVA”:

You think you own something

But you don’t own nothing

When the government man comes around

Puts his dirty old boots on your ground

If the Pacific Intertie met local landowner opposition, it doesn’t seem to have registered in contemporaneous political debate. There was no procedural route like NEPA to formalize it, nor YouTube to popularize it.

One way to mitigate the land use opposition is to shrink the battlefield. That means our federal transmission expansion can’t be organized solely around the far more land-intensive resources of wind and solar power. That’s a hard lesson for, say, the leftwing Climate and Community Institute, whose ambitions on public power development consistently and narrowly aim only for renewables deployment.

The anchor program, on the other hand, would be kicked off with existing TVA-owned land for the plants and a few hundred miles for each anchor line. Tighter land use is still open to conflict; even these lines will need to cross many people’s property.

If the “government man” wants to put his “dirty old boots on your ground,” we can at least ensure that there’s a specific public purpose. The skeptic might nonetheless see Amazon as the cause and the beneficiary of the intrusion. In recent months Georgia locals have been arguing a transmission line exists solely for the data centers, for example.

Compared to progressive proposals for transmission powered by prospective wind and solar farms, the anchor program poses a clearer, if crude, case that it’s keeping everyone’s lights on: the nuclear plant anchoring the line. The nuclear construction project that’s “built for the people of the United States” and that employs thousands during construction—and several hundred for generations to come—will be a clear reminder of public benefit. It’s not for nothing that nuclear, according to the latest Gallup polls, is the energy source with the most bipartisan approval.

* * *

The anchor program threads the needle to give federal development of transmission the buy-in it needs from utilities, states, the public, and the hyperscalers whose demand launches the country into a new economic conundrum. As with New Deal public power, the point is to deliver the benefits of public resources as cheaply as possible. The segmented architecture, inspired by the Pacific Intertie, resolves the cost allocation and recovery battles that have sunk so many proposals. Hyperscalers foot most of the bill.

Though it’s been sketched here as a program for TVA, it could just as easily apply to the New York Power Authority, which is currently developing its own nuclear projects, or the Nebraska Public Power District, which sees nuclear as not just critical for its operations but essential for surpassing local political hostility to renewables. As the program grows, more hyperscalers pay into the reserve fund; more ratepayers gain capacity value to support load growth without emissions; the federal office improves its siting, planning, and pricing; and the construction risk of the AP1000s decreases. But it needn’t be confined to AP1000s; in later years smaller public power utilities could host an SMR like the BWRX-300 that’s under development at TVA, or even microreactors. Nuclear power isn’t a hard requirement either. In the West, the standardized clean, firm resource built and delivered via the anchor program—and worthy of cost overrun insurance for public builders—could be enhanced geothermal instead.

Following the example of the Pacific Intertie, the anchor program presents a template to build new interregional transmission without imposing stealth deregulation and with a political coalition on its side. That revolves around building clean, firm resources needed nationwide as public anchors, pooling risk from hyperscalers into cost overrun insurance for public builders only. And it expands public power’s capacities without chartering new public utility systems or acquiring private ones like in Roosevelt’s time. We don’t need to go full New Deal to once again wield public power for electricity abundance.

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Despite the apparent decline in interest in climate change over the past few years, many advocates still think the public and elites will be shocked back into a state of eco-alarm by some portentous disaster. As Jadzia Tedeschi put it for the Climate Majority Project recently, “We’ve only just crossed the tipping point. What comes next will be of a different order.”

What Jason Mark’s new book presupposes is: what if it isn’t?

In The Earth Said Remember Me, Mark, a longtime environmental journalist, considers the subject of “shifting baseline syndrome.” The term was coined by a scientist in the 1990s who described how multi-generational declines in fishing stocks could be missed by official counts that only included evidence from the most recent catches.

As Mark generalizes the concept:

Each of us have our baseline expectations—usually forged in youth—for how the world is supposed to work, how it’s supposed to look. Then the world morphs and the baseline shifts. But either we forget how the world originally appeared, or else a new generation comes along and establishes a whole new baseline based on the conditions of its youth.

Mark’s interests have always resided mostly outside the global tipping points, emissions policy, and climate marches that saturate environmental writing these days. As much as he’s reported on these subjects, I’ve most often encountered his dispatches as a more classical nature writer. The author of 2015’s excellent Satellites in the High Country and meditative essays on humanity’s relationship with animal life and the experience of working on landscapes altered by global warming, he has long excelled at a more outdoorsy, tactile, gardener’s practice of environmental journalism.

The Earth Said Remember Me is in keeping with this practice, a field guide to ecosystem degradation and humanity’s alienation from our neighbors on Planet Earth. And as I read the book, I thought that his subject was not so much shifting baseline syndrome as what we ecomodernists might call “decoupling syndrome.”

As modern humans have destroyed, detached, and otherwise decoupled from dependence and impact on the natural world, we have become structurally better off as a species while less connected to most other species. Post-industrial environmental philosophy, from Thoreau to Muir to Carson to McKibben, is largely a reaction to this alienation, to what humanity loses even as we reduce our ecological footprint.

Restoring what’s lost, Mark’s reporting suggests, is not a task for after the apocalypse, but the constant, chronic responsibility of humanity.

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Decoupling from Nature

Shifting baseline syndrome, though, is real, and is one reason that I have come to doubt that any kind of “climate wake-up call” will mobilize the mass public to demand sweeping climate action.

It’s true and tragic, for instance, that wildfire smoke has become viscerally worse in the last decade, not just where I live on the foothills of overgrown temperate forests of the American West, but also in the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard far downwind from relatively pristine Canadian boreal forests. But for better or worse, the smoke becomes an expected, if still infrequent and unpredictable, nuisance in the fabric of public life. There are no climate lockdowns analogous to the covid pandemic, not least because even a comprehensive authoritarian ban on fossil fuel consumption would have little noticeable effect on wildfires, or other extreme weather for that matter.

And that’s the main reason I don’t think the climate wake-up call will ever arrive. Conspicuous events like this summer’s wildfires and heatwaves notwithstanding, the general trend in extreme weather and natural disasters is one of stability. The frequency and intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, and drought have not increased for decades, as Roger Pielke, Jr. illustrates in a new dashboard synthesizing official data for all kinds of natural disasters in the United States. And the human cost of these disasters is, if anything, declining, as wealthier populations become more resilient to the Earth’s climate over time. Our climate baseline just isn’t shifting that rapidly.

What is shifting is the rest of nature.

As Linus Blomqvist put it in Breakthrough’s seminal conservation report Nature Unbound, “Human success has come at the expense of non-human life.” Both by warming the biosphere and encroaching on forests, deserts, grasslands, and marine ecosystems, humans have decimated wildlife populations in the Industrial Era. The World Wildlife Fund estimates an average 73% decline between 1970 and 2020 in its Living Planet Index, which tracks roughly 35,000 vertebrate populations across nearly 5,500 species of fish, mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles. About half of the world’s coral reefs have disappeared since 1950. Humans now use about half the ice-free land on Earth, having transformed many ecologies, mainly with cropland and grazing lands, and fragmented many more.

But for the same reason that human societies have become less vulnerable to climate impacts, we are arguably less vulnerable to these ecological losses than we once were.

For one thing, a decreasing quotient of us actually lives near anything like the natural world. As of last decade, over half of the world’s population lives in cities, a figure that is expected to approach 80% by the end of the century. As one of these billions of urban dwellers, I get my fair share of exposure to nature, in my excursions in the Bay Area’s periurban trails and my ventures to California’s more remote mountains, deserts, and grasslands—but only because I want to. These experiences with wild(ish) nature are recreational, not regular; experiential, not vocational.

So while our ancestors may have relied on nearby rivers for freshwater, wild game for protein, and natural pollinators for agriculture, humans today increasingly use extensive hydrological engineering and treatment for urban water supplies, “factory farms” of domesticated livestock for protein, and commercially managed honey bees for industrial-scale crop pollination. Modern societies are simply less dependent on ecosystem services, renewable flows of energy and nutrients, and even just the basic existence of other species for our material well-being.

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Go Outside

It’s on these systems—the shifting and morphing webs of Earth’s plant and animal life—that Mark focuses in his book. And that’s why, sad and contemplative as the experience of reading it was, I came away from it inspired, not demoralized.

In a genre beset with abstractions about tipping points and hypothetical disasters that will magically fix our environmental politics, Mark offers a more prosaic, journalistic account of global ecological change, and how to confront it. In his reporting on attempts to resuscitate monarch butterfly populations in Northern California, or the Lummi Nation’s efforts to restore wild salmon abundance in Cascadia, Mark observes how humans today actually interact with and work to shape their local wildlife—whether for its existence value as with the monarchs, or its sustenance value in the case of the salmon, or, most often, a mix of both.

And while Mark uses these case studies to depict shifting baseline syndrome—the extent to which today’s wildlife enthusiasts can’t even know what they’re missing—the deeper undercurrent of his book, I would argue, is ecological decoupling.

We most often use the concept of decoupling to capture the growing gap between empirical measures of human well-being and environmental impact. GDP is increasing while carbon emissions decline: classic decoupling.

But decoupling also describes the process by which modern human societies rely less on ecological sources of wealth and well-being, and more on engineered or synthetic resources. We don’t need firewood to heat our homes if we have electric heating. We don’t need to deplete wild fish stocks if we have aquaculture. We don’t need to harvest fats and oils from whales if we have petroleum-based alternatives.

And it’s this form of decoupling, the long modern arc from rural subsistence to high-tech urbanity, that overwhelmingly accounts for the alienation from the natural world that Mark laments. Most Americans, and increasingly most humans, simply don’t need, for their immediate health and well-being, to be aware of local wildlife counts, or wild fish harvests. To the extent these empirics show up meaningfully in the typical person’s live experiences, it’s through many layers of social and technological mediation.

Mark offers a framework for bridging these layers, and for overcoming shifting baseline syndrome:

1. Go outside.

2. Bear witness.

3. Make a record.

4. Pass it on.

This is also a recipe, I think, for resisting the alienation caused by our decoupling from nature. In fact I’d go so far as to argue that exploring and experiencing nature directly are the very best ideas in environmentalism, a philosophy that erred in connecting our tactile and complex ecophilia to a more global, flattening policy agenda demarcated by global average surface temperature and parts per million. The supposition of modern environmental risk, after all, is that violating global biophysical boundaries will cause global ecological systems to collapse. This abstract scientism contrasts sharply with the corporeal, meliorist ecological activism on display in Mark’s reportage.

“In my life I’ve watched the gray whale return and the peregrine falcon and the otter,” Mark quotes one Mia Monroe, co-founder of the Western Monarch Count. “I don’t know what’s ahead for monarchs. But I do know that when people realized there was a problem, and we did something different, then nature responded.”

Mark includes dozens of such sentiments throughout the book, not to warn of impending and irreversible collapse, but to implore his readers to choose to care about nature, and to tend to it. As Emma Marris wrote in her own meditation on decoupling, “If we use up nature, we will be miserable. If we wall ourselves off from nature, we will be miserable. The path to joy is to allow nonhuman nature to thrive by reducing our demands upon it, while loving ourselves enough to allow ourselves to remain within it.”

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Remembering and Restoring

“What if that Pearl Harbor moment never comes to pass?” writes Mark. “What if the alarm bells announcing the asteroid keep blaring until they fade into white noise?”

This simple provocation (mixed metaphors and all) goes somewhere that many environmental writers aren’t willing to venture. Having mused on the white noise of the climate apocalypse myself, I’m drawn to Mark’s diagnosis of a chronic condition most often misunderstood as terminal. In describing even devastating ecological loss, Mark portrays a natural world in constant change, rather than a step-wise shift from the pristine to the apocalyptic. Our task is not to stop the baseline from shifting, he suggests, but to remember the Earth that existed before our time, to save and restore what we can, and to shape the Earth our children will enjoy.

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Across the political spectrum, one hears that America needs more transmission lines to decarbonize its grid, to lower costs, to increase renewable energy deployment, to interconnect large data center loads, to ward off blackouts, and so on. Different political factions see very different roles for the federal government to play in that development, from permitter to market maker to planner to builder.

There’s one point that unifies the factions, however: that those dastardly electric utilities stand in the way. From the libertarians at R Street, to the center right at Niskanen Center, to the progressive left at Roosevelt Institute, to the ecosocialist left at Climate and Community Institute, advocates of major transmission expansion identify the utilities—with their old-fashioned public service regulation, monopoly territories, and vertical integration—as a major obstacle to overcome.

For the Abundance camp, though, the slow expansion of transmission stems less from utility opposition than from federal permitting processes that are held up, too easily, by myriad private stakeholder groups. Permitting, thanks to its widespread recognition as a central factor in the transmission problem, is the angle of attack taken up by most legislative efforts to aid transmission expansion in recent years.

But these efforts come equipped with what the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus, Ryan Alimento, and Seaver Wang recently identified as stealth deregulation. To take their most high-profile example, the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 was in part “an attempt to use transmission reform as a trojan horse to force states where utilities continue to be traditionally structured and regulated to allow competition from merchant power generators.”

