We’ve painted ourselves into a corner on climate change — our planet is going to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. And while greenhouse gas emissions aren’t rising as fast as they used to, we’re still emitting carbon dioxide at record-high levels, so further warming is inevitable.

Stopping Earth from heating up further demands effectively zeroing out everything we emit from burning fossil fuels. But at this rate, there’s no way around the fact that we have to go further: We must not just reduce carbon emissions, but pull carbon dioxide back out of the air. The latest comprehensive report from the United Nations’ body of climate scientists made it clear that every scenario that sees us escaping dangerous warming requires carbon capture.

It’s possible to wrench the thermostat back in the other direction and avoid the worst outcomes. It just requires the small matter of scaling up nascent technologies to a global scale and building an entirely new industry from scratch to pull upward of 9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year. No problem.

But there may be a solution to this that checks all the right boxes and very few of the bad ones: extracting carbon directly from the sea.

It gets around some of the squeamishness around geoengineering approaches like dimming the sky to cool the Earth since there’s nothing being added to the environment; just removing the waste that shouldn’t have been spewed so recklessly in the first place. In 2023, hundreds of scientists signed onto a letter calling for more research, development, and field-testing of ocean-based CO2 removal.

It can also address another problem created by our gargantuan carbon emissions: ocean acidification. When carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid, which is slowly starting to shift the pH of the world’s oceans. That affects marine chemistry in ways we’re only beginning to understand, and can threaten sea life by dissolving the shells of tiny organisms that form the foundation of the ocean’s food pyramid. Pulling carbon out of the ocean can slow this down.

So two fish on one hook. Simple, right?

Of course not. “There are quite a lot of challenges, to be honest,” said Adam Yang, who studies ocean CO2 removal at Dalhousie University in Canada. “This whole field of marine carbon dioxide removal is quite new.” 

Yet there are already companies working on the problem with new technologies who say there is a business here that is planet-saving and profitable. Later this year, one ocean CO2 capture company — Equatic — is planning to commission the largest marine CO2 removal plant in the world in Singapore. It will pull about 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the ocean every day. That’s a miniscule amount compared to the billions of tons of extraction needed, but it would provide a demonstration that the technology does indeed work. 

The bigger question is whether this can turn into a viable business, especially in an era where international cooperation is breaking down and some of the largest greenhouse gas emitters are backing away from their climate change commitments. When it comes to carbon dioxide, can we finally create an industry out of withdrawing more than we deposit? 

How ocean-based CO2 removal works

The notion of pulling carbon dioxide out of seawater makes a lot of sense if you look at the basic physics. Current carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are around 430 parts per million. Those are likely the highest levels humans have ever experienced. 

Yet at the same time, 430 parts per million is only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere. Extracting one metric ton of carbon dioxide would require combing through 1.8 billion cubic meters of air. That’s the equivalent of 720 Olympic swimming pools. That requires a lot of scrubbers, a lot of energy, and thus a lot of money.

But because of how carbon dioxide reacts with water it’s about 150 times more concentrated in the sea  than in the sky. About 30 percent of humanity’s carbon emissions are absorbed by the ocean. This gives us a huge leg up on collecting carbon compared to drawing it straight from the air. 

“We’re focusing on direct removal because the capture step is the most expensive and most complicated part,” said Gaurav Sant, an engineering professor at UCLA and co-founder of Equatic, the company building the largest ocean CO2 removal system. (Sant also noted that what they’re doing is “removal,” not “capture,” because capture implies a step where you have to concentrate the CO2).

When you take carbon dioxide out of the water, Henry’s law means that removed carbon dioxide is replaced by more carbon dioxide from the air, said Steve Oldham, the CEO of Captura, another company developing a system to capture carbon dioxide from the ocean. So if you keep drawing CO2 out of the ocean, it will also draw down the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. 

Since the ocean covers two-thirds of the planet, there is massive surface area for this reaction to take place.

Their specific technologies are different, but both Captura and Equatic separate seawater into acids and bases to extract carbon dioxide and then recombine them to return neutral water back into the ocean. The water, now depleted of carbon and returned to the sea, can go on to soak up more CO2.  

