climate progress

Exactly one year ago, I drove up Pacific Coast Highway just before dawn.

Toppled utility poles and downed wires littered the street. In a tunnel of thick black smoke, flurries of glowing red embers raced across the road, out to sea. Hours passed, but the sun never rose. Everything was gone.

In the face of all this horror, everyday people responded not with fear or hate, but with courage and love. It’s human nature — a reflex to disaster more certain than the sunrise.

Amid a chaotic evacuation in the Palisades, I watched residents use their minivans to pick up their neighbors who had been traveling on foot and shuttle them to safety. A volunteer community brigade marched door to door ensuring others got the evacuation orders.

In Altadena, employees with the small local water utilities raced across town protecting and fixing the water systems firefighters relied on. Afterward, hundreds volunteered with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to clear debris from the streets, parks and churches of Pasadena.

In the year that’s followed, the same locals have stepped up to hold their governments accountable and fill in where leadership was vacant — even when some people, including some of their peers — considered that work controversial. They’ve all nonetheless helped their neighbors in tangible, meaningful, ways.

Here are their reflections (edited for length and clarity) on the year and the futures they imagine.

Keegan Gibbs leads the Community Brigade program with the Los Angeles County Fire Department. During the Palisades fire, the group’s roughly 50 volunteers went door to door ensuring residents had evacuated, fought spot fires and transported animals to safety. The group also routinely helps homeowners understand how to harden their homes against wildfire. This fall, the brigade doubled its size, with new recruits going through basic firefighter training.

Gibbs: Across Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains, the Community Brigade envisions a critical mass of residents who have taken responsibility for their home “ignition zone,” creating neighborhoods where wildfire can move through the landscape without becoming a community-level disaster.

In this future, the Brigade is a trusted local institution and a proven model — demonstrating that shared responsibility and disciplined preparation can fundamentally change wildfire outcomes and be adapted across the West.

Kari Nadeau, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, helps lead the LA Fire HEALTH Study, a first-of-its-kind research effort by universities and hospitals to understand the fires’ contamination and the subsequent health impacts over a 10-year period. The researchers have found that firefighters who fought the L.A. blazes had elevated levels of mercury and lead in their blood compared with other wildland firefighters and that the fires corresponded with increased emergency room visits for heart attacks and respiratory illnesses.

Nadeau: I think,10 years from now, we’re going to look back and say, we really tested for as many exposures as we could in the air, water and soil, and then we looked at whether or not they affected short-term and long-term health outcomes. That will not only help L.A. and policymakers, but it’ll also be scalable to the rest of the world — because the human body is the human body.

Jane Lawton Potelle founded Eaton Fire Residents United, a grassroots organization of residents with still-standing homes contaminated by the Eaton fire. The group — led mostly by women — assembled the first comprehensive evidence of widespread contamination within homes. Now, they’re pushing public health agencies to adopt best practices to remediate homes and keep residents safe, and they’re calling on insurance regulators to ensure survivors have the financial means to follow them.

Potelle: If the government doesn’t intervene, then five to 10 years from now our communities will still be living with contamination in homes and soil, driving preventable health harms while shifting massive long-term costs onto families.

EFRU hopes to see the “clearance before occupancy” approach communitywide so that all surviving homes, schools, businesses and public spaces affected by fallout from the L.A. fires have been restored to verifiably safe and healthy living conditions.

Spencer Pratt, second from right, who lost his home in the Palisades fire, at an anniversary event where he announced he was running for mayor.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Spencer Pratt is a reality TV star-turned-fire accountability advocate, turned mayoral candidate who has successfully lobbied Congress to open an investigation into the handling of the Palisades fire response and recovery. He has helped lead and publicize lawsuits against the city and state and provided some of the first evidence that the Los Angeles Fire Department knowingly left the Lachman fire smoldering, limited its firefighting operations to avoid sensitive plants and subsequently covered it up.

Pratt: The most important lesson I learned this past year is that you cannot rely on our state and local government. … I remain hopeful that we can rebuild our family town. If the state and local government won’t give us the opportunity to start, I will continue asking the federal government to step in and help. There has to be a way to cut through the red tape and get people back to their hometown.

Pablo Alvarado is the co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which not only cleared Pasadena’s streets but also trained hundreds of workers on how to safely operate in the burn areas, distributed more than a thousand personal protective equipment kits, and provided assistance to more than 13,000 families affected by the fires and ICE raids.

