Amid the catastrophic fires that have plagued California this month, the conversation around mitigation and prevention has accelerated.
In today’s episode, the hosts are joined by Anukool Lakhina, the CEO and co-founder of BurnBot. The company produces tank-sized robots that take in biomass, incinerate it, and extinguish it as they move. Prescribed burns are a normal part of forest management, but they typically require specific weather conditions for safety purposes. But BurnBot can operate around the clock, no matter the weather.
In the interview, Anukool explains how his robots work and their potential to diminish the strength of fires like those in LA. He also discusses the bills and policies that he believes can make the biggest impact on fire mitigation moving forward.
Earlier in the show, the hosts unpack and debate some of the first moves from the new Trump administration on climate and energy, including the President’s “national energy emergency,” the unwinding of President Biden’s tailpipe emissions rules, and the impact of a study on the social cost of carbon.
Credits: Hosted by Julia Pyper, Emily Domenech, and Brandon Hurlbut. Produced by Max Savage Levenson. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor.
Political Climate is co-produced by Boundary Stone Partners, a leading bipartisan climate change strategic advisory and government affairs firm. Their mission-driven approach combines innovative solutions with expertise in technology, finance, policy, federal funding, and advocacy. Learn more and get in touch today at BoundaryStone.com.
The energy industry is transforming – are you staying ahead of the curve? As the premier bipartisan strategic advisory firm, Boundary Stone Partners bridges the gap between technology, policy, and finance to drive real-world impact, empowering clients to shape a more sustainable future. Visit BoundaryStone.com to learn more.
Transcript
Julia Pyper: All right. How’d you guys spend Inauguration day? Emily, did you go party it up?
Emily Domenech: I did. I did plenty of socializing and a little bit of media work too.
Julia Pyper: Socializing, how diplomatic. Did you put on a nice dress?
Emily Domenech: Yeah, I put on a lot of fancy dresses. I had a great long weekend.
Julia Pyper: Brandon, how are things looking over in your corner of the boxing ring?
Brandon Hurlbut: I did not go to… I was not in DC, did not go to any of the parties, was not invited. But I did go to the Clippers-Bulls game at the Intuit Dome last night for the first time, so that was pretty cool to check out that new arena.
Julia Pyper: Welcome back to Political Climate. I’m Julia Pyper. As the Los Angeles fires finally begin to calm down and recovery slowly begins, the conversation around mitigation and prevention has accelerated. In today’s episode, we’re joined by a guest whose company offers an innovative strategy for reducing the threat of future wildfires. Anukool Lakhina is the CEO of BurnBot. The company produces tank-sized robots that take in biomass, incinerate it, and extinguish it as they move. Prescribed burns are a normal part of forest management, but they typically require specific weather conditions for safety purposes, but BurnBot can operate around the clock no matter the weather. We’re thrilled to have Anukool join us to discuss how his tech works, where fire mitigation and public policy intersect, and how momentum is building for the fire tech sector.
We’ll also take a quick look at some of the first moves from the new Trump administration on climate and energy. Do any of the President’s initial executive orders come as a surprise? It’s all coming up on Political Climate.
As always, I’m joined by my co-hosts, Brandon Hurlbut and Emily Domenech. Brandon served as chief of staff in President Obama’s energy department and went on to found Boundary Stone Partners and Overture VC. Hey, Brandon.
Brandon Hurlbut: Hey, Julia.
Julia Pyper: Are you in LA today or are you on the road?
Brandon Hurlbut: I am in LA. Lots of travel coming up in February, but here today, and the air quality’s getting a little better, don’t you think?
Julia Pyper: Yeah.
Brandon Hurlbut: Seems to be.
Julia Pyper: Air quality’s getting better, but what does not track by air quality monitors is the actual ash and the crazy metals that are in it unfortunately. So we are technically under a windblown ash advisory until 10:00 PM tonight, just FYI. Our other co-host, Emily, is over in Washington DC. She served as senior energy advisor to speakers of the house, Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson and is now a senior vice president at Boundary Stone. Hey, Emily. I’m sure the air quality is better where you are.