Stealth deregulation of electricity markets in traditionally-served territories is the natural result of seeing utilities as the inherent problem and market competition as the inherent solution. As Nordhaus et al. point out, however, there are major benefits to the cost-of-service regulation and vertical integration of utilities that are swept away by this view. My collaborator Matt Huber and I have argued for “the utility of utilities” as well, emphasizing, for example, the benefits of this market structure for massive clean energy projects like offshore wind and nuclear power.

Preserving existing market structures isn’t a prescription for transmission expansion either. Any kind of market-neutral authority to site transmission lines between territories will immediately run into the battleground of allocating and recovering costs between them. For many liberals and progressives, this problem comes with a clear solution: put the federal government in charge. The recent Gridlocked report from Groundwork argues this most directly by proposing a new National Power Authority that can build transmission and generation alike, nationwide. There is, after all, a rich American history of federal public power systems like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bonneville Power Administration.

But let’s say we wave the magic wand of abundance and create a federal entity with decision-making authority on siting and even building major transmission lines, a true progressive victory. Before any steel goes into the ground, before it can “just build transmission,” this public authority must act as an umpire. Which resources deserve investment, what the benefits are, and how the costs should be allocated—adjudicating these questions is one of the major challenges lying underneath “permitting reform.”

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The progressive umpire problem

A magically conjured progressive authority for transmission expansion needs to be able to call balls and strikes, but advocates don’t appear to be playing the part.

First, consider the benefits of new transmission. Chief among them, according to some of the loudest voices for a stronger federal role, is increasing renewable energy generation. New transmission lines sited for prospective generation resources and paid for across a broad customer base unlocks renewables investment, like the CREZ example in Texas. With continent-spanning transmission lines, the argument goes, we can drive up the deployment of wind and solar generation and drive down the emissions rate.

Our federal umpire can’t take the benefits at face value, though. Deciding to socialize the network buildout that enables wider renewables integration comes with clear financial interests whispering in the federal government’s proverbial ear. That includes investors in renewables themselves, of course, but more importantly the many large corporate consumers hungry for renewable energy to substantiate their climate accounting goals. Last year hyperscalers Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft signed 80% of all corporate renewables contracts, for example.

Former FERC Chair Mark Christie has written extensively on how this corporate interest behind public transmission investment warps the adjudication of cost-benefit tradeoffs. Yet transmission proponents largely paint a picture in which the only corporate interests lobbying to steer such decisions are the utilities. Meanwhile the Corporate Energy Buyers Association and other such trade groups consolidate the political interests of major energy consumers in much the same way their forebears lobbied for deregulation in decades past.

Now consider the costs of new transmission. That utilities often oppose transmission lines for undercutting their own local generation is not merely about their shareholders’ profits—private interest over public. The so-called stranded cost problem is a real one for the socialized assets of the rate base, the assets the utility invested in as part of performing their public service. But also, depending on the contracts around the power sales over the line, the existence of new transmission might impose a new operational burden on the utility, and therefore new costs.

Consider the example of the Plains and Eastern Clean Line project in the 2010s, a failed attempt by private developers to sell wind power from Oklahoma into Arkansas and the Tennessee Valley Authority via a large HVDC transmission line. TVA ultimately neglected to sign a long-term power-purchase agreement with the project, destroying its viability. Abundist author Marc J. Dunkelman explains these events in Why Nothing Works as TVA protecting its fossil-fueled power from competition with carbon-friendlier wind. (TVA’s massive nuclear fleet, and the debt it incurred to build it, goes unmentioned.) But that’s a bad call from the umpire.

From TVA’s perspective, the contract just didn’t make sense for ratepayers. “We’re looking at a power demand in the future that is flat, or declining slightly,” TVA’s then-CEO told reporters in 2017, “so we don’t anticipate needing major additions to power generation for a decade or more.”

Rejecting the contract for the Clean Line’s wind power meant TVA’s revenues went to public assets and public workers instead of private assets and their investors outside the Valley. That dynamic is not about utility profit; TVA doesn’t have any shareholders to enrich. It’s possible the imported wind power would’ve been so cheap that the avoided costs would make up for the lost revenues. But as wind power dispatched and delivered intermittently, Clean Line also would have imposed additional costs on TVA: the operational need to flexibly balance all that power. Utilities in RTO regions can rely on purchasing energy on demand from a private fleet of gas-powered generators competing to make a buck—exactly what enabled CREZ to tap into renewables potential in Texas—but not TVA.

The magic wand of abundance conjures an exciting progressive vision of public authority, in this case, to expand our transmission system. But without accurately recognizing cost-benefit tradeoffs—without paying attention to which interests are in the umpire’s ear and why—that public authority can’t be trusted to call balls and strikes fairly.

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What public power was for

When Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned for Governor of New York in 1928, he characterized proposals for private hydroelectric development of the St. Lawrence River as “attempted robbery.” A few years later, as Governor, he established the New York Power Authority. Later, as President, he spearheaded yet more public power developments. “These great Government power projects,” Roosevelt stated at the Boulder (Hoover) Dam dedication in 1935, “will affect not only the development of agriculture and industry and mining in the sections that they serve, but they will also prove useful yardsticks to measure the cost of power throughout the United States.” The whole point of the Bonneville Power Administration, for example, was to deploy a transmission network that could deliver low-cost federal hydropower to the masses.

Today, however, we auction off public waters and public lands for private interests to develop into renewable power projects on a regular basis. It’s not robbery if you invite them to do it.

Federal transmission is pitched as a backstop to build the network that will deliver energy from such private, for-profit renewables projects. These generators aren’t public infrastructure projects that bear commemorative plaques or employ generations of workers, the kind that earns buy-in from locals. Instead, they’re hypothetical agglomerations of faceless, peopleless wind and solar farms that myriad competing private developers created. Local buy-in concentrates in the lucky landowners who will collect annual lease payments and creates bitterness in all their neighbors who lose out.

The power produced by these projects, that the federally-supported transmission would carry to distant loads, is intermittent and therefore less directly useful to a receiving utility than the firm, dispatchable hydroelectric power of old. That’s where stealth deregulation comes in, to fertilize the soil with new market structures that prioritize the offering and buying of such power. Meanwhile, utility bill increases in territories like PJM stem largely from capacity prices, and these non-firm resources offer less accredited capacity value than firm ones.

For a federal authority to be trusted with any of this, our vision of public power transmission expansion must be anchored instead to public resources with tangible public benefit—clean, firm power owned and operated at cost that puts people to work. It’ll have to play ball with utilities, too.

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A different public power template

What might such a program look like? Rather than dreaming of a public power system rivaling the New Deal in its ambition, we can find inspiration instead in the postwar federal transmission project known as the Pacific Intertie.

Under the Kennedy Administration in 1961, a federal task force initiated the planning of the Pacific Intertie, a collection of interregional transmission lines connecting federal hydropower in the Pacific Northwest, managed by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), down to load in California, reaching all the way to the municipal utility for Los Angeles. In its original form finished in 1970, the project consisted of two parts: dual AC transmission lines carrying roughly 2,500 MW across 940 miles and an HVDC line carrying 1,440 MW across 846 miles—the first HVDC transmission line in the United States and still the longest. Since then it’s been widened and expanded, to transfer even more power between the regions.

California utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric, then the country’s largest utility, needed more power to serve the state’s growing load, and Northwest hydropower looked like a good solution. By 1958 PG&E was in talks with BPA and an Oregon utility to build a far smaller line that would enable them to purchase federal hydropower. The public power ideologues of the Northwest threw their copious cold water onto that proposal: not only did the law require preference for public customers on sales of federal hydropower—unlike a behemoth like PG&E—they worried their regional power would be sucked dry by California. A Congressional resolution passed the next year ordered a halt to “all negotiations for any interconnection or sale of surplus power” until Congress could further study the issue. A firmer political coalition was needed.

In 1961 the Interior Secretary set up a federal task force led by BPA’s administrator to find a solution. Though great pains were taken to play ball with the utilities, the task force was driven by a public power ethos. The clearest path forward was, to them, for the federal government to build its own transmission lines from the Columbia River in Oregon down to Southern California. They drafted plans for various such pathways as bargaining chips against the utilities.

To beef up their opposition to Bonneville intrusion into their state, the California private utilities formed the California Power Pool, a seed that eventually blossomed into today’s CAISO. According to the newly formed power pool, there was “no need whatever for the Federal Government to spend vast sums of taxpayers’ money to build the transmission system the task force proposes.”

Over the next three years the political questions around ownership, preference, and regional allocation of the Intertie bounced around the task force, Congress, and Western governors. Democrats urged federal solutions and public preference, while Republicans in Congress, mostly aligned with the utilities against this scourge of socialism, tried to restrict BPA and encourage private enterprise. Though HVDC offered technical benefits for the lengthy project, it was really competition with the Soviet Union, who’d recently deployed the first HVDC line in the world, that drove the inclusion of this technology in the resulting project.

Even Canada became part of the political balancing act. To ensure regional power needs would continue to take priority, only surplus power could be sold to the new customers. BPA, however, didn’t quite have enough of that to go around. Meanwhile British Columbia was developing its own new hydroelectric projects and needed a market for their power. As BPA’s administrator explained years later, it was critical to Los Angeles that they receive firm power in any such transmission project, not just variable surplus, and it was exactly this firm demand from a growing customer base that sealed the deal for Canada.

Ultimately the task force reached a compromise with the utilities on a new, less government-controlled idea for the Intertie. Rather than a single federal authority building, owning, and recovering costs for the lines, they would be segmented by utility territories; those responsibilities would fall, separately, to each segment’s owner. The federal government would build and finance the segments that fell within its Oregon territory, while each other utility, public and private alike, would similarly build and finance their own. Not only would private utilities like Portland General Electric and the members of the California Power Pool plan and build their own segments of the lines, they’d collect their return on equity too. Markets would be preserved.

Though some in the West decried the proposal as a giveaway to private utilities, the task force set out clear ground rules, at the behest of Congressional Democrats, for those utilities’ participation. The chief requirement was that the public benefit should be equal to or greater than the hypothetical, all-federal designs for the Intertie that had served as the task force’s bargaining chip—a direct, postwar application of Roosevelt’s “yardstick” principle for public power during the New Deal. After months of study, the task force had priced out the costs involved in their alternative designs, and any proposals from utilities had to beat them. Two such segment proposals were denied on this basis.

Rather than acting merely as toll collectors, each utility in the Intertie needed to purchase some of the hydropower itself as well as offer up its own fossil-fueled power for purchase by BPA during the dry seasons. The utilities also absorbed, via their ratepayers, their shares of the overall project risk, in case it fell apart or the California demand never materialized.

At the terminus in California, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, a public utility, received about 700 MW over the innovative HVDC line. From the Oregon-Nevada border all the way down to Los Angeles, the equipment for the line was built and operated by LADWP but with ownership split between them, the private utility Southern California Edison, and a few smaller municipalities, all of whom helped to finance its construction.

After the 1970 dedication in Los Angeles, a Times editorial declared that it “may not look as romantic as the pyramids in the desert near Cairo, but it’s a lot more practical, and the towers and lines … are as awe inspiring as anything man has ever created.”

The Pacific Intertie’s task force fought for three years over ownership, preference, and regional allocation. What it never had to fight over was whose resource deserved a federal line, because the resource already belonged to the public. It never had to model speculative benefits, because Los Angeles was asking for firm power by the megawatt. It never had to allocate costs among rivals, because each participant financed its segment and recovered it through its own rates. And it never had to judge whether private participation served the public, because it wielded yardstick pricing. The private utilities kept their segments, their returns on equity, and their market structures—precisely the interests whose competing claims would be litigated before any federal authority today. Still the Pacific Intertie played the builder and not the umpire.

Part II of this essay argues that this combination serves as a template for solving the transmission problems of our own generation.

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Fred Stafford is a STEM professional and independent researcher on the power system, decarbonization, and public power. His newsletter can be found at PublicPowerReview.org. “Fred Stafford” is a pen name.

Read Part II

With domestic electricity consumption rising for the first time in a generation, a debate has erupted over how best to meet this new demand.

One camp argues that the fastest way to deal with load growth is through marginal and distributed improvements—by “getting more out of the grid we already have” with grid-enhancing technologies (GETs), capturing efficiency gains from electrified end-use technologies like heat pumps, and deploying distributed energy resources (DERs) like rooftop solar, battery storage, and virtual power plants (VPPs). The other camp seeks to streamline construction in the bulk power system with proposals to hasten siting and permitting for new transmission lines and interconnection for new power generation and for new large sources of load like data centers, chip fabs, metal refineries, and beyond.

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they can complement each other. Efficiencies and larger net supply can be unlocked on both the supply and distribution ends of the electric power system, and many DERs can indeed deploy quickly, “buying time” for the bulk power supply and transmission that will need to be built out in the coming years and decades.

But some in the first camp tend to pit the approaches against each other. To wit, a new series of reports by Rewiring America argues that tech companies should secure electricity by financing home upgrades, rather than funding new centralized generation. They describe this as a choice over whether hyperscaler grid investment “reinforces a model that concentrates wealth among large energy and technology companies, or builds one that lowers costs, strengthens communities, and centers households.”

