L.A.’s Fire Nightmare May Carry A $150 Billion Price Tag

1 year ago 49

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After eight months without rain the hurricane-force winds that hit the Los Angeles region on Jan. 7 – clocked at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour – kicked off a deadly and dangerous start to the new year. More than 10,000 homes and structures have been destroyed, at least 24 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands of residents were forced to flee the monstrously large Palisades and Eaton fires. Even those fortunate enough to remain in their homes have had to contend with power outages and dangerously unhealthy air. It’s also likely to turn into L.A.’s most expensive natural disaster.

When the fires are finally out, the damage done could reach as high as $150 billion, according to an estimate from AccuWeather. If that turns out to be correct, the wind-driven fire nightmare will rank among the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. What’s troubling is that we’re likely to see similar records broken in the coming years, as this is the type of climate-related disaster that researchers have been warning about.

“What we're seeing now is that the fire season has expanded to the point where it's overlapping with the Santa Ana wind season. They didn't use to overlap,” climatologist and University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Mann told MSNBC. “The Santa Ana winds tend to occur outside of the dry season, but now we're seeing an overlap because the dry season's getting longer, and the rains are taking longer to come in the winter. It's January and there's barely been any rainfall over a large stretch of Southern California. And all of that is tied to the large-scale warming of the planet from the burning of fossil fuels.”

When the burning is done, Los Angeles and the surrounding communities will rebuild and rebound. But the grim reality is that weather-related disasters are now par for the course, coming off the hottest year in recorded history, which featured devastating hurricanes and floods.

The Big Read

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What’s Really Behind Donald Trump’s Dogged Pursuit Of Greenland

Donald Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland resurfaced last week at a press conference in Mar-a-Lago where he didn’t rule out the use of force to get it (and maybe also the Panama Canal). It’s not the first time he’s voiced interest in the vast, Danish-affiliated island, though this time one of his sons even traveled there for a staged visit that included showing local supporters in MAGA hats – who may have been homeless people rounded up for the event.

So what’s behind the incoming president's dogged pursuit of the Arctic island? Of course, security is one reason but there's another not-so-subtle motivating factor. Greenland's mineral resource riches are becoming more accessible as the Arctic ice continues to melt due to changing weather patterns and its mining industry is over three centuries old. If its resource riches are examined in detail, many of them are highly coveted in the age of global digitalization and electrification.

According to the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, the island is rich in rare earths, lithium and cobalt used in a range of products from batteries to mobile phones, as well as wind turbines and transmission lines.

Hot Topic

Natrion

Natrion CEO Alex Kosyakov on enhancements to the IRA to aid battery component makers

Are you concerned about the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its incentives for the battery industry during Trump’s second administration?

We're maybe cautiously optimistic. Rationally speaking, it would not make a lot of sense for the IRA to go away for Republican lawmakers because it has benefited Red states the most. If you look at where all these projects have sprung up, it's predominantly in the Rust Belt and in the Southeast. It's brought a lot of jobs in manufacturing.

Trump has also said that onshoring the manufacturing of critical technologies is an aim of his, and that's what we're trying to accomplish as an American battery technology maker. I'll also add that if the IRA changes, in some ways it might actually be a good thing, especially for a company position like us.

Under IRA, as a battery component maker there's not a whole lot of things there for us. We're a battery technology company, but we make a cell component. We don't make the whole battery. And because of that, a lot of the kilowatt-hour subsidies and those sorts of things, those don’t trickle down to us. Those exist for our customers.

At a federal level we could try to get grants and loans, but the IRA itself doesn't really provide a whole lot which is unfortunate because if you look at some of the challenges in onshoring American battery manufacturing, its component-level things that we haven't figured out yet. If the IRA is adjusted to address some of those things, it could actually be hugely beneficial.

We make a solid-state electrolyte separator that's a drop-in substitute for current separator materials. And we're making ours entirely in the U.S. or entirely with a North American supply chain. And there's a significant performance, a safety benefit that our separator delivers once it's inside the cell.

And under the IRA as written, there’s no specific program for battery components like Natrion’s?

Correct. It certainly incentivizes our customers to seek us out as one of a handful of American separator suppliers, but the customer reaps the benefits.

As a startup you don’t have limitless funds to lobby politicians. Who’s pushing for the kinds of changes you hope to see?

One of the things we're doing is actually working for the Department of Defense, where the benefits we're providing, the safety and performance are obviously quite conducive to defense applications. They're looking at, it's not just batteries, but even things like magnets for electric motors, these critical technologies, they're auditing the supply chains and there can't be a single adversarial element in there.

In some parts of government there are people starting to understand that if you want a truly U.S.-made battery, every part of it's got to be made in the U.S. It can't just be the final assembly.