Crypto News: My wildfire-ready home

Homeowners looking to adapt to increasingly ferocious wildfires face a paradox. While they can undertake any number of costly upgrades to lower the odds their house is consumed by flames, if their neighbor doesn't, all those efforts could be for naught.

Today's newsletter brings you a first-person perspective on how to grapple with hardening your own home while knowing there are firebombs likely sitting just a few houses down the road. Plus, how nuclear and fossil industry supporters are teaming up to stop offshore wind.

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Fire herd immunity

By Todd Woody

Strolling through the hillside urban forest that's my California neighborhood, my dog thrusts his nose in the air, catching the scent of redwood, bay laurel and eucalyptus on the breeze as San Francisco Bay glitters in the distance. It's a picture-perfect but disturbingly warm autumn day in the Berkeley Hills.

On hot and gusty days like this one, I see hundreds of thousands of flaming embers. They are launched, in my imagining, from a faraway wildfire igniting an unstoppable inferno that consumes my densely populated neighborhood, burning down into the city of 120,000. That my watch buzzes with real-life alerts about small fires breaking out across the East Bay only adds to the unease. It's a sense of existential doom that I can't seem to shake as California enters another season of Santa Ana and Diablo winds this month.

Illustration: Grace J. Kim for Bloomberg

It is all but assured that climate-driven wildfires like the ones that devastated Altadena and Pacific Palisades in LA in January will be back for my home. Like those communities, the Berkeley Hills border fire-prone wildland and are cleaved by canyons that act as blow torches, funneling flaming embers into neighborhoods. That makes climate adaptation here less of a lifestyle choice and increasingly a matter of life and death.

So I'm spending considerable cash to fortify my 1928 home against wildfire and relandscape my property by removing plants and other combustible material within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of the house, in accordance with a forthcoming state-mandated buffer space dubbed Zone Zero. The science shows that such ember-resistant zones dramatically increase a dwelling's chances of survival.

But wildfire resilience is like vaccination — it takes herd immunity to stop a contagion or a conflagration from spreading. Experts say about 90% of homeowners in a high-risk area need to comply with Zone Zero; otherwise, once one house starts burning, the radiant heat will ignite neighboring homes and trigger out-of-control structure-to-structure combustion. In other words: Unless my neighbors also gird their homes, we're all going to burn.

"The frank reality," says Yana Valachovic, a University of California wildfire scientist, "is that we have to live differently in California."

My job as a climate journalist made that clear to me. In 2024, I went out with Berkeley Fire Department officials for a wildfire story as they inspected all 9,000 homes in the hills for wildfire risks such as overgrown or dead and dying vegetation. At a Tudor-style house, an inspector pulled back healthy-looking but highly flammable juniper bushes that carpeted the front yard to reveal a mass of dangerously dead branches underneath. House after house revealed potential firebombs planted in plain sight. I began to look at my neighborhood in a new light.

The shrubs and a magnolia tree planted in my front yard against a wall of my next-door neighbors' 1912 wood-shingle home definitely wouldn't stop a wildfire. I had them ripped out in May, revealing two vents on the neighbor's house. If a fire had ignited the plants, flaming embers could have blown inside their home.

The reporter's lush front yard before (left) and after (right) updates. Photographer: Todd Woody/Bloomberg

Given my yard's small size, I replaced all the flammable mulch with decorative rock and placed a few colorful, noncombustible ceramic pots planted with small succulents near the house, which is permitted. Beyond the Zone Zero perimeter, bushes were removed to create space between the vegetation, so if embers landed on one plant, it would be harder to spread fire to others. My neighbors on the other side took out trees that grew too close for comfort to our house, though their absence is noticeable in a neighborhood where greenery often does the work of creating privacy.

Wood fences and gates attached to a house are particularly problematic — once they ignite, they burn like fuses to a bomb. So I replaced my wooden gate with a modernistic metal one, the kind you might see in LA, for $3,000. And while California doesn't require home-hardening upgrades for dwellings built before 2008 —the vast majority of homes in high-risk wildfire areas like mine — I complemented my house's fire-resistance roof and fire-resilient stucco exterior with ember-resistant mesh that seals the exterior vents during a fire. (Cost: about $4,500 including covering those two vents on my neighbor's house.)

In the seven months since starting to harden my home and give the yard the Zone Zero treatment, I've spent about $20,000, and the vibe is now more Santa Barbara than Berkeley. But then again, so is Berkeley's climate these days.