Rewiring America assert that nationwide adoption of heat pumps, rooftop solar, home battery systems, and household electrification more broadly will create a new category of flexible grid resources that would not only meet 100 percent data center electricity demand but also improve energy affordability for tens of millions of households and reduce “reliance on expensive infrastructure expansion.”

Neither the analysis nor the grandiose proclamations made in the Homegrown Energy report series should be taken seriously. Rewiring America makes overoptimistic and unfounded assumptions to frame residential electrification as a preferable alternative to investment in the bulk power system. Their findings assume rates of heat pump, rooftop solar, and home battery installations that immediately jump orders of magnitude above the pace of deployment observed in recent years. Moreover, they never discuss how electrifying 68 million homes by 2030 would create significant new electricity demand of its own, overlook what the logistics and operational costs of such a program would look like, and how the country would meet load growth post-2030 having already exhausted all the ostensibly easily-mobilized energy capacity the residential sector has to offer.

Electrification and DERs can absolutely improve the existing power system and certainly deserve policy support. But maximalist studies like these deceive policymakers into believing that home upgrades should be the priority for grid expansion.

In addition to neglecting the need for new bulk supply assets like power plants, transmission and interconnection, and grid-scale storage, residential electrification maximalism poses immediate perverse consequences for homeowners themselves. The city of Berkeley, CA, for instance, is requiring sellers of single-residence homes to “replace fossil-fuel appliances or make other green upgrades as a condition of sale.” Sellers who defer this requirement must pay the buyers a $2,500 credit towards post-purchase retrofits, though the costs of installing a heat pump, for instance, can easily reach $20,000. The requirement amounts to an unfunded mandate on homebuyers in Berkeley, pushing up the cost of retrofits and with it the cost of housing.

Instead, the pathway through the nation’s electricity affordability crisis requires an approach that embraces both the large-scale electricity system and distributed innovations. In a political moment where the anxieties of everyday Americans are coalescing around worries that data centers will spike their electricity bills, policymakers have a golden window of opportunity to leverage hyperscalers’ power-sector investments to finance electrical projects that benefit them and society at large. By framing residential electrification as an alternative to investment in the bulk power system, Rewiring America’s reports present a zero-sum policy agenda that overrelies on distributed energy resources and may only worsen energy cost pressures for American consumers.

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Distributed Math That Doesn’t Add Up

The core problem with Rewiring America’s reports is their considerable overestimation of the grid capacity that home upgrades could create.

For heat pumps, Rewiring America’s logic is that the grid is sized to peak capacity, so lowering demand during those peaks means that utilities or hyperscalers don’t have to invest in new peakers to accommodate a large load. They model this by looking at the 10 most stressed hours of the year. During the other 8750 hours of the year, the assumption is that data centers would be powered by making greater use of existing generators. This isn’t outlandish; baseload gas turbine plants operate at 66% capacity on average. Presumably, they could operate during more hours of the year to serve new data centers. Likewise, upgrading inefficient electrical HVAC systems to heat pumps could, at face value, reduce peak demand and free up capacity to accommodate data centers.

Most other methodological choices don’t hold up so well under scrutiny. Rooftop solar estimates, for example, adopt the simplification that every rooftop in the country allows for an optimal south-facing system. This effectively guarantees high-end solar output estimates, by a considerable margin. In addition to eliminating those roofs with facings that diverge quite dramatically from due south, a solar deployment campaign would also have to exclude homes with older roofs or roof materials and homes where systems would not generate economically useful solar output. This home upgrades proposal also overstates the number of homes that would opt in by ignoring reductions in participation from variations in homeowner receptiveness.

Meanwhile, installation capacity may lag behind the targeted level of ambition. Rewiring America repeatedly suggests that home electrification, rooftop solar, and batteries offer faster solutions than centralized infrastructure, citing long lead times for gas turbines and interconnection queues and promoting home upgrades as solutions implementable “on the order of months rather than years.” Months may be a reasonable assumption for each individual instance of home electrification, but Rewiring America’s reports model heat pump installations for 68 million homes and solar-battery systems for nearly 80 million single-family homes by 2030. According to our analysis, this would entail, relative to current deployment rates, an 35-40x increase in residential solar installations and a 170-180x increase in home battery storage installations, to say nothing of the number of certified electricians and other professionals needed to facilitate this level of deployment.

Not only are Rewiring America’s rooftop solar estimates wildly optimistic, they also fail to account for geography when claiming that potential rooftop solar and storage capacity “can meet 100 percent of data center demand growth.” This flashy statistic, found on the first report’s front cover, is based on statistics summed across the entire country: 109 GW of potential solar plus storage capacity compared to 93 GW of expected data center demand. But much of their estimated capacity will simply be far away from new data centers. The figure below illustrates the potential spatial extent of supply-demand mismatches. Residential upgrades leave a huge quantity of data center demand in Virginia unmet, for instance, while rooftops in sunny California and Florida generate far more electricity than locally anticipated data centers require. The report’s headline claims imply diversion of these surpluses to regions in need of this capacity, requiring extensive investments in interregional transmission lines—the same model of large-scale infrastructure expansion Rewiring America purports to caution against.

A home upgrade campaign must also overcome unresolved technical and administrative hurdles facing DERs that will necessarily add implementation costs, extend the deployment timeline, and introduce risks that Rewiring America fails to discuss. Operationally, utilities would have to make substantial distribution network upgrades to usefully leverage residential solar generation, while also overcoming technological challenges around forecasting, coordination, and control. For fully-utilizable home solar and battery systems, utilities may even reasonably demand a grid integration charge to cover supporting system infrastructure. The difficulty of assessing upgrade potential, recruiting participants, and executing projects house-by-house will also add considerable transaction costs to the nominal sticker value of each project’s added capacity. The Rewiring America analyses largely avoid reckoning with these costs.

Beyond ignoring administrative and grid charges, Rewiring America’s second report makes methodological choices that hide trillions in peculiar household spending assumptions. The report, titled “A Policy Blueprint for Energy Affordability,” recommends electrification policies that it claims will deliver “$26,000 in average lifetime savings per home, or $1.5 trillion nationwide” after a 15-20 year payoff period. These are not savings from lower energy bills alone, but rather savings relative to a future where every home nationwide irrationally replaced its appliances with newer “like-for-like” versions. Thus, Rewiring America assumes every fossil-fired stove, water heater, and home heating unit in the country, by default, will be replaced with the latest fossil-fired model. They apply an average like-for-like upgrade cost of $15,000 per home, meaning that—across all 68 million non-electrified homes—homeowners would spend an unnecessary $1.02 trillion, rather than simply retaining their existing appliances. A more honest approach would not count this extraneous upfront capital expense in assessing nationwide lifetime savings from mass electrification, a calculation which ought to stand on its own merits.

Altogether, mass home electrification could offer some opportunities to free up grid capacity as hyperscalers drive load growth nationwide, but not likely anywhere near the extent to which Rewiring America claims and certainly without creating downward pressure on electricity bills.

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The Residential Sector: Promising But No Silver Bullet

Additional evidence that upgrading homes is insufficient to meet data center load growth actually comes from Rewiring America’s reports.

The Homegrown Energy “series” actually contains two different scenarios with assumptions optimized to support two different sets of goals. Part II argues that retrofits can be made affordable by modeling heat pump installation in the 68 million U.S. homes without them today, and by assuming a self-consumption battery dispatch strategy that minimizes the exports and imports of energy to the grid.

This contrasts starkly to Part I, which promotes household upgrades as an option to meet data center demand by lowering energy consumption during peak hours. Accordingly, it cherry-picks the subset of 21 million homes where heat pump installation would reduce peak demand and lower prices. These households already have electricity-based HVAC but use less energy-efficient technologies than heat pumps. Naturally, switching from an outdated electrical system to a better electrical system decreases energy consumption—much like swapping incandescent lightbulbs with LEDs. But restraining the scope of analysis excludes the other 47 million households for whom heat pumps would increase electricity consumption—those that currently use gas, oil, wood, or have no space heating and those with window or wall air conditioners or without air conditioning. Yet Part II, which does model heat pump installation for these homes, contains no mention of how such a program would raise peak electricity demand and necessitate new investments in centralized infrastructure.

Part I furthermore treats each state’s rooftop solar and storage as a perfectly coordinated network of grid assets and prioritizes residential exports that provide grid-wide peak shaving, as opposed to Part II’s approach that prioritizes benefits for homeowners over serving systemwide demand. The tension is that a battery cannot aggressively export during peak hours (as assumed in Part I) and also minimize said exports (the assumption in Part II). Residential solar with storage cannot simultaneously optimize for these two differing societal value propositions. In other words, home upgrades can either serve data center demand or lower the costs of home electrification, but they cannot do both.

Lastly, even if Rewiring America’s oversimplified projections for improved efficiency from home electrification somehow bear out, increasing load growth beyond the next half-decade will invariably require new electricity supply and transmission that the ratepayer will have to pay for. Rewiring America’s initiative would equip every household in the country with heat pumps, batteries, and rooftop solar by 2030. But after every gigawatt of reasonable capacity from the residential sector has been leveraged, home electrification can no longer serve as a resource to match virtually assured continued load growth post-2030. To do so will require additional centralized power plants and transmission—the majority built by utilities and paid for through electric bills, or by data centers themselves.

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Affordable Electrification Cannot Ignore Infrastructure

The proper balance of attention towards home upgrades and the grid at a system level is ultimately simple. Policymakers should cut through red tape to make home upgrades more accessible for Americans that want them while focusing on channeling utility and data center developer capital investments into the shared infrastructure that supports long-term electricity system resiliency and national economic growth. In short, home electrification and DERs should be pursued on their own merits without overstating broader grid benefits.

The dilemma confronting U.S. politicians for the foreseeable future is that no realistic course of action will substantially lower electricity rates—certainly not immediately. More electricity demand will require more construction, which will in turn require capitalization through shared charges. The costs of merely maintaining and replacing existing distribution infrastructure are already showing up in ratepayers’ bills. The conflict between the transition to clean energy, load growth, and energy affordability is thus an emergent feature of markets adjusting to new demand, not a bug.

With or without clean energy, modernizing the U.S. grid in a time of rising demand will be more costly for many years before those efforts start saving Americans money. Those expenditures represent an investment in a better future that may reduce energy bills in a decade, not tomorrow. Maintaining focus on the long-term arc of the energy system, more than anything, will help keep policy efforts more appropriately balanced between opportunities at the level of the single-family home and those at the level of the macrogrid.

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Smoke from wildfires in Canada and Minnesota left much of the east coast under hazy skies this past weekend—an increasingly familiar summer occurrence. In some parts of the D.C. metro area, air quality reached a hazardous 373 AQI. No U.S. forest policy could have prevented smoke from Canadian wildfires from reaching D.C. But the episode is a reminder of the broader wildfire crisis and of the need to ensure federal investments in reducing wildfire risk are actually yielding results here at home.

Climate conditions, decades of fire suppression, and a century of fuel accumulation leave us increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire. A perfect storm of political reorganization, staffing attrition, and regulatory gridlock is actively making it even harder for government agencies to respond. Without addressing these challenges, federal funding for wildfire mitigation will be slow to stop our forests from burning as often and as severely.

Congress is days away from breaking for August recess and faces a dwindling number of weeks for legislative activity before the end of the year. This past weekend’s conditions and the worsening wildfire season underway across the western United States serve as reminders that Congress cannot afford to delay action on legislation aimed at reducing wildfire risk.

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Wildfire mitigation under Trump 2.0

Historically, greater federal investment in hazardous fuel reduction (HFR) has translated into more acres treated. As Congress increased funding for mechanical thinning, prescribed fire, and other fuel reduction activities, treatment output rose accordingly.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) followed by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), provided a multiyear infusion of funding for hazardous fuel reduction beginning in FY2022. According to the last decade of HFR data for the Forest Service, both funding and reported treatment acres peaked in fiscal year 2023.

When President Trump returned to office, his administration inherited those investments and the opportunity to translate them into substantially higher risk mitigation outcomes. Yet, reported treatment has since moved in the opposite direction. IIJA funding is set to expire this year. After $514 million in HFR spending over its five year period, there has been little acceleration in treatment rates. The US Forest Service (USFS) treated 3.3 million acres in 2025, below 2024 levels and short of its own 3.6 million acre target.

Even prior to Trump 2.0, the current pace of treatment was vastly outmatched by the crisis. In recent years, USFS and DOI have averaged treatment of 5-7 million acres per year nationwide. For comparison, California alone requires treatment on roughly 3.9M acres per year to meaningfully reduce wildfire risk. In 2022, the Biden administration published a wildfire strategy with the goal of carrying out fuel treatments on an additional 50 million acres nationwide over a decade. USFS and DOI have identified a backlog of 117 million acres with high or very high wildfire risk potential.

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Why hasn’t more funding produced more treatment

Since the influx of unprecedented wildfire mitigation funding from the IIJA and IRA, treatment rates have not accelerated proportionally and measurable reductions in wildfire risk remain elusive. There are several reasons the recent funding surge has not yet translated into record treatment output.