Oldham said that there are several key advantages to Captura’s system. One is that it generates its reaction chemicals from the ocean and returns them there; no extra chemicals are left in the water. The chemical process is in a closed loop.

Another benefit is that when their electrodialysis unit breaks down saltwater, it can store the elements for a while and run them back through the electrodialysis unit to generate electricity. Effectively, it’s a battery. That means the system can run on intermittent power, like from solar panels, and supplement its own electrons when necessary. 

This is in contrast to other forms of marine carbon dioxide management techniques, like ocean alkalinity enhancement. This is where companies dump minerals into the ocean to make it more basic, raising its pH so it can absorb more carbon dioxide from the air. “If you have to add mountains of material into the ocean, it becomes hard to scale,” Oldham said. “We try to position ourselves differently.”

Captura currently has a pilot unit in Hawaii that they built in 70 days for less than $10 million. It extracts about 1,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Even if we could scale that up to a commercial level 500-kilotonne ocean-based CO2 capture plant, you’d need about 20,000 of those to remove 10 gigatonnes of global greenhouse gases. 

On one hand, that doesn’t sound so far-fetched when you compare it to the scale of other industrial facilities. There are about 14,000 coal power plants and more than 100,000 wastewater treatment plants in the world. Mim Rahimi, an engineer at the University of Houston, noted that there’s already a lot of coastal infrastructure in many parts of the world to support shipping and oil and gas extraction. Ocean-based CO2 extraction can piggyback on the existing power grid, pipelines, and technical know-how in these areas, reducing some of the operating costs. 

On the other hand, this is still a buildout of an entirely new sector based on a new technology at an extraordinary scale, and it needs to reach that in just a couple decades.  

There are still some big technical and scientific obstacles too, starting with the sheer size of the ocean. It’s a big, complicated organism. Its composition shifts with the currents and the seasons, so extraction systems will have to adapt. Seawater is corrosive and full of living things that can readily foul machinery.

To ensure this is all carbon negative, the energy to power the system has to come from a source that itself doesn’t emit greenhouse gases. The captured carbon also has to be put to use or stored in a way that will prevent it from ever getting back into the atmosphere. And there’s so much about the ocean that we still don’t know. While electrochemical seawater carbon extraction is less invasive than some other marine carbon management ideas, we’ve never tried artificially removing carbon at scale and the full ripple effects are unclear. 

Where does marine carbon removal fit into the climate toolkit?

While carbon-negative technologies will be essential for meeting our climate goals, we still have to do everything we can to curb greenhouse gases as much as possible first. This means decarbonizing power generation, driving, heating, and so on. But even then, there are still sectors of the economy with no easy route to zero greenhouse gases where it’s also difficult to capture them at the source, like air travel and shipping.

Captura’s Oldham said that leaves about 10 gigatonnes of emissions from these hard-to-abate sectors. It’s for these last remaining bits of emissions where carbon removal comes in. 

But Equatic’s Sant said that if they get their costs down and performance up enough, CO2 removal could be an option for anyone looking to reduce their impact on the environment instead of just a last resort.   

“If carbon management is cheap enough, indeed you go economywide,” Sant said. “You don’t create this tiered structure of saying we go after some things first and other things later.”

And marine CO2 removal will be one of many approaches we’ll need. Closing the gap on the remaining emissions will require a variety of systems like direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, alkalinity enhancement, and so on. No one technology is going to have a monopoly, and given the scale of the problem, we need all the help we can get. But marine CO2 extraction does have a lot of advantages. 

So how do you get someone to pay you to do this?

Carbon management is effectively a waste management problem, and we have business models for dealing with things like garbage and sewage. But history shows people only do this grudgingly, often long after a problem has become impossible to ignore. And right now, climate change is still pretty easy to ignore: carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless gas that’s tricky to trace to its source whose effects are spread out across the planet. 