Emily Domenech: Hey, Julia. Yeah, it definitely is better. We are fortunate. I think we’ve only had air quality like that when there were those Canadian fires like two years ago.
Julia Pyper: Right. It’s just really cold over there.
Emily Domenech: It’s freezing. Having spent a lot of time outside in lines over the last few days, I wouldn’t recommend it.
Julia Pyper: Well, the cold did not dissuade people from showing up for the inauguration. Washington DC was busy, I know this from folks who were at events and around town. So as the Trump administration kicks off, we’ve seen policy begin to take shape via an initial flurry of executive orders signed on day one. This includes America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, a ban on offshore wind development, an “energy emergency” quote, unquote, that will facilitate fossil fuel extraction and more. So we’ll take a quick look here at the big picture. First to both of you, was there anything that surprised you among these executive orders? Some of the details will still be hashed out as the executive orders kind of go to the agencies for implementation, but anything at the top line that caught you off guard? Maybe, Brandon, I’ll go to you first.
Brandon Hurlbut: Well, we’re back in the Trump confetti machine. So I think what we can hopefully do on this show for our listeners is help separate the substance and actionable things from some of the rhetoric and political theater and do a better job of that than I think generally the media did the last Trump administration. One thing stuck out to me is how ready they were. I mean, it was an impressive organized effort that they unleashed on day one. And so for Democrats, we need to be ready for the next time the voters give us the chance to have that kind of authority, and we can’t go back to the same stuff we’ve been selling. We’ve got to make the changes. So I think while we’re in a little bit of this wilderness, we should be thinking about when given the chance to have that authority again, how would we use it.
Two, I think some of the things they put out were popular. I was happy to see that they want to facilitate the permitting and construction of interstate energy transportation and other critical energy infrastructure. That stuff is great, but I think some of the stuff that they’ve put out is not popular, halting wind development which is very popular in red states. I think 8 of the top 10 wind states voted for Trump. So I think those are the areas that I think we have to point out as to some of these actions may not be what’s best for their constituents. I think the freeze on the IRA spending, that happens at re-administration, they always go on pause.
Julia Pyper: To be clear, this is grants and loans as far we know, not tax credit related.
Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah, grants and loans.
Julia Pyper: Yeah.
Brandon Hurlbut: Right, right, right. So the discretionary spending, grants and loans as you said. But it says 90 days and so we’ll see how long does that pause go for because it’s legally only supposed to be for 45 days and then they’re going to send everything to the Office of Management and Budget. That seems like a lot of bureaucracy and they’re supposed to be reducing bureaucracy and making it easier to do business with the federal government. So that’s the stuff I’ll be paying attention to.
Julia Pyper: Is this where the impoundment clause can come in, where if they’re legally required to spend the money, can they not spend it? I think there’s some legal questions here and the new head of the Office of Management and Budget has said he’s willing to use impoundment. Emily, do you have any thoughts on this in terms of what’s real and will become real after they do these reviews?
Emily Domenech: Yeah, I mean, I think to Brandon’s point about the Trump administration coming in prepared, I think we got a slew of executive orders that very much outlines the agenda of this administration. Some of these things are starting points, so it’s, hey, agency head, go do a review, take a look at these programs. Some of these things are going to be things where the report back part is the part that matters and becomes a part of the budget request they send to Congress and where they prioritize their efforts in terms of things like reforming the way the federal government operates.
I think it’s, one, impressive to see them be that prepared, and two, really one of the things that I think the American public appreciates about Trump. He’s real direct. He tells you what he wants to do. He’s not out there sort of being like hiding something on a Friday. They put it all out on their first day and said, “This is the stuff we want to prioritize.” And in the energy space, I think there’s lots to be excited about. We see a big emphasis on permitting reform, a big emphasis on investments and infrastructure and meeting energy demand, and I think that if you’re an energy developer of any kind that should be exciting to you.
Brandon Hurlbut: As a former high ranking congressional staffer, does it worry you the amount of power in the office of the presidency that they’re exerting versus the Congress? Because you have appropriated funds, you have the will of the Congress. Does any of that concern you as far as checks and balances?