Read the full story, including how neighborhoods are organizing to work together and the state's challenges implementing Zone Zero.

A stabilizing force

$18 billion

The amount California lawmakers agreed to add to the state's wildfire utility fund. The effort is aimed at helping stabilize utilities' finances and limiting shareholder losses.

Balancing risk and affordability

"At some point you have to live with the discomfort of some residual risk."

Duncan Callaway

Chair, University of California, Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group

The cost to bury power lines and harden infrastructure would raise utility bills. Callaway said that creates a tradeoff between affordability and risk reduction.

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Your weekend listen

When Canada elected Mark Carney as prime minister, there was hope that the country would pursue stronger climate policies. That hope was crushed after Carney signed a deal with the oil-producing province of Alberta that will roll back or dilute green regulations. As a result, Steven Guilbeault, Carney's culture minister has resigned from cabinet. He was the environment minister under Justin Trudeau and responsible for many of the policies at risk. This week on Zero, Guilbeault tells Akshat Rathi why the Alberta deal was the last straw.

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

Your weekend read

The fossil fuel and nuclear industries haven't exactly been friendly. After all, both provide baseload power, putting them in competition to sell electrons on the grid.

But the rise of renewables has created a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" moment. Many supporters of nuclear and fossil fuels have teamed up to counter the rise of renewable power. Attacks on offshore wind have proven particularly damaging, dovetailing with the Trump administration's assault. This weekend's excerpt comes from an investigation by Monte Reel and Mark Chediak into the burgeoning alliance and its attempts to quash the offshore wind industry.

Their story follows reporting on how the backers of a politically connected nuclear startup are working, at times covertly, to neutralize the industry's chief regulator.

For more investigations that expose unseen connections, please subscribe to Bloomberg News.

A wind turbine off of Virginia Beach in 2023. Photographer: Kendall Warner/The Virginian-Pilot/Getty Images

The towering smokestacks of the Indian River power plant have been etched on the horizon of Delaware Bay for more than 60 years. From its opening in 1957, the plant burned tens of millions of tons of coal, sending pollution over thousands of homes and toxic ash into the groundwater.

About 20 years ago, residents began joining in opposition. They collected health data from downwind communities; their findings prompted Delaware to officially designate the area a cancer cluster and led the plant to start downscaling operations.

Last year the administration of Joe Biden, whose summer home is about 14 miles northeast of the plant, approved a plan that reimagined the site. The project called for putting a substation next to it that would distribute energy from more than 100 wind turbines to be built about 10 miles out to sea. The last of the plant's four coal-burning units was already scheduled to shut down for good within a year. Renewable energy would take the place of coal.

David Stevenson had something different in mind. A former executive for the DuPont de Nemours Inc. chemical company, he worked for the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Delaware affiliate of the State Policy Network (SPN), a national consortium of think tanks aligned with, and partly funded by, fossil fuel interests. On behalf of the institute, Stevenson, 77, campaigned against electric vehicle subsidies, national ozone standards and a carbon tax.

But Stevenson's main target of opposition has been offshore wind energy. Up and down the East Coast, from Nantucket to North Carolina, he's been involved with nonprofits with names that wouldn't look out of place alongside a Greenpeace bumper sticker: Save Our Beach View, ACK for Whales, Protect Our Coast NJ, the American Coalition for Ocean Protection. He also started the Ocean Environment Legal Defense Fund, designed to help anti-wind groups finance lawsuits against individual wind proposals. One challenged the project near Indian River, owned by US Wind Inc. Among the lawsuit's plaintiffs were Stevenson and a Delaware beach town, Fenwick Island.

In January, two weeks before Donald Trump returned to the White House, Stevenson sent an email to the mayor of Fenwick Island with some proposals that might reverse the fate of Indian River, which would close its last coal unit one month later. He attached two documents to the email. The first was a draft executive order he'd written for officials connected to the incoming Trump administration. (Stevenson had served on Trump's first transition team, after the 2016 election.) Among other recommendations, it called for the federal government to stop approving leases for offshore wind projects and cancel all existing leases for projects that hadn't yet been completed.

The second attachment was a policy recommendation for incoming Delaware Governor Matt Meyer titled "SMR Nuclear Proposal." (SMR stands for "small modular reactor.") It proposed that the governor allow Indian River to be sold to a nuclear power operator instead of being turned into a wind project.

He told the mayor, who shared his opposition to the project, that he wasn't widely circulating the documents. "I want Trump and Meyer to get the credit," he wrote, "leaving a better chance they'll do as requested."