“I think you could almost imagine if there was like a black cloud of carbon in front of your house, you would be like, ‘I need to get rid of this.’ And that just doesn’t happen,” said Jackson Somers, an economist studying the environment at the University of Connecticut. Absent regulations on carbon, if you want to get into the business of CO2 extraction, you need a customer who wants to compensate for their emissions, and right now, that’s a shallow pool. 

The US, the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, is withdrawing from all things climate-related. There is still the 45Q tax credit that offers upward of $180 per metric ton of carbon dioxide captured from the air for facilities that begin construction before 2033. But marine CO2 removal is not eligible for this. Meanwhile, in the corporate world, the winds are blowing against environmental, social, and governance goals in the corporate world. “To be blunt, our timing is lousy,” said Captura’s Oldham.

Additionally, CO2 removal systems are decoupled from their sources — they’re not grabbing carbon where it is emitted, like with carbon capture and storage systems attached to power plants — so it requires a crediting mechanism to account for how much carbon is removed and where to send the bill. Carbon offsets, however, have earned some well-deserved skepticism after failing to deliver meaningful CO2 reductions. 

So in order to function, marine carbon extraction companies will need iron-clad measurement, reporting, and verification of their CO2 removals, said Mai Bui, who studies carbon removal technologies at Supercritical, a firm that has developed a carbon removal market. While the market will set the price, the goalpost for CO2 removals is around $80 to $100 per metric ton. 

There are some regulations that do encourage carbon removal at the moment. In several US states, the UK, and the European Union, there is a cap-and-trade policy system for limiting greenhouse gas emissions that would be able to use credits generated by extracting carbon from the ocean. Bui also noted that while political momentum around addressing climate change is weak, companies like airlines and shipping firms have to plan for decades ahead and are all too aware of how the political winds can change direction. They want to be ready for a world with more restrictions on carbon and are looking for any way they can to stay within their limits. In addition, Frontier, a consortium of companies including Google and JPMorgan Chase & Co, have pooled $1 billion to buy carbon removal credits to create a market signal for developers of removal technologies. 

In the meantime, the CO2 extraction companies are also developing side hustles. Oldham said that Captura is licensing its electrodialysis system, which has a lot of other applications beyond CO2 capture, like desalination and lithium mining. Some companies might also pay to use the captured CO2 as a raw ingredient. Equatic’s Sant said the company is aiming to sell the hydrogen their system generates as an industrial chemical. 

Despite the tough business and governmental environment, if marine CO2 extraction firms can survive the current moment and get their costs so low that investors want to get in on the ground floor before the pendulum swings back, then they could come out much stronger. 

Whether this will work — as a technology at scale or as a viable business — is still unclear, and scientists are still learning what it would mean to reverse the damage to the climate since the dawn of the industrial revolution. 

But we’re already in the middle of a giant uncontrolled planetary experiment on the effects of heat trapping gases. We must undertake a more thoughtful experiment on how we can avert the worst outcomes of a warming world. We know we will need something to withdraw CO2 from the biosphere, so we should probably get started.

The United States has been chasing the rhetorical goal of energy independence — the ability to produce enough domestic energy to be essentially free of dependence on imports — since the energy crisis of the 1970s exposed the country’s reliance on Mideast oil. President Donald Trump has put his own spin on the idea, pushing beyond independence to “energy dominance.” 

If you look just at oil extraction, the US seems to have succeeded. Thanks to the fracking revolution, it is now the largest oil producer in the world, and it exports more petroleum and other liquid fuels than it imports. The US is, in fact, a dominant player in the global energy market.

But as the US and Israel’s attacks on Iran this week have revealed, being dominant in energy isn’t the same thing as being independent. What you’re paying at the pump now is directly connected to what’s happening 6,000 miles away. Because of attacks on shipping and oil infrastructure, gasoline prices are rising across the country, reaching an average of $3.25. The last time prices jumped this high this fast was in March 2022, when Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine. Even Trump was forced to awkwardly acknowledge the reality. 

“So if we have a little high oil prices for a little while, but as soon as this ends, those prices are going to drop, I believe lower than even before,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. Trump has also tasked his Cabinet to look for any way they can to keep gasoline prices down. 