Emily Domenech: I’m very much an Article 1 girl who believes in the power and authority of Congress. It’s their job, they need to do it. But this is nothing new. I mean, you worked for President Obama when he was like, “I’m going to do all my legislating with a pen and a phone.” We’ve been doing this switch back and forth in terms of the executive branch saying, “We’re going to do as much as we can under the authority we’ve been given.” The reality is if Congress doesn’t like it, Congress can do something about it. They have the ability to direct funds and to say, “Hey, no funds allowed to do XYZ rule.” They don’t often exert it the way that they should, and I frankly think the solution to a strong executive is a strong legislative branch. That’s how our system is designed, and Congress has to be willing to use the authority it has.
In this case, I think many of these things are things Congressional Republicans really agreed on and have wanted to do for a long time. So while I think we’ll see kind of a, hey, we’ll do this much permitting reform, for example, through executive order and through the regulatory process, but then we’re going to try to back it up with laws, passing laws that can put that stuff in statute and make it more permanent.
Julia Pyper: So a couple other things to highlight from this. One thing the executive order did, as I mentioned at the top, is declare this emergency. It’s different from the emergencies of the past where you had the oil embargo and people were lining up at gas stations, and actually that era in the seventies, late seventies, prompted a lot of the efficiency standards, use more of your own domestic energy. We’re actually in a moment where there’s a lot of American energy, but the impetus for this national emergency, as I understand it, is really to power AI. So that was one of the reasons that President Trump wrote this. If we need more power, we need to win this geopolitical race. We’ve talked about it on the show with a former FERC Chairman, Neil Chatterjee among others.
So this to me is interesting. It’s a different way of defining “emergency.” I’m wondering what you all think of that use and the driver of AI. I think it’s really primarily at unleashing natural gas, right, in power plants and for those purposes, maybe also nuclear, but I’m wondering how you think that does boil down. Is there anything in there for wind and solar developers as well? I’m wondering what that impetus is, what we take away from this.
Emily Domenech: I actually think it’s a really… when you read the language in the executive order, it’s very broad in defining energy infrastructure and energy investments, and very much this idea of using the national emergency declaration is to give cabinet secretaries the ability to go and say, “Hey, what can I do in a national emergency that I can use to speed up this process?” I know it’s a little bit of a, oh, well, we have a lot of energy right now, so why are we saying it’s an emergency. Well, every major evaluation of our demand growth is just through the roof. I mean, the IEA thinks we’re going to have demand growth by like 18%. It’s a really significant amount over the next two years.
So I think the idea here is we’ve got to act now or we’re going to have a crisis where we can’t meet our power demands and we can’t meet the needs of growing our industries like AI. So it’s getting ahead of it and trying to get ourselves to a place where we don’t have five-year permitting timelines to get things off the ground and we can actually get stuff built.
Julia Pyper: So much of this is devil in the details, right? I think, yes, that motivator on more power is clearly there, more energy is needed. When you get further into it, some of the things that have been put forward are like loosening some of the regulations around methane leakage. However, there are some oil companies that have actually pushed for those regulations because it gives them the price signal to actually capture and reduce the methane leakages which is actually just their product, right? So there’s a good financial impetus for some of that. So it’ll be interesting as the administration gets further into it and talks more to industry about what do they actually want rolled back, what are some good rules of the road. I think a lot of this is yet to be hashed out.
Another piece of the puzzle is coming to the Inflation Reduction Act. One executive order did not call for the revocation of existing final rules that implement the tax credits, but only so long as the rule was published in the Federal Register and has an effective date no later than 60 days after the order. So there’s some details here to unpack. Talk to your lawyers. But I think what’s interesting about it is some of the key core tax credits like 48E tech-neutral is final, is published, was effective the day they published it under the Biden administration. So it appears something like that might be outside the scope of this review. So again, we’ll all be kind of figuring out what the intent is here. These are higher level, but it didn’t seem like they tried to pull the rug out from people, out from under developers on that score while they are reviewing some of the pending rules and things that are yet to come from various government agencies.
Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah, I just hope that they’re current also on the state of some of these technologies because what concerned me a little bit was the way that Doug Burgum was characterizing renewables. He was basically saying in order to meet this energy crisis or emergency, we need baseload fossil fuels. But solar and wind and storage can function as baseload when paired together, and also we have lots of distributed assets that can be rolled up and together provide reliable power, and that’s really what we need. So I’m hoping that there will be thinking through that and not thinking about this like from the technologies of 10 years ago.
Emily Domenech: Yeah, but I think here it’s, we want to be able to build the right thing as fast as possible, and like we’ve talked about on this show, how do we make it so the federal government is not the impediment of being able to build things in America. It shouldn’t be the thing that’s stopping progress from going forward. I think that’s where we’ll see them focus, particularly when it comes to the regulatory agenda is how do we make sure the government isn’t the deciding factor in whatever we’re trying to do next in meeting our energy demand.
Brandon Hurlbut: Emily, do you see a scenario where they try to force fossil fuel plants that would’ve been closed down because they’re uneconomic to stay open?
Emily Domenech: I think uneconomic is it depends on what the environment is. If it’s uneconomic under a rulemaking that’s getting rescinded, that I would imagine that those various utilities will look at their mix and decide whether or not they want to continue. I don’t think you’ll see a lot of federal mandates to maintain certain assets because we don’t usually like federal mandates. That’s not how we think about energy policy. That said, I would expect a Republican leaning FERC to really focus on reliability and affordability above all else. That’s where their mandate is. There are plenty of other factors to consider, but that’s what their job is, and I think you’ll see a return to that statutory, ‘what are we supposed to consider when we consider various projects?’
Julia Pyper: So kind of I think in the similar vein, especially when we think about the power sector, one other piece of an executive order was directing the EPA to submit a report within 30 days evaluating whether greenhouse gases do in fact pose a threat to humanity. This is the, quote, unquote, “endangerment finding,” and it underpinned 2009 laws that govern power plant pollution effectively. We’ve seen this tossed back and forth in the courts, but I think it’s largely been held up. So the EPA now’s being directed to do a further review of this. It has been accepted now for years. Emily, what do you make of this? What kind of result could come from an EPA report, given this is an issue that’s been litigated? Where do you think this goes?
Emily Domenech: So just to clarify here, the direction here about the endangerment finding is really focused around the use of what is called the social cost of carbon and how we use that metric to measure costs and benefits of various projects. Republicans have long questioned the science and application of the social cost of carbon. I find it to be something that is arbitrarily used and it’s been argued about in the courts a ton. This is designed to go back and frankly say, “Is this a metric we should continue to use?” And I always think about it because there’s folks obviously on the other side of the aisle who love the social cost of carbon metric, but nobody on the Dem side would want like a social benefits of fossil fuels metric to be used on when we decide projects. So I think that’s part of where Republicans come from when looking at this particular endangerment finding. It’s about that issue.
Julia Pyper: Do you think that research though, that report would affect a later analysis of the endangerment finding writ large and how it underpins other regulations?
Emily Domenech: It certainly could, but I think the design here is to question the use of that social cost of carbon metric when making regulatory decisions which would affect your future rulemakings and potentially could make it a more interesting discussion where we’re looking at costs and benefits in real time instead of one that’s driven by a model.
Julia Pyper: And I have to ask, because of course Elon Musk spoke at the inauguration. We know he has an EV company, Tesla. One of the other pieces of an executive order talks about rescinding the “EV mandate,” quote, unquote, which is really the fuel efficiency standards set by the EPA and NHTSA to make fuel efficiency higher and higher over time to which point EVs become a compliance pathway. California has their waiver right to implement their own fuel efficiency standards, very strict. Tesla actually makes a lot of money selling credits for compliance under that program, and several other states have aligned with California. We’ve talked about the California waiver, whether the EPA would revoke that. So what do you guys make of President Trump saying he’s going to revoke the EV mandate, so to speak, kind of a general term that plays out at the state level and the federal level? What does that look like? And I’m curious what we think might be happening on the priorities there.
Emily Domenech: I mean, I will say I think this is mostly focused on, again, that regulatory agenda at the EPA and making sure that the federal government isn’t the one who’s setting that standard in terms of whether or not you must buy an EV. I think this is a great… it’ll be a very interesting moment to see how much Elon Musk decides to weigh in on this issue and whether or not it’s a top priority for him. As of now, I don’t think it’s been the number one item that he’s bringing to the table. So I mean, I think he’s a little bit more focused on doing work in the government efficiency space.