First, as IRA and IIJA supplemental funding kicked in for HFR, Congress pulled back on the “regular” annual base appropriations for the same activities. Regular appropriations for these activities are primarily included in the annual funding bill for Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. This apparent supplanting is, in part, due to a shift of some funding to a new budget line item consolidating salaries and expenses across all Forest Service programs starting in FY2021. The budgeting change makes year-to-year comparisons of HFR funding difficult, but two things are clear: the IRA and IIJA funding is less of a windfall because it offsets some of the drop in regular appropriations, and federal funding for HFR has, nevertheless, reached record highs.

Second, more treatment requires more planning. Large landscape treatments require years of planning before implementation, so some lag is expected. Workforce losses have affected USFS’ ability to maintain the current pace of HFR treatments, much less execute even more. Data from late last year showed HFR work by USFS was down 38% in 2025. If USFS is suffering a similar slow down in planned acres—which stakeholders and Members of Congress are concerned is the case—USFS will struggle to sustain higher treatment levels in future years.

There will undoubtedly be calls for more mitigation funding this year as IIJA funding expires and the next round of annual spending bills are negotiated. Adding to the looming funding cliff, the Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund is scheduled to expire after FY2027 unless Congress extends it, raising the risk that suppression costs will once again crowd out funding for HFR efforts.

Funding remains necessary but just throwing more money at the problem isn’t enough. Congress must also address slow multi-year NEPA reviews, resolve litigation induced delays, and ensure agencies prioritize wildfire mitigation among other agency priorities like wildfire suppression or timber production.

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What Fix Our Forests can and can’t fix

Congress should dedicate sustained funding for HFR, but also focus on removing barriers to implementation. The Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA), which passed the House and advanced out of Committee in the Senate last year, takes aim at regulatory streamlining and reducing litigation risks. Forest management projects, which include HFR efforts, attract more litigation than any other federal projects. The bipartisan bill expands several authorities intended to accelerate hazardous fuel treatments on more acres, including expanded categorical exclusions under NEPA to encompass larger sized projects, shorter timelines for legal challenges, and improved interagency coordination mechanisms.

Trump 2.0 has made it clear that their deregulatory agenda goes hand in hand with historic federal workforce reductions. This is important because while streamlining environmental reviews or improving interagency coordination might result in some improved efficiencies, regulatory reform doesn’t automatically put chainsaws in the woods. USDA’s sweeping reorganization and mounting workforce reductions threaten to further exacerbate preexisting staff capacity constraints at USFS.

When asked in congressional hearings why treatment targets had fallen despite available funding, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz did not provide a clear explanation for the decline beyond citing vague “operational challenges.” Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and other agency officials have emphasized full suppression. It would be a mistake to return the failed policies of the last century that prioritized full suppression at the expense of proactive fuel management.

Some environmental organizations and sympathetic lawmakers have cited the lack of direct funding in FOFA and a general distrust of the current administration’s land management priorities and implementation abilities as reasons to withhold their support from the legislation.

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Congress’ next move

Despite warranted skepticism, Congress should pass FOFA this year. Giving diminished, understaffed regional offices the statutory tools to cut through red tape is the best opportunity they have to maximize remaining resources, and lay the groundwork for future administrations to make better use of appropriated mitigation funding.

Congress has already demonstrated that it is willing to invest billions in reducing wildfire risk. The next question is whether federal agencies can convert those dollars into completed fuel treatments on the ground. Until Congress pairs sustained funding with regulatory reform, implementation capacity, and accountability for acres treated, appropriations alone will continue to produce disappointing results.

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I’m very excited to share with you the product of many months of research and writing. It’s a report called Rewiring Risk: How to Bring Down Electricity Bills and Increase Wildfire Resilience in California, and it offers a framework for understanding and addressing the state’s intertwined wildfire, home insurance and electricity unaffordability crises.

For the launch of this report, we decided to try something a little different: a podcast! Above you can find a conversation between me and my colleague Eric Biber, a professor of environmental law at UC Berkeley who was an incredibly helpful reviewer of my report. I hope you take the time to listen, but if you just want the highlights, you can find a heavily abridged transcript of our conversation below.

Thanks, Lauren.

Read the Report HERE

Inverse Condemnation with Strict Liability: A Boring-Sounding Doctrine that Is Actually Really Important

Lauren

So maybe we can just start with what exactly this is. “Inverse condemnation with strict liability,” It’s a bit of a mouthful. People’s eyes glaze over as soon as you utter it.

Eric

Inverse condemnation is the flip side of what’s called eminent domain. Eminent domain is the power of the government to take someone’s property, with or without their consent, as long as compensation is paid for it. Say the government wants to build a highway. You can sell to the government if you want, but if you choose not to sell, the government can go to court, force the title of the property that’s covered by the route of the highway and have that transferred to the government in return for a court adjudicated amount of money that is supposed to be just compensation—which is the federal constitutional term for this and it’s the standard practice in most states.

Inverse condemnation is the opposite of eminent domain. The government does something to your property, and they don’t go through the eminent domain process, and the property owner alleges that the government action was effectively taking title, or affecting the property in a way that required compensation, and so I’m going to court to force the government to pay that compensation.

The concept of strict liability is a concept out of what’s called tort law. Tort law is basically the law of accidents or intentional actions—where someone does something that hurts someone else, either in their body, in their property rights, in their reputation, range of possible ways, and you know, if you purposely do something to hurt someone, that’s pretty obvious. But most of the time, this is unintentional, right? You run into someone’s car with your car, and we adjudicate who owes what for that accident through a concept usually called negligence. So that’s the standard for much tort liability in the U.S.

Strict liability is a different standard. It basically says if you’re doing a certain kind of action and you harm someone else, you’re liable. Doesn’t matter if you took reasonable precautions. Doesn’t matter if you were negligent or not. You are liable. So to put it back together, what we have here is inverse condemnation with strict liability – if you do something that harms someone else, we will hold you strictly liable for it because it is a form of eminent domain for which compensation is required.

So that raises the question: Why is this applying to electric utilities? These are not highways. These are not public entities. These are private companies. Well, as it turns out, California, like basically all other states, applies this concept of eminent domain and publicness to activities besides constructing public roads. It has long historically applied for railroads and electric transmission and gas pipelines and other pipelines. Even if it’s operated by a private company, those entities have eminent domain power, and the theory here is that they’re providing a public utility, a public use. The whole point is that anyone should be able to access electricity if you can pay the fee. They have an obligation to hook you up and connect you to the system. They can’t discriminate against you.

Okay, so now you can see that the electricity system could be seen as something that’s for public use, and that the utility company would be seen, even if it’s a private company, as a public utility. And that’s basically how the California courts put it together. It’s like, okay, these are public utilities doing a public use; if they damage private property in the course of their operations, compensation is owed.

Why strict liability? So this concept is not unique to California, as you note in your report. A bunch of other states have this possibility of an electric utility being liable for damage to private property. California is basically an outlier here because of the strict liability standard. In other states, it tends to be a negligence standard.

Lauren

So why does California apply strict liability where all the other states only apply a fault-based or negligence-based standard?

Eric

Basically, the California Supreme Court concluded this is what the standard should be. There’s, I think, a theory that the public is benefiting from this infrastructure, so the public, in the form of the public entity that causes the damage, right, should compensate the members of the public who are harmed as a result of that infrastructure, right? So it’s sort of a risk spreading concept. If you are harmed by this public infrastructure, the public should be supporting it. Balanced against, are you making it too expensive for us to construct or operate this infrastructure? It’s not clear to me that the California courts would come to the same result, knowing what they know now about the implications of this doctrine.

Lauren

You just alluded to the consequences of strict liability, and I guess I should be clear about what I think those are and what I think probably you agree those are, which is: one, it’s been disastrous for electricity affordability because it incentivizes electricity utilities to mitigate to the point of diminishing marginal returns, often with extremely expensive capital expenditures.

But strict liability for utilities has been around for 25 years. So, why did these affordability effects become pronounced only quite recently? Well, it turns out the collision of growing wildfire risk with this doctrine produces it, which leads us to the question of why wildfire risk has apparently grown in California over the past 10 years. Most wildfire people who study it have an agreed upon story of what these factors are. The first is fuels management, and Eric, maybe you can talk a little bit about this because you go into quite a bit of detail about it in your Fixing Wildfire Law article. What is the history of fuels management specifically in California, and how has it led to the situation we have now?

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How Forestry Practices Provided Fuel for the Fire

Eric

Basically, starting in the 1920s, there’s a huge push for fire suppression. The Forest Service starts a policy of putting fires out on its lands by 10 a.m. of the next day as a basic policy. Fire was seen as a risk to property. Part of this was a response to a very large series of fires in the 1910s that caused tremendous damage throughout the Western U.S. But it was also seen as damaging a resource that should be used by people. Like we don’t want trees to burn; we want to use them for timber, for instance.

And the problem, of course, is that many, though not all, the ecosystems in Western forests historically burned. Whether it’s from Native American burning or natural sources. A chunk of it’s natural lightning. These are species, for instance, that require fire to reproduce. Pine trees whose cones need fire to burst open and sprout, but also that if you don’t burn, if you’re in a dry western pine forest, the fuels just accumulate. It’s not wet year round, like in much of the eastern U.S. such that you can get the fuel to decompose. It’s going to burn, and so the forests will burn one way or another, and of course, if you decide to put out the fires for 50 years, the result is the fuels accumulate.

And exacerbating that was a range of practices of industrial logging that tended to emphasize treating forests like plantations, creating large single age stands of forests that also can be vulnerable to fire in sort of the way they structure and are managed. So you put those two together. Those happen for several decades, and eventually, the result is at some point things are going to give, and then that gets exacerbated by climate change. Things are warmer. Things are drier. Those are things that make fires go bigger. They can also interact, for instance, making wind events like we have in California particularly stronger and more dangerous.

So again, one of the challenges is that fire is particularly a risk in particular weather events that will occur, but are hard to predict in the aggregate. And so, most of the worst fire events get started during these extreme wind events. So you put that together, as you say, you have a doctrine sitting around that allows for recovery, and then you get a dramatic explosion and fire, and in particular, expansion in the intensity and size of the fires and the damage they do.

You know I reference the big burn in the 1910s in northwestern U.S. that burned out whole towns, but it’s different today in part because there’s more people, property is a lot more valuable. There’s a lot more development and a lot more development in places that might burn, and so you get events like the Camp Fire that burns out Paradise. You get fires in the Napa and Sonoma counties and wine country in Northern California that burn in urban areas, and one of the things we’re starting to see now, and again—this has happened historically—you’re getting fires entering in or starting on the edge of urban areas that turn into structure-to-structure fires.

This is what happened in the Palisades in LA, Altadena in LA as well, and it turns out there’s actually a lot more fuel in a house than in a tree. So if you overwhelm urban fire suppression, it can become extremely difficult to restore control in a high wind event. So you put all that together, and you get the possibility of much higher losses economically and at levels that are just not sustainable by even very large corporations like California public utilities, which are companies with tens of billions of dollars of assets, but you know they’re not going to sell off the transmission system to pay the judgment. They have to have cash, and they don’t.

How We Subsidize the Expansion of the Wildland-Urban Interface with Fire Policy

Lauren

This brings us to the other element of growing wildfire risk, which is growing exposure. The fact is, more people are living in dangerous proximity to wildfire than ever before. I think we probably have a pretty similar account of why this is. What’s your understanding of why we have this growth in the WUI, the so-called WUI, the wildland urban interface?

Eric

Wildland urban interface, one of the worst acronyms ever invented.

So why? Well, some of it is just a story of urban sprawl, cars, lots more income. People want to live in beautiful places, right? So that’s a chunk of it. There have always been rural communities in these places, but a lot of the population boom is driven, you know, by tourism, by people wanting second homes, by people wanting to travel and visit these places or retire to these places because they’re beautiful, wonderful places to live, and I don’t think that that demand is not going to be there.

Another component of it is that land use regulation, which has its pros and cons, tends to be stricter in urban areas than it tends to be in some, but not all of these exurban or rural areas. That varies a lot by place, but I think it’s fair to generalize that rural areas in the Western U.S. tend to have less strict land use regulation, which makes it easier to build things again for better or for worse. And so the result is you can get a lot of development scattered over the landscape, which makes it harder to protect. Isolated houses are harder to protect than contiguous core areas from fire coming in. Makes it harder to have fire on the landscape. One of the prime ways you deal with fuel loads is to try and restore fire, low intensity or even medium, higher intensity fire, depending on the ecosystem, to reduce the fuel loads. It’s hard to do that if you have people living out there.

So that’s another chunk of it, and another chunk of it is that we effectively, in our fire policy, at least subsidize development in these spaces, right? So we provide public fire suppression and fire protection, and that disproportionately benefits the people who are more at risk, right? Which is going to be people living in the WUI as a general rule. And related to that, the insurance system can provide that cross subsidization as well, depending on how policies and rates are structured.