One sign of the rising danger is that Trump also said on his social media platform that the US would offer political risk insurance for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and possibly naval escorts, particularly for oil tankers, after transits drastically slowed. Twenty percent of the world’s petroleum consumption and 20 percent of natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran itself is the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, and its oil facilities are under attack. It’s now launching its own strikes on oil tankers. We’ve seen shocks to the global oil and gas sector before, but this is the big one. 

“We’re living through the geopolitical nightmare for markets,” said Sam Ori, executive director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “This is the crisis that has kept people up at night.”

And with the route throttled, Americans are likely to see even higher gasoline prices in the weeks to come. For most Americans, gasoline is their single-highest energy expense, averaging $2,930 per household in 2024. Adjusting for inflation, the US has been blessed with fairly steady gasoline prices over the decades, so a big, sudden price spike will hit households hard.  

All of which raises the question: If the US is producing more oil than ever, how are we still vulnerable to supply shocks occurring half a world away?

Why we may never achieve “energy independence”

It sounds straightforward in its wording, but energy independence has always been an ill-defined, unachievable goal, no matter how many presidents invoke it. Depending on who you ask, it means reaching self-sufficiency in energy production or immunity from foreign turmoil. But even if the US sourced every drop of oil we use from within our borders, we would still be vulnerable to international price shocks for one simple fact: Oil is a globally traded commodity. Its price is set not by how much the US extracts at home, but by the international laws of supply and demand. 

“A disruption in the flow of oil anywhere affects prices everywhere,” Ori said. “No matter how much oil you produce, no country is insulated from the volatility of the global oil market.”

Then what about Trump’s favorite term: “energy dominance”? This is similarly vague, somewhere in between deregulating the domestic energy sector to encourage more oil and gas extraction and a strategic doctrine to wield energy exports, particularly natural gas, for diplomatic leverage. The vast quantities of oil and gas the US has unlocked with the shale boom “changes how geopolitical oil price shocks abroad are transmitted to the U.S. economy, but not the fact that they will have an impact,” said Lutz Kilian, director of the Center for Energy and the Economy at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, in an email. 

While the US is the biggest oil producer, it’s still less than a quarter of the global total. We can’t drill our way to meaningfully cheaper gasoline and can’t make up for what’s lost when the Strait of Hormuz gets blocked. “If the Strait is not operational, there is no way in hell the US can replace that,” said Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution.  

But markets are only one factor hobbling energy independence. For one thing, not all oil coming out of the ground is the same, and crude oil has to be refined before it’s of any use. US refineries along the Gulf Coast are mostly set up to process heavier oils we import rather than the lighter oil we extract domestically, mainly through fracking. That lighter crude tends to be more valuable to export than consume at home. The US is set up to be a giant, well-oiled cog in a global machine rather than a stand-alone contraption. 

If a foreign oil supplier gets cut off, the US has more oil reserves it can tap, but it can take months to years to ramp up production. The US does have the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil. The Biden administration tapped it to keep gasoline prices down after Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine. But the reserve is only meant to replace oil imports for 90 days, and it’s currently at less than 60 percent capacity.

“Every president gets crap when they use it because folks come out and say, ‘Oh, that was political, and he’s just trying to lower gasoline prices.’ Well, yeah,” Gross said. “Although it is kind of odd to release SPR oil for a conflict we caused.” 

And while the US is the world’s largest oil producer, it’s also the world’s largest consumer — with appetites only set to grow as more Americans take to the roads and skies while fuel efficiency regulations get weaker. 

The net result is that the shale boom has changed “how geopolitical oil price shocks abroad are transmitted to the U.S. economy, but not the fact that they will have an impact,” said Lutz Kilian, in an email. “Energy independence is not possible except in autarky,” an imagined scenario where the US is completely self-sufficient while also isolated from global trade. 

So is energy independence a worthwhile goal, even in theory? 

“No, it’s not,” Ori said. “I don’t think ‘energy independence’ is a useful concept at all.”