Julia Pyper: Yeah, I find this interesting because I assume this has to go through a whole formal rulemaking process, the final rule, right? This has been in place, so if they’re going to roll it back, this is where, again, devil’s in the details of just that broad line statement, revoke EV mandate. What does that mean? I think it’s years of work, and then we will have comments and see what we’re actually dealing with here.
Emily Domenech: Yeah, but I think, again, like we talked about at the top of the show, this is an articulation of their plan and strategy. In some cases, these EOs give real directives to secretaries to go do preparatory work, but in other cases it is saying, “Hey, this is an item that we want to do and that we want to tackle, and we’re going to give you more information on it as we go forward.”
Julia Pyper: So before we move on, I did want to touch briefly on last week’s hearing for President Trump’s energy and climate-related cabinet appointees. They went off without much drama, but I do want to highlight an exchange that I thought was interesting between Republican Senator Bill Cassidy and Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent. Cassidy pitched a tariff on carbon-intensive products coming from China, and Bessent said he was open to it. So what do you guys make of that proposal? We had a little climate policy sprinkled into this nomination hearing. Emily?
Emily Domenech: I was going to say, post-IRA tax policy is climate policy, and it’s part of why you see a lot of energy folks getting engaged in the tax world. You know, I think this is an idea that could potentially be having a moment. It’s had plenty of opposition from sort of more traditional Republicans as a gateway into a carbon tax, but I think the tariff approach appeals to the Trump administration and certainly appeals to people like J.D. Vance. So I am not at all surprised that Cassidy asked about it. I do think he’s got a little bit of an uphill battle convincing his fellow Republicans on the hill that it’s something that should be done through the legislative process, but I mean I could see a Trump administration being open to any way of tariffing China.
Julia Pyper: Any final thoughts here, Brandon, as we put the inauguration day behind us and start to get into, as you said, away from the confetti and more to the real heart of the matter, the meat of it all, if you will? What’s your sort of sense of where we stand?
Brandon Hurlbut: A couple things. One, on the tariffs, that’s going to be really interesting as we go forward. I mean, he’s talking about a 25% tariff on all products from Canada and Mexico starting on February 1st. We’ll see how that-
Julia Pyper: They didn’t announce any on China. As someone who grew up in Canada, I’m like, “Rude. What are your priorities here?”
Emily Domenech: I think they have big plans for China.
Julia Pyper: We’re so nice.
Brandon Hurlbut: They got into office on high costs, and what impact will that have and what will be the politics of that I think we’ll be talking about on this show. And then second, we also saw that the raids are going to start on immigration to deport folks. Now where that impacts us is that they got to pay for that, and so if they need money sooner rather than later, that could argue for more of the ‘two reconciliation bill’ approach. Get an early win, get the funding for where they want to do that. Then that pushes the IRA debate out to a second reconciliation bill that could happen later in the fall, and my understanding is that they might need that money sooner rather than later.
Emily Domenech: I would just note that, don’t forget, we have a regular appropriations process where there’s plenty of opportunity to use that sort of standard annual appropriations to move forward your agenda. So it’s part of why Speaker Johnson really insisted on doing a continuing resolution in December and not doing that omnibus appropriations bill, and they have approps coming up in March. So they’ll get an opportunity to fund some programs through that appropriations process, but they’ll probably have to make some deals with Democrats to get that bill across the floor.
Brandon Hurlbut: That’s right, because it needs 60 votes in the Senate.
Julia Pyper: Pop the popcorn. We’re getting ready to go.
Brandon Hurlbut: It’s going to be a wild ride, everybody.