And California is particularly susceptible to this because it has, for a long time, strictly regulated the rates that can be charged for homeowners’ policies to protect against losses like from fire, and that restriction on rates mutes the ability of using insurance to send economic signals about where higher risk exists, right? And so that’s another form of cross subsidization. Just because you have cross subsidization doesn’t make it bad, right? We may think that you know, rural communities are poor. They need support, things like that. But talking about a bunch of second homes in Tahoe, or you know, down in the Sierra Nevada, or somewhere like maybe you’re less sympathetic to cross subsidization. But those are the basic concepts.

Development in the WUI’s exploded. It’s going to continue to explode. There’s demand there. We don’t have a regulatory system that consistently constrains it. And from an insurance and public policy perspective, there are components that significantly subsidize it. I could back out and sort of say, if we were thinking about rural development more broadly, there are other ways in which rural areas are more expensive to live and harder to live in. So I don’t want to say that this is all determinative, but within the scope of what we’re talking about for fire, there’s definitely a cross subsidization component.

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Prop 103: The Root of All Evil?

Lauren

Yes, this is the great bugbear of my paper. The mechanism by which rates are tightly regulated is the dreaded Proposition 103, which I mention a lot in my paper, and I doubt we will ever see rolled back in our lifetime. Which essentially, yeah, Eric’s shaking his head. Proposition 103 was originally a response to, I guess people thought auto insurance was too high, and like many things in California, it was put to ballot initiative. People were saying, “Do you think the prices are too high? Then vote for this ballot initiative.” And people said, “That sounds good to me.” And it turned out what that did is it subjected rate increases to the whims of an elected official, the insurance commissioner, who being elected has political reasons to not approve rate increases that are high enough, and by high enough I mean to let the insurance market clear and send actuarial signals about where it is safe to live. To me this is the root of all evil. I don’t know if you feel the same way exactly, but this is the original sin to me.

Eric

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the framing you give is, I think, a key, an important part of it. I think the best responses, if I was to sort of play the devil’s advocate on the other side, is, you know, without the elected accountability, the insurance companies would dominate as the larger repeat players relative to consumers, and you would get crappy products with poor claim service that would just take money from people and not actually give them good services, right? And there is, you know, I think a reasonable argument for consumer protection in the insurance context because of the possibility that you could pay in and not get out, because insurers could use policy provisions and claims services to effectively deny what you thought you were paying for.

That being said, there is a large range between good consumer protection and rate freezes, right? And so I think it is fair to say that I would agree with the position you’re putting out there, which is that the current system is not allowing insurers to recoup the funds they believe they need to be economically viable to provide protections in high risk parts of the state.

And part of that is that they can’t differentiate based on that risk to the level they think they should be able to, and also differentiate between policyholders who take various steps to reduce risk. Right, so you can harden your home or clear what’s called defensible space, removing vegetation around your house to reduce those risks, and part of it is also just the inability to increase rates in response to new information, and so that can effectively turn into, as you note, a cross subsidization in which low risk parts of the state pay for high risk.

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Some Cross Subsidies Are Better Than Others

Eric

Now I’m going to step back. Like, insurance is sort of by definition cross subsidization in that way, right? It’s risk spreading. I think the problem comes in when it gets to an extreme level where it raises questions about what policy goals we’re trying to achieve. And so, again, this I think is a hard problem to solve, in part because some of that cross subsidization you could make plausible equity claims for, right? Poor rural communities. Think of communities like in Northern California that were historically logging dependent, natural resource extraction dependent. Those industries have declined substantially. They’re relatively low income, looking for some kind of economic boost, and setting insurance at much higher rates would be just yet another economic burden to what are already very burdened communities.

But like I said, it’s hard to have much sympathy for someone buying their second home in a resort area in California. So separating out who we’re supporting and what the equity claims here are is tricky and may not always be feasible. But I agree with you, the current system is not functional, and it does effectively produce substantial cross subsidization that, at least in part, is benefiting people that we probably don’t think have good equity claims, and is also in part facilitating further development in areas that are higher risk for fire, which exacerbates the problem to begin with.

Lauren

We should get into what exactly the cross subsidies are that I complain about in my report. So there’s quite a few of them. The first is the one relevant to the utilities, and this is a somewhat complicated one. There’s kind of two ways in which the utilities cross subsidize people in high risk areas. The first is, of course, by taking excessive grid mitigation measures to avoid setting a fire in a high risk area.

The second is this really interesting—and maybe you can explain more about this—it’s an interesting kind of mechanism called insurer subrogation, by which the insurer can sue the utility to recover the claims that had to pay out to the person whose house burned down. Why can they do that?

Eric

Subrogation is the idea that you can step in the shoes of someone else to assert their claims because you compensated for them. So, if you actually ever read your policy, you’ll see this comes up, right? Like if the insurer comes out and pays a claim for you, they’re going to reserve the right that you had a claim against someone else for the harm that they compensated you for, they will assert that claim to get their money back. As an example, I once turned my ankle playing basketball in a gym, and the health insurance company called me up a little later and said, “Hey, do you think there was something fishy about the gym that led you to turn your ankle? It’s like, “No, no, I just misplaced my foot on the basketball court.” But they were looking to see, “Did I have a claim?” Right, a negligence claim against the owner of the court, such that they could recoup the money they had paid on my behalf for my medical care, right?

Lauren

And that would be awesome for them, right?

Eric

Yeah, well, I mean, insurers budget based on this, right? They’re going to take into account that they are going to assert claims for a certain proportion of our asserted legal claims and the certain proportion of claims, insurance claims, made by our policyholders, and use that to recover some of the funds we pay out. And you know, if you take that into account, then you’ll take into account what capital reserves do we need to pay claims, what rates do we need to charge to pay claims, and so on and so forth.

So, as you know in the report, what has essentially happened for the insurance industry in California is they have made up for the lower rates they can charge, which may not be sufficient to support the claims they believe they will need to pay out because of wildfire risk. They have made that up by asserting claims against utilities under strict liability, so essentially, what has happened is strict liability for utilities for fire risk in California has been a way to help prop up the insurance industry in California, and as you know, that that does produce another form of cross subsidization because the rate payers are not just paying for the capital expenditures to reduce.

But all the utilities self-insure or contribute to the state pool funding, and what happens is that ratepayers in general are paying for the claims payouts by the utilities to these insurance companies, and again, that’s going to go from low risk to high risk as a general rule, right? Because there’s going to be more claims in high risk than low risk areas, and so that is a key part of supporting the insurance industry in California. The insurance companies make arguments that you do that [get rid of strict liability], we’re out of here.

Lauren

So this is to me one of the worst cross subsidies. Because it essentially subsidizes people to live in dangerous places indefinitely, and it delays an insurance crisis that is going to need to happen. Well, it’s already happening essentially. This is what’s happening right now. You know, State Farm pulled out of the state a couple years ago [editor’s note: State Farm didn’t actually pull out but they stopped writing new policies and non-renewed a bunch].

Eric

I think I see it as the same as the others, right? It’s still low risk to high risk. I think maybe it’s the capriciousness of it is what you’re maybe referring to. It’s just like who suffers losses that their insurance companies claim that then have the happenstance of being connected to utilities that result in payments, as opposed to a more systematic way of understanding, you know, who was harmed? Who took reasonable risks in where they lived, and reasonable precautions in hardening their homes or managing fuels on their property, and paid reasonable, or paying into rates that were reasonable to cover an insurance pool, for instance, and it’s also going to be totally capricious in terms of who who’s compensated. You could have a very expensive second home versus, you know, the only place you live. It’s all your assets in a rural town, and either one, it’s treated the same.

Lauren

Yes, the capriciousness is part of why I don’t like it. I would say the other reason is that as opposed to a cross subsidy, like say general fire protection and suppression, it is funded regressively. So when something is funded through the rates, everyone famously pays the same rate for electricity. That is going to affect lower income consumers more than higher income consumers, especially because in California, low income people are more likely to live in our very hot Central Valley and require more air conditioning. So I think it’s a very bad way to do it. It obviously creates a ton of moral hazard, and I think that if you’re going to create a ton of moral hazard, at least have it funded progressively through the tax base.

Eric

The capex, to be clear, would also be regressively funded. That is, at least arguably, that’s providing a public good in the sense that you’re reducing fire risk that will benefit the broader landscape and society.

Lauren

Yes. So yeah, the capex benefits people in high risk areas more than low risk areas, but at least it benefits the people in low risk areas some.

Eric

Sure.

Lauren

Whereas subsidizing people’s insurance really only benefits them and makes the wildfire exposure worse in the long run, in my opinion.

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The Radioactive Politics of Home Insurance and Electric Utilities

Lauren

There’s also the famous cross subsidy of the FAIR plan that’s slightly outside of the scope of my paper. But we should talk about it.

Eric

It actually is essential because the FAIR plan is the backup insurance plan if you can’t get homeowners insurance in California, and let us emphasize: like, if you do not have homeowners insurance, the average person is screwed because you can not have a mortgage without homeowners insurance. Set aside that your most important asset is at risk of going poof with no compensation. No one’s going to write you a mortgage without homeowners insurance for obvious reasons. The bank wants to be able to get its security back if something happens, and so the FAIR plan is a state mandated insurance program that’s the insurer of last resort. It is not unique to California. Florida, Texas, many states have similar systems. All of them are prone to similar risks. They get all bad risks, so it’s a terrible risk pool, which means it is extremely susceptible to losses. Historically, these have also not been good at setting rates commensurate with their risk, in part because they’re often publicly run or publicly supervised, and in part because you can tell equity stories about why you’re not going to dump giant rates on poor people who need to get insurance to protect their limited assets.

The result is that you need a backfill somewhere, and so this happened in the FAIR Plan, which got hit with a bunch of claims out of the LA fires. I believe it was a billion dollar backfill that all the other insurers in the state had to give the FAIR plan, and half of that comes from the admitted insurers putting an assessment on their ratepayers. So all the policyholders in the state are cross subsidizing those people who are on the FAIR plan as well. And again, that is going to be low risk to high risk, and again, within the high risk pool, there’s going to be a range of people we may feel more or less sympathetic to in terms of whether we want to be supporting them.

You can see these dynamics happen in other states. It is extremely politically popular to ensure people have access to homeowners insurance, and insurance companies, like utilities, are hard to make politically popular. Let’s put it that way.

Lauren

So people hate insurance, and this is kind of your, I would say, reasonable critique of my report, is that people hate insurance, people hate utilities. It’s politically popular to rail against them.

Right, and you see that dynamic, like you see this down in L.A. after the fires, right? Like it’s not a left-right thing. It’s a range of people who are really pissed at their insurance company for not paying out the way they think they should be paid, and wanting to get back at them about that. And again, like there are times when insurance companies don’t do what they should do. It’s a difficult contractual problem to solve, right? And so that’s why you have the public intervention. But the result can be, as you say, that the insurance companies can’t charge what they need to make the risk pooling work.

So is it politically feasible [Lauren’s idea to reinstate actuarial pricing]? I don’t know. I mean, it’s also going to be infeasible if no one wants to write policies. And one interesting dynamic you have seen is there have been efforts at reform or change by the current Insurance Commissioner [Ricardo Lara, who implemented the Sustainable Insurance Strategy in late 2024, which seeks to take pressure off the FAIR plan by allowing insurers to charge higher rates]. One can debate the merits of them as well as the underlying politics of how much he’s helping insurance companies versus rate policyholders. But there have been changes that have happened, and there’s been, I think, surprising levels of political support for those changes, from what I’ve observed. Partly because of the shock waves of non-renewals and people getting non-renewals across the state does change the political tenor some.

Utilities are harder in part because there’s definitely examples of bad behavior by some of the utilities along these lines in the past, including deferred maintenance. So those memories are present in a way that I think makes it hard for people to have sympathy for what you’re talking about, but again, you know the question is when, if utility bills go up enough, does that change the political dynamic enough? And one other thing– you flag the progressivity or regressivity of those rate increases, which I think is really important. It also interacts with the state’s climate goals because a lot of those are focused around electrification. Transportation, heating, home heating, and things like that. And if electric rates are high enough, those become much less feasible for people to do, and also increase the regressivity of the increased electricity rates even more because transportation and heating are pretty fundamental activities for people, and so that is an additional reason. And I think those dynamics are one reason why . I think you would potentially see traction in the state legislature to make changes. I’m more skeptical you get changes through the ballot process because I think with the politics around utilities and insurance companies, it’s just really hard to get the broader public on board. Well, let’s make those entities better, let’s help them – it’s not an easy pitch to make, right?

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2026 may well be remembered as the year global agriculture began to untangle itself from decades of precautionary red tape. Earlier this year, the agricultural biotechnology landscape shifted in two places that have long defined opposite poles of the regulatory debate: the European Union, historically the home of exceedingly precautionary biotech rules, and the United States, a pro-innovation leader now eyeing a massive regulatory overhaul.

The EU Parliament recently approved a landmark framework for regulating New Genomic Techniques (NGTs). Many plants developed with CRISPR or other precise gene-editing techniques will now be treated more like conventional crops by regulators than transgenics, commonly referred to as “GMOs.” Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture is weighing a clean break from its legacy Part 340 biotechnology rules, in place since the late 1980s.