It may not sound as good, but a better goalpost than “energy independence” is “energy security,” ensuring an uninterrupted flow of hydrocarbons and electrons at an affordable price. And that requires both strong domestic production and secure sources from abroad. “To really maximize energy security, you want to minimize the way that volatility can affect your economy,” Ori said. That means building durable relationships with trading partners. It also means reducing our dependence on all oil, mainly in the transportation sector. 

Unlike past crises, the oil price spikes from the US attacks on Iran are a problem of our own making. At the same time, the Trump administration is rolling back fuel economy regulations for cars and trucks and repealing incentives for electric vehicles that would have otherwise helped limit demand. But Trump is instead working to increase fossil fuel production and consumption on all fronts. 

Just how bad will things get? Global oil markets are currently well supplied, so there’s a lot of crude already on the move or in storage that’s cushioning the blow. Future prices will depend on how long war-driven disruptions go on and how much alternative capacity emerges. There are other shipping routes for oil and pipelines across countries like Saudi Arabia that could absorb some of the capacity. Kilian said that higher fuel prices could also have a muted effect on inflation. “The effect of a one-time energy price shock on U.S. headline inflation tends to be short-lived, even when the energy price remains elevated,” he wrote. 

But we’re in an unprecedented situation, and we have yet to see the full economic and energy impacts of the war. It’s clear that record oil production can’t shield against supply disruption, and the next conflagration may not be on the US’s terms. When that happens, we will need some help from our friends, or we will all pay for it.  

The Trump administration is about to tear down a load-bearing ruling that considers climate change as a threat to Americans’ health. 

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency is announcing that it will publish its final rule to dismantle the endangerment finding for greenhouse gases — the legal foundation of the EPA’s major US climate regulations. But when it comes to climate regulation, a final rule is not the final word, and the move means frustrating uncertainty for industry, for the environment, and for ordinary people. 

This is the culmination of a long campaign for President Donald Trump and his allies to undo climate change regulations. The endangerment finding — which an EPA spokesperson described to Vox in an email as “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history” — was name-checked as a target in Project 2025. Last year, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wrote that repealing these rules would drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.”

The tale of the endangerment finding is its own saga. In 2007, the US Supreme Court ruled that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act if they harm public health. In 2009, the EPA under President Barack Obama found that, indeed, gases that heat up the planet endanger people’s lives. The fossil fuel industry and Republican-led states have challenged the decision over the years, but federal courts have continued to uphold it. 

The most important consequence of this finding is that it justifies tougher pollution limits on cars and trucks. Car companies can then stay within those caps by increasing fuel efficiency or electrifying their fleets. The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, the bulk of which come from road vehicles. Without the endangerment finding, these specific regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from cars go away.

Once this domino falls, other climate change regulations like those governing pollution from power plants are likely to fall next. 

But of course, nothing the government does is simple. 

Here are three possible ways this all could play out — though one thing we know for certain is that there will be lawsuits.

Outcome 1: The endangerment finding repeal is blocked

Environmental groups argue that the Trump administration’s justification for the repeal is weak on the science and on the law. And here they have an advantage. 

The core of the endangerment finding is that convincing research shows that the heat-trapping gases resulting from burning fuels like gasoline and diesel are warming up the planet. That then leads to consequences like more extreme heat that can worsen ground-level ozone pollution, greater concentrations of allergens like pollen, and more severe weather events. 

This was well established in 2009, and in the years since, the connection between climate change and health has only grown stronger. The EPA has a mandate to protect Americans’ health, and if you look at the evidence, regulating greenhouse gases is clearly part of that mandate. 

The Trump administration is likely to argue that the evidence for this is too muddled to make that case, but as Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Transport Campaign at the Center for Biological Diversity, argues, “This is flat-Earth science.” 

“They’re essentially taking robust science that has only become more clear since the endangerment finding was issued and they’re saying that it’s, as Trump puts it, a hoax,” Becker added.

The endangerment finding has withstood numerous legal challenges over the years in federal courts. “The endangerment finding and EPA authority is well established at this point as a legal matter,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.

The challenge to the repeal of the endangerment finding may end up back at the Supreme Court. Could the high court buck its own precedent? As the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2023 showed, it’s within the realm of possibility. And as the West Virginia v. EPA decision in 2022 demonstrated, the court is happy to handcuff the EPA’s efforts to address climate change. 