Julia Pyper: All right, let’s turn now to our interview with Anukool Lakhina, founder and CEO of BurnBot. Anukool is no stranger to fire tech. In addition to his work at BurnBot, he also serves as a partner at Convective Capital where he helps steer a handful of primarily software companies focused on mitigating wildfires. With BurnBot though, he brings a hardware solution into the mix. BurnBot’s machines offer an exciting and innovative approach to tackling one of the most divisive components of fire mitigation, forest management. Anukool founded the company in 2021. Since then, it has embarked on pilot projects with Cal FIRE, PG&E, and the US Forest Service. Last year the company raised $20 million in Series A funding. In light of the Los Angeles fires, BurnBot is more relevant now than ever. Anukool, welcome to Political Climate.
Anukool Lakhina: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Julia Pyper: Well, look, I want to start with what’s in the news, and that’s of course the LA area wildfires, multiple ones. You are an expert in this area. So before we get into BurnBot and all that you’re working on, can you tell us a little bit more about how these recent fires have changed the conversation around fire mitigation? It’s not a new conversation, but it feels like this is a particularly poignant moment and maybe a crossroads to an issue that a lot of people have been working on for a long time, including some lawmakers and guests we’ve had on this show. I’m wondering if you think this is a pivotal moment in how we address wildfires in this country.
Anukool Lakhina: 100%. I mean, I do think that this is a watershed moment. It’s almost like a COVID moment for wildfire resilience in large part because the destruction, the heartbreaking destruction is so vast. And more importantly, at least the way I see it, it’s deeply, deeply unsettling because it shakes, really, our very sense of what it means to be safe and secure in our urban environments. So the bad news and the good news, I guess, is that these fires are actually preventable.
Brandon Hurlbut: Tell us about BurnBot and why you started it and what you’re doing there.
Anukool Lakhina: BurnBot was founded on the idea that if we increase the pace and scale of precision vegetation treatment or precision fuels treatment we could reduce the risk of destructive wildfires. So our mission is to prevent these destructive wildfires by scaling what’s called fuel treatment or vegetation treatment. As you can appreciate, Brandon, every wildfire needs something to burn and usually it’s this dead vegetation that surrounds our infrastructure, our homes, our communities, our sensitive habitats. So our thesis is if we can efficiently in an economically viable manner and also in a scalable and ecological manner take out that dead vegetation we can make the difference between a town burning down and a town not burning down.
Brandon Hurlbut: Can you tell our audience, how does it work? Describe the technology.
Anukool Lakhina: So today, if you think of vegetation management or fuel treatment, it is regrettably a fairly manual approach. It requires very skilled people to go do dangerous work in dangerous environments, and that’s great, but the scale of the problem really requires us to think about how can we amplify their capacity. So BurnBot’s approach is to build robots, and these robots are operated by those very same skilled technicians, and what we see is a meaningful scale up in the capacity of doing fuel treatment. So we have two kinds of robots. The company, BurnBot, gets its name from one of these robots which is a controlled burning robot, and essentially the idea of prescribed fire or controlled burning is not new. It goes back to 10,000 years, the indigenous people were using it, the ranchers that followed, they were using it.
But the reality is in the 21st century kind of world that we live in, you’ve got structures intermixed with vegetation. So you cannot just go put fire on the ground. Even if you have a really skilled set of folks, you have the risk of escape, you have the smoke considerations to deal with. You also have weather limitations. You can only put fire on the ground in certain times of the year. Too dry and the fire could be destructive. Too windy, you could have an escape event. Too wet, the prescribed fire treatment won’t be effective. And then as I mentioned, you also need a lot of skilled technicians to do this work.
So our controlled burning robot really addresses all these challenges. Our controlled burning robot can burn in all weather conditions. It can burn with no smoke, so you can bring prescribed fire next to homes, next to power lines, next to roadsides, next to communities where I would argue those are the areas that need treatment so that we protect our critical infrastructure, we protect our assets.
The medium model is the one that we’re scale-manufacturing right now. The medium model is roughly 25 feet long, nine feet wide, eight feet tall, and it can open up about a hundred acres per day of of prescribed fireworks. Of course there’s a lot of sophistication in there because temperatures get up to a thousand degrees Celsius, stainless steel, the stuff that’s SpaceX rockets are built out, those things melt. So we’ve got computer-controlled torches so we can control the intensity length of the flames inside. So inside that chamber we get to kind of play god in some ways, right? We can control all the parameters, we can burn when there’s wet, when it’s dry, we can burn the seed bank of invasive vegetation that’s the most ignitable one. So there’s a lot of instrumentation, a lot of precision that we get which you wouldn’t get or you don’t typically get when you’re burning with a drip torch, right? You’re kind of a victim of the landscape. If it’s dry or wet, you’re trying to burn it, it’s not going to really work. But with our enclosed chamber, we get that precision.