Alvarado: We don’t know what this political year will bring, or what the next five or 10 years will look like. But we do know this truth: Rebuilding will happen, and it is impossible to do it without migrant labor. Our work makes reconstruction possible. Yet while our labor is welcomed, our rights are not respected.

From Katrina to these fires, we have learned the same lesson again and again: No one is coming to save workers — not FEMA, not local governments, not corporations. That is why our message has always been clear: Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo. Only the people save the people.

Hundreds of Palisades fire survivors gather in Palisades Village to commemorate the one year anniversary of the Palisades fire on Wednesday. Residents and others were demanding that the government help accountable for its missteps, demand relief for those trying to rebuild and demand for more comprehensive emergency planning.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

More recent wildfire news

On Wednesday’s one-year anniversary of the fires, survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires returned to their communities to mourn the loss of their neighborhoods and neighbors, and to demand accountability and action from their governments. You can read our coverage here.

A year into recovery, Times reporter and Altadena native Colleen Shalby reflects on her community’s devastating loss, the pride she feels for her hometown and her persistent hope for the next generation of Altadenans.

At a fire anniversary protest in the Palisades, Spencer Pratt announced his candidacy for Los Angeles mayor. “Business as usual is a death sentence for Los Angeles, and I’m done waiting for someone to take real action,” he said.

The city of Los Angeles routinely ignored state fire safety regulations dictating the width and slope of roads for evacuation and firefighter access as it permitted development in areas with very high fire hazard, a new lawsuit alleges.

A few last things in climate news

Federal tax credits for residential solar, batteries and heat pumps expired at the end of 2025, reports Bloomberg’s Todd Woody. Tariffs probably will also push up prices for solar panels and batteries, which are primarily imported from China and Vietnam and other countries.

One company with deep ties to California stands to benefit from President Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela: Chevron. It is the only foreign oil company to maintain continued operations in Venezuela through decades of tumultuous politics, The Times’ Jack Dolan reports.

As Congress works to avert an end-of-January government shutdown, its latest spending package would largely keep the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget intact, reports Liza Gross for Inside Climate News. The Trump administration had initially proposed a 55% cut to the agency’s budget; the latest proposal cuts it by only 5%.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more wildfire news, follow @nohaggerty on X and @nohaggerty.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Last February, I climbed into a Jeep and rumbled up a rocky shelf road that took me high above a breathtaking corner of the Mojave National Preserve. At the top was an old gold mine where an Australian company had recently restarted activities, looking for rare earth minerals.

The National Park Service had been embroiled in a years-long dispute with the company, Dateline Resources Ltd., alleging that it was operating the Colosseum Mine without authorization and had damaged the surrounding landscape with heavy equipment. Dateline said it had the right to work the mine under a plan its prior operators had submitted to the Bureau of Land Management decades before.

President Trump had taken office just weeks before my visit. Environmentalists told me the conflict posed an early test of how his administration would handle the corporate exploitation of public lands.

At the time, observers weren’t sure how things would shake out. Conserving public lands is one of the rare issues that’s popular on both sides of the political aisle, they pointed out.

Almost a year later, it’s clear that the Trump administration has sided with the corporations.

Trump directed the Department of Interior to inventory mineral deposits on federal lands and prioritize mining as the primary use of those lands. He instructed officials to dramatically fast-track permitting and environmental reviews for certain types of energy and critical minerals projects — and designated metallurgical coal a critical mineral, enabling companies that mine it to qualify for a lucrative tax credit.

His budget bill lowered the royalty rates companies must pay the government to extract coal, oil or gas from public lands and provided other financial incentives for such projects while reducing the authority of federal land managers to deny them.

Under the president’s direction, the DOI has opened up millions of acres of federal land to new coal leasing and moved to rescind both the 2021 Roadless Rule, which protects swaths of national forest lands from extractive activities by barring most new road construction, and the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which puts conservation and restoration on par with other uses of BLM land like mining, drilling and grazing.

The administration is seeking to roll back limitations on mining and drilling for specific pieces of public land, including portions of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the watershed feeding the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and a buffer surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers overturned management plans limiting energy development on certain BLM lands in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.

Altogether, the Trump administration and its legislative allies have taken steps to reduce or eliminate protections for nearly 90 million acres of public land, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. That figure rises to more than 175 million acres if you include the habitat protections diminished by the administration’s moves to weaken the Endangered Species Act, the organization notes.