However, the current 6-3 Republican majority on the court hasn’t yet hinted that they think the original 2007 decision confirming the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions was bad law. 

Andres Restrepo, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club, said that in cases dealing with specific laws like this, the Supreme Court does tend to let prior decisions stand. “I think that ultimately the government before the Supreme Court will be hard-pressed to make a winning case,” Restrepo said.

If the Trump administration loses and the endangerment finding survives, they will be bound by law to come up with regulations for greenhouse gas emissions. But “[the Trump administration] will probably try to get around it and issue the weakest standards possible,” Restrepo said. “In those cases, we’ll be ready to challenge them.”

Outcome 2: The endangerment finding repeal stands

If the courts side with the Trump administration, the government won’t be in the business of regulating greenhouse gases anymore. That doesn’t necessarily mean that big polluters will be home free, though. Federal climate regulations stood in place of other avenues of litigation from communities against fossil fuel, power, and auto companies. With the endangerment finding gone, businesses could face a new wave of legal action from small parties. 

“If the Trump administration indeed goes ahead and removes this endangerment finding, I think that will eliminate that liability shield for major companies,” Restrepo said. “I think that they’re actually going to be exposing industry to significant litigation risk by doing this and I think a lot of people in industry are nervous about that.” 

However, even if Trump ultimately succeeds in revoking the endangerment finding, it may not stay buried for long. 

Outcome 3: This frustrating game of ping-pong continues

In two short years, there will be another presidential election. And the pendulum on climate change could swing back. A Democrat could take the White House and undo Trump’s work to undo the rule. “It would be the first order of business for a future administration to overturn this,” Restrepo said. 

The root of the problem that has led to this regulatory back-and-forth is that Congress has never been able to pass a new law to directly regulate greenhouse gas emissions, as it was able to in the 1970s with conventional air pollutants. As a result, every Democratic attempt to regulate climate change has been forced to rely on a law that was never designed to regulate climate change. Without a dedicated law, efforts to limit greenhouse gases will remain vulnerable to political whims. 

Getting the ball rolling to reinstate the endangerment finding is its own process. The next administration would have to go through another notice and comment period to reinstate the endangerment finding that would also be subject to judicial review. 

This long-running, tedious ping-pong match is robbing Americans of meaningful action against a genuine threat to their health while making their lives more expensive. 

Because the two parties can’t agree on the endangerment finding, climate regulations keep getting tied up in court and reversed by new administrations, never getting a real chance to cut emissions. The US has made progress to rein in climate change: its greenhouse gas emissions have declined over the past 20 years. But that was mainly due to the market-driven decline of coal power and gains in efficiency. 

If limits on climate pollution from cars and power plants actually took effect during all of these years of squabbling over the regulation, the dropoff would have likely been much faster.

In the meantime, many of the sources of carbon dioxide also emit pollutants that have immediate detrimental effects on health. During Trump’s first term, his EPA found that weakening greenhouse gas regulations would lead to hundreds more premature deaths and tens of thousands more asthma attacks each year. 

And all of this capriciousness is damaging to the industries that the Trump administration is trying to boost.

Greenhouse gas-emitting sectors like the auto industry and power generation generally would prefer weaker pollution rules than strong ones, but having the goalposts move every few years is even worse for them. Car companies are already designing cars for the 2030s, but right now it’s not clear what regulations they’ll face, creating uncertainty and raising costs for the auto industry. US carmakers also want to sell their cars in other countries, many of which have their own climate regulations and mandates for electric vehicles. If they pump the brakes in their drive toward greater efficiency and electrification, they become less competitive. 

Similarly, power companies have to design plants that require billions of dollars in upfront investment that will be paid back over decades. Constantly changing the rules makes it harder for them to make a business case — and can end up increasing power bills for all of us. 

The EPA says that the endangerment finding repeal is part of a strategy to save money for Americans, since stricter pollution standards can raise the price of vehicles and electricity production. But tougher emissions limits on cars improve their efficiency, so drivers would spend less on fuel. Gasoline is already the single-biggest energy expense for most US households. 