In addition to this controlled burning robot, we also have what are called masticator robots, and masticator robots, as the name suggests, they go and chew up dense vegetation like you would find around the suburbs of LA, chaparral, brush. So for this kind of landscape, you wouldn’t use prescribed fire as the first treatment mechanism. You would usually masticate it. You would chew it up into finer, finer fuels, and then you would introduce fire as a second treatment, and this is one of the key things that I feel is sometimes lost. People think vegetation management or fuel treatment, you do it once and it’s done. But the reality is in this variable climate that we find ourselves in, you have extreme precipitation which leads to a lot of vegetation growth, and then you have extreme dry spells which leads to more fuel to be burned. So it’s not a one-off treatment. We need the ability to continuously and regularly do treatment. Once you have masticated it, every 18 months do safe controlled burning which is not only ecological, it’s also extremely economically viable.
Emily Domenech: You have a simulation that shows the impact that BurnBot could have made on minimizing the Palisades fire. Can you talk us through that and share some of the details on how that could have worked?
Anukool Lakhina: The reality is in these wind-driven fires, as soon as you cross the vegetation to structure interface, as soon as you cross that interface, what then results is really a structure-to-structure configuration. And as soon as you get into that motion, even the best response capability is overwhelmed. To be clear, California has the best response capability on the planet. So one of the things that we are seeing many forward-thinking towns do today is to create what are called halos of protection. So imagine a buffer around urban environments. Imagine a buffer around towns, which really this buffer is a fuel-free zone where it really makes sure that the vegetation-to-structure boundary is not breached.
If you were to go back in time and kind of replay the Palisades fire with and without that halo of protection, the implications are profound. Even in the first eight hours, you would see one-fifth, one-seventh of the damage and impact, and that’s just in the first eight hours, this compounds as time goes on. This is based on best available data, day-of weather, day-of wind conditions, day-of moisture levels in the vegetation, actual terrain. But if you were to simulate the fire, as I said, with and without this halo protection, the effects are profound.
Julia Pyper: That’s amazing what you’re working on and it’s clearly a piece of the puzzle. I’m wonder if you can put it in context with other fire mitigation strategies, and I’m thinking of here the fact that PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, spent over $2 billion, $2 billion, rate payers pay for that on vegetation management already, and they actually eliminated the program saying it was largely ineffective, and now they’re moving toward actually insulating power lines, moving trees away from power lines. Of course this is one cause of fires, electrical equipment, but I’m just wondering how we put that into context. I can totally see why vegetation management is part of the picture, but here we had $2 billion spent and it was largely deemed not effective. So I’m wondering how do these pieces all work together and does it really come down to just not building next to these areas?
Anukool Lakhina: Yeah, it’s a good question, and a key point that I think deserves emphasis is that the most critical fuels that need treatment aren’t always the most obvious ones. So to your point on PG&E and others, it seems like a lot of attention has gone towards large trees and treating trees and trimming trees, but it’s often the fine fuels that are on the ground, grasses, small shrubs, leaf litter, those are the ones that drive fire spread into communities. These fuels are the ones that dry quickly and they respond rapidly to changes in humidity and temperature, making them particularly dangerous during those red flag conditions. I mean LA, let’s take that. The fuels that burned weren’t trees. They were shrubs, they were grasses around our communities. If you look at Lahaina, the fire that burned in Hawaii and the fire kept burning, it kept burning well until it reached the ocean because it burned through the town. What was that? Those were invasive grasses from abandoned ag land. A small ignition, and the fire just kind of took off.