Together, these moves mark a broader retreat from process-based regulation toward more risk-based and technology-agnostic frameworks. Product-based regulations ask what a product does, what risks it plausibly poses, and whether regulation will actually improve safety—rather than focusing on the technology used in development. This is about more than administrative streamlining; it’s the key to a new wave of agricultural innovation.

While the EU’s NGT reforms and the US’s potential overhaul are steps in the right direction, true modernization demands that all genetically engineered products—gene-edited and transgenic alike—be treated the same as conventionally bred crops. Continuing to differentiate between these categories as a proxy for risk conflicts with the scientific consensus that gene-edited and transgenic crops don’t pose new risks compared to conventional breeding, often making changes to a plant’s DNA with greater speed and accuracy and fewer unintended changes. Only by aligning regulations with established science will we unlock the benefits of biotechnology innovation in agriculture.

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Climate policy often clashes with the needs of poor households. Nowhere is this clearer than in the debate over clean cooking. For nearly three billion people, daily cooking still depends on wood, charcoal, dung, crop residues, coal, or other solid fuels. The smoke from those fuels is not an abstract environmental problem. It is a direct health risk, especially for women and children who spend the most time near household fires. Liquified petroleum gas (LPG) is a solution: compared with wood, charcoal, dung, and coal burned indoors, it produces far less household air pollution and can sharply reduce exposure to fine particulates and soot. For families facing daily smoke exposure, the health gains can be large and immediate. But LPG is not a zero-carbon fuel, thereby making it a target for climate activists.

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Kirk Smith vs Paul Ehrlich

While almost everyone has heard of Paul Ehrlich and his sensational (and wrong) views on overpopulation, few people are aware of the late Kirk R. Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley. Smith helped establish the modern science of household air pollution. He was a major contributor to international climate science, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet he refused to treat climate policy and human health as competing goals. Smith never lost his focus on practical solutions for people living with severe health risks in poor countries.

Beginning in the early 1980s, Smith studied the consequences of cooking with solid fuels in poorly ventilated homes. He and his colleagues documented the links between household smoke and serious illness, including childhood pneumonia, chronic lung disease, and cardiovascular disease. His work on clean cooking in India helped transform household air pollution from a largely overlooked problem into a major public-health and development priority. Smith worked with Indian researchers to measure women’s exposure to smoke from traditional cooking fuels such as wood, dung, charcoal, and crop residues. That fieldwork helped establish the scientific basis for understanding household air pollution as a serious cause of respiratory and cardiovascular disease, especially among women and young children.

Smith’s central contribution was to show that the health problem was not merely “indoor smoke,” but dirty combustion that affected entire households. In India, where hundreds of millions of households relied on solid fuels for daily cooking, this meant that exposure was both widespread and lifelong. His research emphasized that improved biomass stoves could reduce some pollution, but often did not reduce exposure enough to meet health-protective standards. Smith argued that genuinely clean fuels—especially LPG—were essential for rapid health gains.

Smith was an influential advocate for expanding access to LPG for poor households. He viewed LPG as a practical, immediately available fuel that could sharply reduce household air pollution, lessen the burden of fuelwood collection, and improve the daily lives of women and children. His collaboration with Indian scientists and policymakers helped support one of the world’s largest clean-cooking efforts, which provided LPG access to roughly 80 million households.

Smith’s approach was pragmatic. He argued that clean-cooking policy should be judged by actual exposure reductions, health outcomes, affordability, and sustained use—not simply by whether a fuel was classified as renewable. Subsequent research in rural India has reinforced the importance of sustained LPG use, noting that a connection to a gas line is not enough if households continue to “stack” fuels by using wood, dung, or crop residues alongside LPG.

Smith’s legacy in India is that he linked environmental science with practical public health interventions. By documenting the risks of solid-fuel cooking and making the case for clean fuels at scale, Smith helped shift clean cooking from a niche stove-design issue to a central question of health, gender equity, air quality, and development. Smith and his collaborators showed that household air pollution was among the world’s largest environmental health risks, contributing to millions of premature deaths each year. The burden fell disproportionately on poor women and children. For households that rely on solid fuels, LPG is the most immediately available clean-cooking substitute.

That conclusion sometimes sits uneasily with climate activists in the West who treat any expansion of fossil-fuel use as inherently suspect. But Smith warned that “improved” biomass stoves do not meet health-protective air-quality standards in real-world use. A stove that is marginally better than an open fire may still leave households exposed to dangerous levels of pollution.

The World Health Organization makes the same point: for households relying on solid fuels, LPG is among the cleanest alternatives that is widely available at scale. This does not mean LPG should be treated as a permanent end point for energy policy. It means that, in places where electricity, biogas, ethanol, or other genuinely clean options are not yet affordable and reliable, LPG can be an important bridge to better health and lower household pollution.

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Health, forests, and policy realism

There is one important additional benefit to clean cooking. In many poor communities, the use of wood and charcoal puts pressure on forests and local ecosystems. The contrast between Haiti and the Dominican Republic illustrates the point. The two countries share the island of Hispaniola and have similar environmental conditions, but they have followed very different cooking-fuel paths. The Dominican Republic shifted much more of its household cooking away from wood and charcoal and toward LPG or electricity, while Haiti has remained heavily dependent on charcoal. Forest outcomes have diverged sharply. Clean cooking is relevant not only for health, but also for land use and forest conservation.

Smith was concerned that restricting LPG access in poor countries in the name of climate change could push hundreds of millions of people back toward biomass or coal for cooking. His argument was not that climate change is unimportant. It was that climate policy should not ignore near-term health damage or impose unrealistic solutions on households that lack affordable alternatives. In his view, opposing LPG in the name of climate policy could be ethically questionable if it blocked one of the few proven, scalable ways to reduce the world’s largest household environmental health burden.

Smith’s views represented a nuanced perspective on fossil-fuel use. Subsidizing gasoline for wealthy consumers is not the same as helping a poor rural household replace a smoky biomass stove with LPG. The climate implications, equity implications, and health implications are different. A targeted LPG subsidy for poor households must be evaluated as a public-health intervention, not as a generic fossil-fuel subsidy.

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Policy lessons

Clean-cooking programs have helped tens of millions of poor households gain access to LPG, reducing reliance on solid fuels and improving the prospects for women’s and children’s health. Implementation challenges remain: connection to LPG does not always mean sustained use, especially if refills are unaffordable or distribution is unreliable. But the experience demonstrates that large-scale clean-cooking transitions are possible when public policy, distribution systems, and household affordability are aligned.

Poor households need safe, reliable, and affordable energy now. Where grids are reliable and power is affordable, cooking can be done with electric cookstoves. But until those options are broadly available, rejecting LPG can leave families dependent on fuels that are more dangerous for health and often worse for local forests.

A more constructive climate and development policy must place human welfare at its center. It should support LPG cooking fuels today, invest in electric and renewable alternatives, and judge interventions by measured outcomes rather than slogans. Kirk Smith’s work is valuable because it points toward that kind of practical environmentalism: one that takes climate change seriously while also taking seriously the lives of people exposed to dangerous smoke every day.

The same principle applies more broadly. Energy policy should not be reduced to a choice between climate and development goals. Healthier and more prosperous societies are generally better able to invest in environmental protection, forest restoration, and cleaner energy systems. Climate policy should support energy transitions within poor households, to improve health outcomes and alleviate the burden of poverty.

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It’s easy to forget today, as more and more people have come to take the idea of solar geoengineering seriously, that the idea first really broke through into elite public consciousness as something of a troll. The notion had been discussed in a few arcane corners of the academy over previous decades. My uncle, William Nordhaus, even briefly mentioned it in his seminal 1975 paper on climate change. But the 2009 publication of SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner, was the first time that discussion of the topic, to my knowledge, broke through to the mainstream. Levitt and Dubner argued that it would be far cheaper to simply hack the atmosphere with sulfur particles than to reorganize the global economy around non-fossil technology.

The book provoked a furious reaction, almost entirely to the single chapter devoted to the topic. All of the now familiar objections were present. Geoengineering created moral hazard and might become a gigantic perverse incentive for the world to continue to burn fossil fuels. It could create new armed and perhaps even nuclear conflicts, as the resulting changes in weather patterns might shift rainfall or ocean currents in ways that advantaged some nations and disadvantaged others. Geoengineering might solve one aspect of the problem, a warming atmosphere, but wouldn’t do anything about another, ocean acidification. The untimely cessation of geoengineering, before atmospheric concentrations of CO2 had been significantly reduced, would result in termination shock, causing temperatures to rise rapidly and catastrophically.

The troll ended up playing a central role in both turning geoengineering into the climate culture war object that it is today and galvanizing efforts to transform it from a thought experiment to a real technology. Within a few years, multiple international frameworks for governing geoengineering had been proposed. Research funding began to flow into the sector. Today, multiple startups around the world purport to be developing the technology. Several new NGOs have launched to advocate for geoengineering research. The billionaire tech class has taken notice, which has led, predictably, to some quarters of the environmental movement taking notice. The Environmental Defense Fund has launched a deep pocketed research program. Even NRDC says it supports geoengineering research.

Over the years, I too have been supportive of geoengineering research. Back in 2018, I argued in Foreign Affairs that the two degree delusion created its own sort of moral hazard, lending credence to the idea that adaptation to higher temperatures and geoengineering research were not necessary. In my 2021 review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky, I suggested that future human societies might engineer the climate not to save our own skins but to preserve biodiversity. And in 2024, I somewhat cheekily proposed that we use a somewhat less controversial form of geoengineering, marine cloud brightening, not to mitigate climate change but to moderate natural climate variability driven by the ENSO cycle.

Geoengineering was interesting to me discursively because it usefully separated concern about the consequences of climate change from all of the priors that had been mapped onto the issue from its emergence as a public concern in the late 80s and early 90s. The notion of modifying the atmosphere intentionally seemingly had the potential to disrupt the polarized battle lines that had hardened around the climate issue, making it less of a proxy for the environmental movement’s long-standing regulatory and soft energy obsessions.

But as discussions about geoengineering have moved from the fanciful to the practical, I have increasingly come to see it not as the antidote to climate catastrophism and green millenarianism in the public discourse but rather as the most likely, and perhaps only, plausible pathway to actual catastrophic climate change. My evolution on this question has less to do with the technology itself—the risk of termination shock has always been part of the conversation. Rather, it is my evolving view on climate risk and the continuing disconnect between the actual consequences of climate change on human societies, which have thus far been marginal, and the climate discourse, which insists that the consequences have already arrived and are already catastrophic, that has led me to reconsider the wisdom of even geoengineering research.

Geoengineering has been promoted as a “break in case of emergency” technology in the event that climate change gets really bad. But this framing of geoengineering presumes that there is a clear and observable threshold of badness where it is clear that emergency action is required. It should already be obvious that no such threshold exists.

Much of the climate movement insists that the emergency has already arrived, reliably conflating natural climate variability with climate change, which in turn is blamed for climate related disasters that are predominantly driven by maladaptation, poverty, and failing institutions, not anthropogenically intensified climate hazards. Many geoengineering advocates, meanwhile, have themselves become increasingly catastrophic about climate change, at least in part to justify use of the technology.

As a result, the troll has ended up reifying the catastrophism it was intended to combat. In a “post-truth” world in which states of emergency are easily manufactured, geoengineering strikes me as far more likely to be deployed in response to a fake emergency than a real one.

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The Fake Emergency

Despite a degree and a half of warming over the last two centuries, human populations have done nothing over that period other than become more resilient to climatic extremes. Climate related mortality has fallen dramatically. Economic costs have fallen as a share of GDP and remain flat as a share of wealth exposed to extreme climate phenomena. Emissions continue to rise, and with that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and global temperature. But emission growth is slowing globally and falling in many regions of the world.

Things could, of course, get worse in the future. But all of the key drivers of future emissions are moving in the right direction. Global fertility rates have fallen precipitously and population growth is likely to come to a halt in the coming decades. Economic growth is slowing in most industrialized and industrializing economies. The global energy system is slowly decarbonizing. Moreover, the primary factors that will determine how the climate affects human societies going forward are the same things that have so dramatically increased our resilience to climate extremes over the last century. Societal wealth, and the improved technology and infrastructure that come with that, mediate our relationship with climate hazards and moderate their impact on us.

For both ideological and strategic reasons, the environmental movement has long misunderstood and overlooked these factors. Environmental determinism has led the environmental and climate movements to fetishize environmental change and downplay our species remarkable adaptive capacities. A belief that catastrophic framings of climate risk would result in strong public demand for climate action has further led the climate movement and its many allies in the media, academia, and government to exaggerate the present day impacts of climate change.

The latter effort has abjectly failed. The issue has no greater support or salience today than it did forty years ago, when pollsters first started asking the public about it. People support climate action as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them or cost them money. When it does, public opinion swiftly turns negative.

Levitt and Dubner’s key innovation was the idea that you could solve the problem, or at least hold it at bay, without resorting to costly policies that the public was unlikely to support. The environmental movement predictably objected to this idea. What, after all, is the point of a climate crisis if you don’t get to slay the fossil fuel industry and construct a solar energy utopia?