The Trump administration has also been trying to resuscitate the US coal industry, but coal-fired power plants have been shutting down across the country because they were more expensive than competitors like natural gas and renewable power. 

All these stops, starts, and reversals are frustrating for everyone, but particularly for the effort to limit climate change. “Of course, none of this is desirable,” Burger said. “You would want this to be a steady state of reducing greenhouse gas emissions consistent with what science demands in order to avert scenarios of high impact, but this is where we are.”

Durable action on climate change will likely demand dedicated legislation, but Congress is unlikely to pass any such measure anytime soon. Until then, advocates for action on climate change will have to use the imperfect tools they have to build the world they want.   

A lot of us might assume that most homes that are destroyed by wildfires were in obvious, high fire-risk areas, like on the edge of forests that frequently burn. But wildfires are a faster-growing and much closer threat than we may realize — burning in places that rarely used to see them.

For instance, many homes that remain in the neighborhoods that burned in the historic Los Angeles wildfires last year are still considered as having “low risk” in assessments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) despite the charred remains of their neighbors showing how vulnerable they might be to embers blowing from miles away. 

It raises an urgent question: Do we actually know which homes face the most danger of burning? 

Government risk maps are too coarse for the way wildfire works now. But new tools powered by AI are giving us a clearer picture. They could reshape how we understand the dangers that lie ahead and force a reckoning over where we live and how we build and protect our homes — if we choose to listen.

How AI helped risk modelers zoom in

For decades, modelers calculated wildfire risk by looking at historical patterns of wildfires, but it’s increasingly evident that this vastly understates the scope of the problem. In fact, until 2023, California prohibited insurers from using forward-looking catastrophe models that included factors like future climate change to set their rates. “Wildfires have very complex dynamics, and a backward-looking approach is not sufficient,” said Firas Saleh, director of North America wildfire models at Moody’s, a financial analytics firm. 

Now, one company, ZestyAI, says they have a new model that fills in “blind spots” in the government’s fire risk calculations, providing a sharper picture of the threats wildfires can pose to individual homes.   

“Early on in our journey, we realized that insurance companies were writing property insurance without having a deep understanding of the properties themselves,” said Kumar Dhuvur, chief product officer at ZestyAI. “A lot of times, their way to get that understanding was to ask agents or the homeowners, ‘Hey, do you have a tree next to your house? Do you have a swimming pool?’”

To produce their estimates, ZestyAI used satellite images of neighborhoods to examine structures, vegetation, and terrain. They combined this information along with historical fire records and climate variables to train their AI model. This allowed them to calculate risks for specific houses.

“You’ve got to be very granular in your assessment of risk,” Dhuvur said. “There could be whole neighborhoods where the resolution is too low and becomes a no-go zone for an insurance company.”

When using its model to analyze the regions burned in Los Angeles wildfires last year, for example, ZestyAI found that more than 3,000 properties that were labeled as low or no risk in assessments from FEMA showed up as having an elevated fire risk in ZestyAI’s model. These properties have an estimated value of $2.4 billion. Across California, there are 1.2 million properties worth around $940 billion that were labeled as low risk in FEMA’s National Risk Index. ZestyAI found all of them to face greater danger.

It’s an alarming result when you put it in the greater context. Sprawling, destructive wildfires are extracting a massive and growing toll from the global economy. In 2025, fires around the world burned through 390 million hectares — more than 90 percent of the land area of all the countries in the European Union. The price tag of wildfires has been surging in recent decades, and the Los Angeles wildfires last year may be the most expensive disaster in US history.  

This is a big jump forward from conventional fire risk models. 

FEMA’s National Risk Index, for example, calculates threats over census tracts or counties (The National Risk Index has now been migrated into the new Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool). The dataset groups high-risk and low-risk homes together in ways that miss a lot of important differences between them. Some houses may have fire-resistant shingles and a wide defensible space that give them more protection. Others may have shared wooden fences with neighbors that create pathways for fire to travel, leaving those homes vulnerable to fires that start far away. 