“All of these things represent in some ways the largest attack on our public lands and giveaway to large multinational mining corporations that we’ve seen probably since the 19th century,” said U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, who likened the level of resource exploitation to “something like what happened during the robber baron era when there was no regulation or protection for our communities or the environment.”

Stansbury has introduced legislation that would increase the fees mining companies must pay to sit on speculative claims on federal lands and require those funds be used for conservation. She told me it’s just a tiny contribution to a larger effort to push back against the administration’s approach to initiate extraction on public lands, which she described as so frequent and pervasive that “it’s a bit like whack-a-mole.”

“So much damage has been done, both administratively and legislatively, over the last 11 months since Trump took office,” she said.

As for the Colosseum Mine, the DOI sided with its operators back in the spring, saying Dateline Resources did not have to seek authorization from the Park Service to keep mining. The announcement was followed by public endorsements from Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The company’s stock value soared, and by September, it had kicked off a major drilling blitz.

The company has already uncovered high-grade gold deposits. It’s taking a break for Christmas, but is expected to resume drilling in the new year.

More recent land news

The Pacific Forest Trust returned nearly 900 acres of land near Yosemite National Park to the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation in a transfer partially financed by the state, reports Kurtis Alexander of the San Francisco Chronicle. Members of the Indigenous group were forced off their ancestral lands during the California Gold Rush, when state-sponsored militias undertook efforts to exterminate them. Some now hope the new property will bolster their decades-long push for federal recognition.

California State Parks is violating the Endangered Species Act by allowing offroaders to drive over dunes that are home to western snowy plovers, a judge recently ruled in a long-running legal case over the use of Oceano Dunes State Recreation Area along the Central Coast. Edvard Pettersson of the Courthouse News Service reports that State Parks will need a federal “take” permit to continue to allow offroading at the popular beachside spot.

California lawmakers introduced legislation to conserve more than 1.7 million acres of public lands across the state, in part by expanding the Los Padres National Forest and the Carrizo Plain National Monument, according to Stephanie Zappelli of the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

The federal public lands grazing program was created as a bulwark against environmental damage but has been transformed into a massive subsidy program benefiting a select few, including billionaire hobby ranchers and large corporations, according to an investigation by ProPublica and High Country News. The three-part series also found a loophole allowing for the automatic renewal of grazing permits has led to less oversight over the health of these lands.

A few last things in climate news

President Trump’s media company is merging with a nuclear fusion energy firm in a $6-billion deal that some analysts have described as a major conflict of interest, my colleague Caroline Petrow-Cohen reports.

House Republicans pushed through a bill that would overhaul the federal environmental review process in a way that critics say could speed up the approval process for oil and gas projects while stymieing clean energy, report Aidan Hughes and Carl David Goette-Luciak of Inside Climate News.

The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol is likely to be removed from California milk cartons, my colleague Susanne Rust reports. The decision exposes how used beverage packaging has been illegally exported to East Asia as “recycled” mixed paper, violating international environmental law.

Wind energy is again under attack from the Trump administration, which this week ordered all major wind construction projects to halt. As The Times’ Hayley Smith notes, the White House has been consistent in slowing down clean energy development in 2025, but offshore wind has been a particular bête noire for the President.

We’ve published a comprehensive collection of stories looking back on the wildfires that burned though Altadena and Pacific Palisades last January and all that’s happened since, which columnist Steve Lopez calls “one of the most apocalyptic years in Southern California history.” Check out After the Fires here.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more land news, follow @phila_lex on X and alex-wigglesworth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

More than two months after an explosion erupted at the Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo, neither the company nor the regulators responsible for monitoring the facility have released details on the cause and the extent of the environmental fallout.

Here’s what we do know so far: Around 9:30 p.m.on Oct. 2, a large fire broke out in the southeast corner of the refinery, where Chevron turned crude oil into jet fuel. The resulting violent blast allegedly wounded several workers on the refinery grounds and rattled homes up to one mile away.

The refinery carried out emergency flaring in an effort to burn off potentially hazardous gases, as public officials told residents in neighborhoods nearby to stay indoors. That warning held until firefighters managed to extinguish the fire the following day.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District — the agency responsible for regulating the refinery’s emissions — said Chevron would submit reports detailing the potential cause of the fire and any unexpected equipment failures within 30 days. But the preliminary reports were handed in nearly a month late — and without any significant updates from what was said in the days immediately following the fire.