That basic reaction to the technology has continued to obtain. The environmental community, mostly, continues to insist that climate change is an existential crisis but not so existential that it might justify geoengineering. The loudest climate advocates are overwhelmingly also loud opponents of geoengineering, insisting that it is a false solution and that the crisis can be averted through a mass mobilization of the global economy to rapidly transition to renewable energy.

But objections of the climate movement notwithstanding, geoengineering strikes me as exactly the sort of solution that political leaders, in the face of a climate emergency (real, imagined, or manufactured) and a public allergic to constraining its own consumption or paying for costly solutions, would turn to. As Nils Gilman observed in his 2020 Breakthrough Journal essay, The Coming Avocado Politics, there is really no reason to expect that the reaction to a major climate panic would be an embrace of eat your spinach environmentalism or a green new deal. Gilman focused on the possibility that catastrophism would stoke xenophobia and support for deportations and enforcement of energy poverty upon poor countries. But geoengineering seems like the sort of response that would fit comfortably as well.

This is the problem with the “break in case of emergency” framing that has attended the geoengineering discourse over the last decade. It assumes that the public discussion about the impacts of climate change reasonably approximates the actual impacts of climate change and that, hence, the technology will remain behind glass until it is truly needed. Nothing that has transpired in the climate discourse over the last fifteen plus years, since SuperFreakonomics brought the idea of geoengineering to public attention, should inspire any confidence that this is so.

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A Man-Made Climate Crisis

The problem with geoengineering is not simply that it is unnecessary given human adaptive capacities. Rather, it is that the technology is far more likely to cause a climate catastrophe than avert one. The reason for this is that termination shock turns climate change from a slow moving phenomena into a fast moving one.

Anthropogenic warming driven by the combustion of fossil fuels has warmed the planet very rapidly on geological timescales but quite slowly on human timescales. We experience far greater temperature variance in most regions of the world from winter to summer, or when we travel from Honolulu to Anchorage, than we have or will experience from climate change. We are resilient to temperature variance and extremes because human populations and societies have had centuries and millennia to adapt to those climates.

This has become something of a talking point for the climate movement in recent years, which claims that our present infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose in our superheated climate. But the actual data suggests otherwise. As wealth, technology, knowledge, communication, and migration have accelerated, our adaptive capacities have accelerated as well—much faster thus far than warming is amplifying climate impacts.

Could a social or economic collapse of some sort, driven primarily by factors other than climate change, dramatically undermine those capacities? It surely could. But the climate consequences of such a collapse would almost certainly pale in comparison to the direct consequences. The only plausible path to catastrophic climate impacts, in other words, entails more proximate problems whose consequences would be far greater than catastrophic climate change.

There is one major exception to this in my view though. Geoengineering. As opposed to the multi-decadal, century, and millennial times scales over which climate change is changing the climate, a termination shock due to the untimely cessation of geoengineering would significantly alter the climate at local and regional levels over decadal, or even annual, timescales. The temperature spike would occur predominantly over the course of one to five years. Most other climate impacts would unfold over similar timescales. Termination shock might disrupt the Asian and African monsoons and accelerate melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Agricultural yields could see dramatic declines virtually overnight.

Geoengineering notwithstanding, all of these risks will be familiar concerns to anyone who has followed the climate discourse for very long. But geoengineering makes it possible for these changes to occur over the course of just a few years, not decades or centuries, stressing the ability of human societies to adapt because the rate of change matters as much as the magnitude. Such rapid climate change would occur far faster than anything produced by even the worst case emissions driven warming scenarios produced by climate modelers. It is, rather, almost singularly associated with geoengineering termination shock.

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The Climate Catastrophe Horseshoe

The climate discourse is a funny beast. A lot of people gravitated toward geoengineering for the same reason that Dubner and Levitt did, because it offered an alternative to the climate emergency. But once they became committed to the geoengineering solution, the solution started to reshape how they thought about the problem.

This is one of the underappreciated features of a wicked problem. It’s not just complicated. In a pluralistic society, and in the face of irresolvable scientific, economic, and technological uncertainties, a multiplicity of meanings are easily projected onto the issue. The nature of the problem and its solution are contested from all sides and the common intuition that solutions are proposed in response to how one understands a problem gets inverted. Problems are increasingly defined in ways that justify the solutions that various factions, constituencies, and interests are already invested in.

The original troll positioned geoengineering as an antidote to catastrophic framings of the climate issue—a kind of get out of jail free card for climate angst. If things really did get as bad as environmentalists said they would, we could always just geoengineer our way out of the problem. But as many geoengineering supporters came to embrace the idea, the reasoning subtly shifted. Increasingly, geoengineering is advocated not as a kind of insurance in case things get really bad but because they are already really bad.

Once you decide that human control of the climate is desirable, not a sin against nature, the desire to geoengineer becomes hard to resist. Wicked logic then almost inevitably drives you toward catastrophism to justify its use. As a result, geoengineering advocates and opponents now hold nearly identical views about climate risk, despite holding diametrically opposite views on geoengineering as a solution.

There is hubris on both sides of that divide. The climate movement remains far too confident that catastrophic framings of the issue will not only result in climate action but the sort of climate action that the movement has in mind. Geoengineering advocacy, meanwhile, simply assumes a level of technocratic competence that is nowhere to be found: that we will be capable of understanding the consequences of geoengineering in advance of undertaking it, that we actually have the technological capability to deliver sulfur particles reliably and with precision to the upper atmosphere, that wise global governance might assure that we will only use the technology in the face of dire necessity and in a manner that is democratically accountable, and that once we start, there will be some plausible mechanism to assure that we don’t stop prematurely.

Put the yin and yang of geoengineering advocacy and opposition together and what you get is an emergent, rather than intentional, path to geoengineering: the development of a technology with assurances that it would only be used under the most dire of circumstances, a global climate movement determined to characterize all negative climate related impacts upon society as proof of just such a dire predicament, strong political incentives for policy-makers to address climate change in ways that don’t cost very much, and the lack of any global institution with the legitimacy to decide when to start or how to stop.

Such an emergent path may even serve the interests of partisans on both sides of the issue. Advocates are effectively getting the world a little bit geoengineering pregnant through research and development, aided and abetted by the catastrophic claims of a climate movement that ostensibly opposes the technology. The climate movement gets a true looming apocalypse to motivate its decarbonization agenda, because without deep decarbonization, catastrophic climate change really does beckon in the event that the world fails to sustain geoengineering.

Such an outcome might serve both the climate movement’s social engineers and the geoengineering community’s aspiring climate engineers. But I fear that it is unlikely to serve the public’s interest. Geoengineering, instead, risks turning the climate movement’s catastrophism into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Thanks to fast-growing electricity demand, especially from AI data centers, demand for new nuclear energy is rapidly growing. In this analysis, we identify 74GW of planned or new nuclear reactor capacity in the United States. While it is unlikely that all of that capacity will ultimately be built, if even a fraction of it is deployed it would mark a historic turnaround for the US nuclear industry.

Historically, a commercial nuclear project required a regulated utility to build the plant, own the asset, and recover approved costs through rates. That is no longer the main event when it comes to planned new nuclear development. Today, the profile of potential commercial nuclear buyers has diversified, thanks, in large part, to AI’s new energy demand. Companies building hyperscale data centers are responsible for 30 GW, or 41% of the 74 GW of announced or prospective new nuclear reactor capacity in the United States. That is more than double the 18% currently under order from utilities and public-power buyers. If utility-hyperscaler hybrid deals are included, the total share of the commercial pipeline drawn from hyperscaler demand is nearly half. Hyperscalers now dominate the firm middle of the pipeline and are the largest identified demand source among more tentative projects. That is a dramatic shift for an industry that, until recently, effectively only had one class of buyers.

Hyperscalers and data-center developers are looking for large amounts of reliable, clean electricity, and nuclear is one of the few technologies that can plausibly provide firm power at that scale. But the story is not simply that AI demand will rescue nuclear. Nor is it that hyperscalers will replace utilities as the primary driver of nuclear project development. The reality is more complicated: non-utility buyers are creating much of the visible demand pressure, while utilities and public institutions still provide much of the deployment interface. In short, commercial nuclear demand is shifting away from decades of exclusive dependence on utilities and public-power buyers.

The technology mix is diversified too. The emerging pipeline is not simply a repeat of the historical large-LWR buildout. Small reactors and non-light-water reactor designs represent the majority of new orders at most stages of the deployment pipeline, from firm orders to more tentative demand signals. Large LWRs remain important, especially by capacity, but a range of reactor designs are being matched to different buyers and use cases.

While the market for new commercial nuclear projects is no longer just a utility procurement pipeline, this transition is still in its early stages. Demand is real and more diversified than in the past. Much of it however, from both utility and non-utility buyers, and inclusive of both traditional large light water reactors and smaller non-traditional technologies, has not yet become firm deployment activity.

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From Market Signals to Buildable Projects

To understand this market more clearly, we built a dataset of new U.S. commercial nuclear projects, programs, and demand signals, sorted by maturity. We separately track non-commercial projects such as research reactors, the DOE pilot program, and other demonstration projects–which generate operating data and reduce technical uncertainty but have a totally different deployment logic. Uprates to existing plants are also tracked separately.

The dataset groups the commercial pipeline into three maturity stages: building, firm, and tentative, and five specific tiers. The building stage captures projects that have crossed a formal licensing threshold—with a site, a design, financing, and an issued license or permit—and may have construction underway. The firm stage covers projects with NRC-docketed applications or site-specific development with pre-application activities: not yet reactor orders, but the bridge between market signal and binding order. The tentative stage captures earlier activity—state-backed efforts, committed developers without NRC engagement, and broader demand signals like fleet-level agreements or non-binding capacity targets. Read from bottom to top, the tiers describe a conversion funnel: the stages a project must move through to get from demand signal (Tier 5) to actual build (Tier 1).

As shown in Figure 1, the United States has a broad commercial new-nuclear pipeline mainly because Tier 5 is so large. Nearly 60 GW of announced or prospective capacity sits in fleet-level demand signals, while the more mature tiers remain comparatively small.

The enormous amount of capacity in Tier 5 especially demonstrates the changes in the U.S. nuclear reactor customer base –hyperscaler-linked demand is now a major part of the commercial pipeline. Hyperscalers now have a direct stake in 45% of announced or prospective commercial capacity of the roughly 60 GW in Tier 5. Hyperscaler-only entries account for about 21 GW, or 35%, while utility-hyperscaler hybrid deals add another 6 GW, or 10%.

That demand from hyperscalers is not confined to one corner of the pipeline. Hyperscaler-linked entries appear prominently in Tier 2, Tier 3, and Tier 5. This tells the story of a market in transition: hyperscalers are now one of the most important sources of visible market pull for new nuclear, but much of that pull remains upstream of orders. They are reshaping the demand landscape faster than new reactor projects are moving toward construction.

These new buyers are also influencing the technological mix of U.S. nuclear. Figure 2 shows that the demand pipeline is not simply a return to large LWR deployment. Across all stages and tiers except for Tier 2, small LWRs and non-LWRs account for most announced or prospective capacity, even though large LWR units are much bigger individually. This suggests that even where large LWRs remain significant, the pipeline is far more technologically diverse than the historical U.S. buildout. Also, buyers for non-LWR and small LWR are mainly hyperscalers. That suggests hyperscalers are not just adding demand to the traditional LWR market; they are disproportionately shaping the advanced-reactor demand to seek firm clean power.

To some, the hyperscaler demand pull is nothing more than a mirage. But rather, these early shifts in reactor demand should be understood as evidence that the U.S. is in a market formation process: the demand has arrived well ahead of the technological products, regulatory certainty, supply chain maturity, and financing support. Importantly, the demand for nuclear from hyperscalers is not only showing up in speculative new-build announcements. It is already showing up in the existing fleet, where capacity can be delivered faster. Hyperscalers are the clear catalyst behind the latest restart, uprate, and existing-capacity deals with a total of 8.3 GW of existing-fleet nuclear capacity: roughly 6.3 GW through existing-plant power purchase agreements, about 1.5 GW through restart-linked agreements, and about 0.5 GW through uprate-linked deals. In other words, that existing-fleet activity confirms the market pull is real, while the larger new-build opportunity remains earlier in the formation curve.

Still, this new demand is in an early stage. Fleet-level agreements, commercial frameworks, and high-case capacity targets are not yet build orders; they still have to become site-specific, financeable, and licenseable projects, and many early-tier entries even lack identified buyers.

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A Matrix of Orderbooks

The next generation of U.S. nuclear projects will not be built only by vertically integrated utilities ordering large reactors one at a time. Utilities will remain central, especially for grid-scale deployment, but they will not be the only source of demand or project formation. Nor will the market be built by data centers alone. Hyperscalers may become major nuclear customers, investors, or partners, but they still need utilities, developers, regulators, suppliers, and operators to turn demand into electricity.

The more likely future is a matrix of orderbooks: repeatable project structures matched to different use cases. Large reactors may be best suited to bulk power, regional load growth, and large industrial or data-center corridors. SMRs may fit public power systems, coal-site replacement, utility-mediated data-center demand, and certain industrial applications. Microreactors may scale first through defense, remote, and critical-infrastructure markets.