That was clear in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires, when some homes were left standing despite just about the rest of the neighborhood turning to ash. 

For its part, the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Vox that the National Risk Index is intended to be a baseline, not an absolute measure of risk. 

“FEMA welcomes efforts by others to develop additional datasets that support communities in preparing for all hazards, including wildfires,” a FEMA spokesperson wrote in an email. “Increased research and data collection on risks enables communities to enhance their preparedness and resilience before disasters happen.”

But even though ZestyAI’s analysis provides a clearer picture of which homes are in danger, it can still leave some important complexities of wildfires, said Hussam Mahmoud, who leads the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate and studies risks to communities. 

Fire risk is not just a function of individual homes but of how whole neighborhoods and environments interact. A group of homeowners might clear a wide defensible space around their own homes, upgrade their sidings, and protect attic vents from cinders, but if one of their neighbors falls short, it could endanger the whole community when flames arrive. Even fire-resistant homes that meet upgraded construction codes can burn if they are pummeled for hours with waves of embers on hurricane-force winds, as the 2025 Los Angeles fires showed. 

“I think AI is a very promising technology,” Mahmoud said. “It has limitations to how it can be used with a physics-based model.”

There are also tradeoffs between how precise risk estimates can be and how much they cost. Inspecting individual homes in person can yield the sharpest picture, but it’s intrusive, time-consuming, and expensive to send people to examine millions of homes. And in-person inspections still don’t tell the whole story. 

“When you’re on the ground assessing buildings and looking if the building has good roof material versus good siding versus something else, you’re assuming that this building is a recipient of fire,” Mahmoud said. “You’re not looking at how the fire is propagating across the community.”

Wildfire risks aren’t just increasing. They’re evolving.

The story we tell about wildfires is shifting. They are not just a problem in wilderness areas that happen to spill over into cities and neighborhoods. Houses are now as much a part of the landscape as pine trees and chaparral. They are both fuels and sources of ignition, even far from forests and shrublands. The vast majority of wildfires are ignited by human activity, and when entire neighborhoods ignite, fires behave in hard-to-predict ways not seen in nature. That was evident as the Los Angeles fires last year engulfed coastal mansions in Pacific Palisades and entire neighborhoods in downtown Altadena. 

But better models like ZestyAI’s can make a difference — if we’re willing to make hard decisions and act on them.  

Some communities have already used specialized fire forecasts to target certain properties with mitigation measures to reduce their odds of igniting and then leveraging that to lower their insurance rates. And with regulatory reforms like allowing insurers to use fire models that look ahead, California is starting to lure some insurance companies back to the state.

The biggest challenge may yet be getting people to acknowledge their risks at all. 

The home listing site Zillow last year decided to remove climate risk scores from property listings under pressure from California real estate groups that complained that the scores were hurting the resale value of some homes. It makes sense: A better map of fire dangers might not be in your interest if you’re trying to sell your home and its value suddenly drops because it shows up as having a higher risk of igniting. An insurance company might also use that information to raise your premiums or drop your coverage entirely. 

There are more reasons why people might not want to think too hard about future fires. Faced with an urgent housing shortage, Los Angeles is under immense pressure to build as much as possible, as fast as possible. Yet despite all the efforts to speed up construction, especially in the wake of the devastating wildfires last year, building in Southern California is still an agonizingly slow process.

Anyone with money and time who has lost their home in a fire can afford to wait to assess their risks and rebuild their homes to be more resilient, or move. However, many lower-income fire victims don’t have a choice other than to try to go back to the same conditions that put them in danger in the first place. That’s part of why there have been more permit applications to date for rebuilding in low and middle-income communities — like Altadena, for example — that burned last year, and fewer in wealthier enclaves like Pacific Palisades. 

“Families that are displaced from Palisades do have the wealth and means to look for alternatives as opposed to Altadena residents, for whom that’s their only option,” said Minjee Kim, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles. 

AI and more advanced models can help us predict these risks and understand them better, but no algorithm can extinguish financial denial or do the political heavy lifting required to stop us from building tomorrow’s homes in burn zones that are only getting bigger.