In those reports, Chevron said the fire was “unexpected and unforeseeable.” The cause is still under an investigation that probably won’t conclude until next month, an air district spokesperson told me recently.

Company officials said the fire significantly damaged power supply, utilities and gas collection systems in that section of the refinery. Repairs are underway but could take months. Meanwhile, the majority of the 1,000-acre refinery is operational, distilling crude oil into gasoline and diesel.

At an air district meeting on Dec. 2, Chevron asked for leniency from conducting equipment testing at the damaged wing of the refinery that is now offline, and the air district obliged.

One member of the agency’s hearing board, Cynthia Verdugo-Peralta, said she understood that the investigation was “quite involved” but stressed the need for “some type of response” from Chevron on the cause.

“I’m hoping that this will never happen again,” she said. “Hopefully this repair will indeed be a full repair and there won’t be another incident like this.”

Environmental regulators like the South Coast Air Quality Management District often rely on the very industries that they oversee to arrange for monitoring and investigations into disasters. For obvious reasons, that’s not ideal. Experts say this system of self-reporting is somewhat inevitable, given that many government agencies lack the staffing, budget and access to provide adequate oversight.

But it often leaves the public waiting for answers — and skeptical of the findings, when they finally arrive.

For example, there are still serious questions surrounding the air monitoring systems at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery that were supposed to act as a safety net for the public nearby during emergencies like the October fire.

Under state law, refineries are required to install, operate and maintain real-time fence line air monitors. Indeed, over four hours after the Oct. 2 fire at El Segundo, Chevron’s fence line air monitors detected elevated levels of volatile organic compounds, a category of quickly vaporizing chemicals that can be harmful if inhaled.

However, at the time of the incident, the refinery’s monitors oddly did not detect any elevated levels of some of the most common types chemicals that experts say would have been likely to be released during such a fire, such as cancer-causing benzene, a typical byproduct of burning fossil fuels.

Experts are now asking whether those monitors were fully functioning at the time.

Earlier this month, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District fined Chevron’s refinery in Richmond $900,000 after the agency found 20 of the oil company’s fence line monitors were not properly calibrated to detect the full range of emissions, potentially allowing excessive air pollution to go undetected and unreported.

As for the El Segundo facility, neither the South Coast air district nor the refinery could confirm whether the air monitors were working properly on Oct. 2. A spokesperson said the air district is scheduled to audit Chevron’s fence line air monitoring network sometime next year.

But it may already be too late to warn nearby communities. Since October’s explosion, there have been more than a dozen reported incidents of unplanned flaring at Chevron’s refinery in El Segundo, according to air district data.

Each one raises the question: What happened?

More news on air pollution

The holiday season is associated with fragrant candles, incense and gathering around the fireplace. But health experts say these traditions should be done in moderation to avoid respiratory risks, according to Associated Press reporter Cheyanne Mumphrey.

That’s especially true in Southern California, where the air district continues to issue no-burn advisories, prohibiting burning wood to limit unhealthy levels of soot, per Pasadena Now.

Almost a year after the Eaton and Palisades fires, the health effects from breathing wildfire smoke are still coming into focus. L.A. Times science and medicine reporter Corrine Purtill writes that emergency room visits rose 46% for heart attacks at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in the 90 days after the fires. The findings suggest the death toll could be much higher than the 31 fatalities that have been linked with the fires.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta sued the Trump administration — for the 50th time — after the suspension of $3 billion in federal funding that Congress approved for building more electric vehicle chargers, according to Times climate reporter Hayley Smith. California alone stands to lose out on $179.8 million in grants that could help reduce smog and greenhouse gases.

A few last things in climate news

The Trump administration announced it will dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s premier Earth science research institutions, per reporting from the New York Times. Scientists fear this could undermine weather forecasting in an age when global warming is contributing to more intense storms and other natural disasters.

A new analysis from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found the rate of sea-level rise has more than doubled along U.S. coastlines over the last 125 years, according to Washington Post environmental reporter Brady Dennis. The research rebuts a controversial federal assessment published this summer that concluded there was no acceleration in rising ocean waters.

The U.S. and Europe continue to abandon their electric vehicle aspirations, ceding the clean car market to China, Bloomberg auto reporter Linda Lew writes. The European Commission recently scrapped an effective ban on combustion engine vehicles by 2035, and Ford Motor Co. walked away from plans to significantly overhaul its EV production — including the imminent demise of its all-electric Ford 150 Lightning truck.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.