The point is not to pick a single winner. It is to create repeatable combinations of reactor designs, customers, sites, financing structures, and licensing pathways. Nuclear gets cheaper and easier to deploy when projects are not reinvented one at a time. DOE’s new American Nuclear Supply Chain Loans point in this direction. The program is not a final build order, but it is designed to support long-lead equipment for eligible projects and accelerate deployment of a standardized reactor design.

The data-center surge has changed the nuclear market in a way that is still difficult to measure but hard to dismiss. For the first time in decades, new nuclear is being ordered by large, fast-growing customers that need firm, clean, around-the-clock power at scale. Some announcements may become projects, others may not, but the sector is no longer waiting only on traditional utility procurement. In any case, nuclear deployment will only scale through a matrix of orderbooks across customers, developers, and utilities.

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In January, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse coined the term “climate hushers” to describe his fellow Democrats who stopped talking about climate change in recent years. Inside Climate News recently quantified this trend, observing a marked decline in congressional press releases that mention “climate change” since 2022.

Whitehouse and his allies have chalked up climate hushing to bad advice from a cowardly pundit class. In April, Bill McKibben called the phenomenon “a product of political consultants looking at polling data.” Last week, Kate Aronoff described hushing as “received wisdom among party pollsters and pundits,” while Aaron Regunberg attributed the trend to “a host of think tanks and pundits—mostly corporatist outfits like WelcomePAC, the Searchlight Institute, and the Breakthrough Institute.”

Most of the coverage of climate hushing has tended to invoke this polling and the punditry. In particular, the anti-hushers are furious about a September 2025 analysis from the Searchlight Institute counseling Democrats “Don’t Say Climate Change,” and a May 2026 op-ed in the New York Times in which the socialist scholar Matt Huber wrote “American voters broadly agree that climate change is a real concern and support addressing it, but they largely do not see it as a top priority.”

And, as the author of the original essay on what we now call climate hushing, I feel some standing to intervene here. So let me be clear: Climate hushing is not principally a punditry phenomenon. It’s an increasingly widespread stance taken not just by moderate strategists, but by the progressive politicians and environmental movement leaders who shape the Democrats’ climate and energy agenda. And it’s happening because the world is changing faster than the anti-hushers can keep up with.

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Take Robinson Meyer’s recent reporting for Heatmap. Many of the rising progressive stars in American urban politics got their start in the Green New Deal coalition of yesteryear, whether it was Zohran Mamdani’s “ecosocialist” upbringing or Nithya Raman’s focus on carbon neutrality in Los Angeles. But as Meyer astutely observes, green industrial policy quickly came into conflict with the anti-imperial commitments of this new progressive class. “Instead of revitalizing the country’s industrial might,” Meyer writes, “it sought to pacify and dismantle the military industrial complex.”

Portions of the environmental movement have also conceded that the old emphasis on the climate apocalypse is no longer tenable. A better approach “is talking about a climate solution, but it’s talking about it in a way that meets voters and the public where they are,” according to LCV Action Fund’s Sara Chieffo.

As Eric Michael Garcia observed, progressives’ new political project “does show how little the modern left talks about climate change compared to 2018.” Even the climate donor class has taken notice. “We gave them money, and all they do now is talk about Palestine,” said Open Society Foundation chairman Alex Soros.

But the mistake that almost everyone involved is making here, on both sides of the hushing debate, is in thinking that that the shift is one of talk or messaging. But it’s not merely a matter of whether Democrats should stop saying “climate change” or start saying it again. Rather, it’s that climate hushing reflects a reaction to the very real material developments that have occurred since climate change came to occupy such a prominent place in Democrats’ issue prioritization.

As I have written since before the re-election of Donald Trump, the events of recent years have destabilized the conditions that characterized the era of the climate hawk. The once seemingly durable Obama-era political coalition is defunct. Interest rates, inflation, and energy prices are stubbornly higher than they were in the 2010s. First Ukraine, then Gaza, and now Iran have drawn political and economic attention away from the domestic decarbonization agenda. Gaza in particular has reordered the progressive prioritization stack, with climate activist groups like Sunrise now almost entirely focused on solidarity with Palestine.

These events in aggregate have fundamentally altered the climate commitments of governments and corporations alike. Net-zero is gone and it’s not coming back. The 1.5 degree target, which was always preposterous, is now acknowledged as such by the United Nations and the wider commentariat.

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And all of these developments have occurred during the relative infancy of the issue that will increasingly eclipse climate change even within the attention spans of progressives and environmentalists: artificial intelligence.

AI obviously reorganizes pre-existing emissions and infrastructure debates. New data centers are powered overwhelmingly by natural gas, obviating the emissions expectations and modeling scenarios that undergirded energy and climate policies like the Inflation Reduction Act. Many anti-fossil activists have shifted their attention to these data centers as a result. The pro-technology wing of the climate movement, meanwhile, is trying, and mostly failing, to shoehorn an electrification-and-renewables agenda crafted before the rise of AI onto a context in which data center load growth is outpacing even the impressive expansion we have come to expect from solar, electric vehicles, and heat pumps.

But this is only the beginning. If projections of AI compute and load growth are even directionally correct, AI will take up not just an increasing portion of our infrastructure and electricity demand but also of our cultural and political attention. In my view, that can all redound to the benefit of electrification and decarbonization—AI may be the strongest demand signal ever for new low-carbon energy technologies. But beyond that, I think AI will come to occupy a central societal anxiety that progressives always hoped would become attuned to climate action.

Democrats, the climate movement, and broader civil society may not have fully reckoned with this epochal shift. But sooner or later, they’ll have to. Progressives and climate advocates are already talking more about data centers, Gaza, and energy prices than they are about heat waves and emissions targets.

In other words, the climate hushing is coming from inside the house. And the sooner that pundits like McKibben, Regunberg, and Aronoff understand that, the better off our climate discourse will be.

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In early 2005, one of the largest public works projects in American history was about to age into eligibility for the National Register for Historic Places. The Interstate Highway system, launched by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, would reach its 50th birthday in June 2006—the age at which federal law considers a place as potentially historic. The officials who administer the nation’s preservation law needed to figure out how to handle this impending deluge of work. Treated as eligible, the system’s 46,700 miles would trigger historic review for every federally funded repaving and guardrail replacement project.

Rather than absorb the burden, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation exempted the entire Interstate Highway System from historic preservation rules. The Council adopted a rule relieving federal agencies from the obligation to consider the effects of their actions on the Interstate as a historic property, reserving review only for a short list of individually significant bridges and interchanges. Moving in parallel, Congress passed legislation exempting the bulk of the system from a related preservation requirement that same year.

The exemption solved an immediate administrative problem. But it duly raised a more fundamental one. If one of the most significant public works projects in American history had to be exempted from historic review to keep that review process functioning, the design of the process is exceeding its intended purpose. The National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) requires federal agencies to consider how their funded, permitted, or otherwise assisted actions affect “historic properties.” Critically, the statute defines that category to include not only sites already listed on the National Register but also any site eligible for listing. Eligibility hinges on whether a property is generally over 50 years old, retains its physical integrity, and ties to a significant historic event, an important person’s working life, a distinctive design tradition, or a body of information important to our understanding of history. Of these criteria, only the 50-year threshold is genuinely objective; the rest invite interpretation, which means a determined challenger can drag almost any property approaching half a century old into a Section 106 review. NIMBY interests routinely exploit this breadth to block development, layering on procedural hurdles that are expensive, time-consuming, and litigious—and that inject substantial uncertainty into project timelines.

The 50-year threshold poses a compounding challenge as America’s mid-century infrastructure ages into eligibility. The post-New Deal building boom produced an enormous stock of highways, dams, federal buildings, and housing, much of which is now crossing the half-century mark. The average year of construction recorded in the National Bridge Inventory is 1964, meaning the average American bridge is more than 60 years old. Each passing year enlarges the pool of properties that challengers can argue require Section 106 review, expanding the surface area for litigation and delay.

Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) in 2021 to begin addressing a generation of infrastructure decay. The slow rollout of the $1.2 trillion package has revealed a deeper problem: the historic preservation framework built in 1966 to protect a curated set of significant sites has grown into a system whose reach now extends across most of the infrastructure that legislation aims to repair. Congress authorized the largest federal infrastructure investment in a generation, but the federal preservation review system has grown so expansive that new infrastructure spending generates a corresponding surge in review.

That much of America’s roadways, bridges, and buildings are more than 50 years old means that they are aging, not historic. Improving—or rebuilding—our infrastructure and housing will require a system that does not generate endless review over technicalities. Reforming the NHPA is a step in the right direction.

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Expanding the Universe of What Counts as Historic

When Congress passed the NHPA in 1966, it broke from sixty years of curated federal historic preservation. The three preceding statutes—the Antiquities Act of 1906, the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916, and the Historic Sites Act of 1935—had identified a small set of obviously significant national treasures (Mesa Verde, Independence Hall, Monticello) for individual designation. In 1966, the NHPA replaced that model with the National Register of Historic Places, State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs), and the Section 106 review process, which required federal agencies to consider the effects of their actions on properties on the Register.

The universe of covered properties has expanded steadily ever since.

As more kinds of properties qualify as historic, more procedural requirements are being attached to each one. The 50-year threshold exacerbated this expansion, pulling a larger cohort of properties into the system every year, which may have seemed manageable when Congress wrote the statute in 1966, but functions very differently against a built environment dominated by mid-century construction.

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Capacity and Delegation

Federal funding for the offices conducting these reviews hasn’t kept pace with the workload. A key role of SHPOs is to survey, evaluate, and nominate significant historic buildings, sites, structures, districts, and objects eligible for the National Register. SHPO Section 106 caseloads jumped 42.7% in a single year following IIJA, reaching 177,400 reviews in FY2023. Between 2020 and 2024, SHPO offices’ share of the Historic Preservation Fund fell from 44% to 32.9%. The workload climbed; the budget for handling it didn’t follow.

The workload has also shifted. When Congress created SHPOs in 1966, they were meant to advise federal agencies on Section 106 compliance—the federal agency was the responsible party, and the SHPO supplied expertise. Over time, the day-to-day review work has moved onto SHPO and THPO staff: identifying properties, assessing effects, drafting findings. The 1992 amendments accelerated the trend by creating THPOs and allowing them to assume SHPO functions on tribal lands. But the THPO appropriation in the Historic Preservation Fund has not kept pace with the addition of new THPOs—five to ten of which are established each year—so each office’s share of the pool has shrunk. Federal agencies still hold formal authority, but the offices doing the work are underfunded relative to the caseload they’ve absorbed.

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The Limits of Existing Exemptions

The growing review burden has not gone unrecognized. Over the past two decades, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation has exempted routine work on one aging sector after another, highways, common bridges, rail corridors, federal buildings, and nearly all of telecommunications. Each of these exemptions concedes that subjecting ordinary maintenance to historic review has become unworkable—leaving intact the review process for large construction projects that would naturally have significant effects.

However, these carve-outs are far too narrow to fully address the scale of the issue. Every exemption only reaches to the edge of the official project boundaries, while the potential effects that can trigger review can extend miles in any direction. The area surrounding these aging infrastructure components is also aging and increasingly eligible for listing on the National Register. For one federally funded interchange reconstruction in Reno, the agency had to evaluate more than 1,400 properties in the project’s path, including over 650 postwar homes that had reached 50 years of age, even though the Interstate itself was exempt from review.

These sector-specific exemptions don’t include maintenance for transmission lines, oil pipelines, and water mains. Laid in the same postwar decades, these systems are now crossing the 50-year threshold just as they most need maintenance and upgrades, and have no exemptions for historic review.

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Moving Forward

More money won’t fix process design flaws; we need to rethink how much these regulations are helping to preserve our cultural identity and how much they’re impairing efforts to build a better future.

Maintenance and routine work for transmission and pipelines, which can cross hundreds of miles and sweep large swaths of the landscape into review, should get the exemption they lack. Better still, a single standing rule should exempt routine maintenance within existing rights-of-way across all sectors, rather than carve out one at a time. Environmental review already treats this work as routine: the same corridor maintenance project can qualify for a categorical exclusion under NEPA, yet still face full Section 106 review.

As more infrastructure approaches the review threshold each year, Congress should move away from treating broad classes of postwar infrastructure and development as presumptively eligible for the National Register. Common resource types—including highways, bridges, transmission lines, pipelines, utility facilities, and standard residential and commercial development—should be presumed ineligible absent a showing of exceptional significance. For purposes of federal review, eligibility should require not merely an association with broad historical trends, but a demonstrated national significance or exceptional distinctiveness relative to the thousands of similar resources produced during the postwar building boom. States would remain free to recognize and protect locally important resources through their own preservation programs.

Such a reform would preserve protection for genuinely important landmarks, cultural resources, and public works while preventing ordinary aging infrastructure from being swept into an ever-expanding review system simply because it has crossed an age threshold. And it would help ensure that the money intended to repair the country’s aging systems is spent on repairs, not absorbed by the review.

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