One of the things that we continuously find is maintenance treatments oftentimes are ignored. You get the big treatment done, people celebrate, and then we move on and then years happen. The LA fire is another really very, very poignant example. The state for the LA configuration was set nearly a year ago where you had the atmospheric rivers that slammed into the state, and then you had this extremely… which led to explosion of growth of fine fuels, and then you had this dry spell. So the challenges with fuel treatment is you have to keep maintaining it, and this is where robots can materially and meaningfully drive prices down, and maintenance treatments can be done at a quarter of the price of the initial treatment. But then you got to do it, right? You cannot disappear for five years or 10 years and then come back and say, “Why did it happen?”
Emily Domenech: So I want to take it back to the sort of policy side of this argument. I’ve worked in the forest management space from the policy angle working for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and a number of other members who have done engagement with the Forest Service and how we manage our federal lands. One of the things you hear from the Forest Service over and over again is that it’s really impossible for them to do the kind of controlled burns and vegetation management that they need to on public lands because they get sued, and the lawsuits and all of the projects and they make it far more expensive and far more difficult. I want to know from you what are the kinds of policy changes, beyond sort this permitting discussion, big permitting discussion, that we need to see to make frankly companies like yours more easily be able to help solve this problem.
Anukool Lakhina: Yeah, look, the reality is most of our forests aren’t even ready to receive prescribed fire or controlled burning because there’s such an accumulation of dead and downed trees. There’s just such an accumulation of fuel loads. So the first step before you can even introduce fire as a maintenance treatment, which these landscapes definitely need, the first step is to clear all the accumulation over the last hundred years because we have mismanaged our forest. So we have to first take care of that.
You mentioned the permitting piece. Look, I know that’s gotten a lot of attention, rightly so, but at least from where I sit there’s a lot of good work already happening, whether it’s Fix Our Forests or other places, and I think that the LA fires will just kind of increase the volume to 12 or 11, right? It just kind of accelerates some of that work. But yes, I don’t think… I have not met anybody in the period that I’ve been doing this work that has said, “Put more permitting.” No one’s actually said that. So everybody’s actually saying, “Yes, let’s relax the permitting code. Let’s revisit why we had this. Hey, it was written in the 1970s. A lot has happened since then. Let’s modernize it.” So I think there’s lots of momentum and there’s sensible bipartisan work already happening on that front.
Emily Domenech: I’m so glad you brought up the Fix Our Forest Act, which was reintroduced last week, and they’re actually going to vote on it in the coming weeks on the House floor. That’s I think a great example of sort of how this area has grown into a bipartisan space. When we first started talking about forest management with Chairman Westerman who’s come on this show before, he didn’t have a lot of friends across the aisle. Now he’s got a hundred co-sponsors who are both sides of the aisle, a strong partner with somebody like Scott Peters from California. And a lot of it is because they took the time to go out to those forests and see, actually see what’s happening, where the mismanagement of decades of sort of poor forest management has left us, and listen to the Forest Service and experts like yourself to find those solutions.
Julia Pyper: And just as a reminder, the Fix Our Forests Act will, at a high level, simplify and expedite the environmental review process to reduce costs and planning times for critical forest management projects. Although the sponsors would note that it will also maintain other environmental standards, but the idea here is cut red tape, make it easier to do.
Brandon Hurlbut: I’m just going to ask, is there anything else, Anukool, that the federal government or the state of California could be doing to help scale your company and others like it?
Anukool Lakhina: I think two areas that would be really great to kind of see activity towards. One is how do we think about maintenance treatments and how do we think about fortifying our towns across America. This is not a California problem. And then number two, how do we catalyze insurance industry. Because with my taxpayer hat on, I am all supportive of getting government dollars to do the initial work, but after that we need to figure out innovative public-private partnerships where the government does the down payment, gets the enormous heavy work done, but then maintenance treatments, I mean, if we can catalyze private capital on it, I think that would be a really great outcome. So everybody benefits from that. Insurance companies get to underwrite with higher margin, more confidence, make more revenue, property owner gets more protection and better insurance, and I think that could be a really great outcome that emerges from this.
Emily Domenech: Yeah, I would just add I think you’re exactly right that the way to think about this is how do we give the Forest Service the tools they need to manage the federal lands, which those federal and state lands are often where these fires begin, so that we don’t have to be in a position where all of our private property owners are at risk. Managing that problem from the big picture federal land perspective I think is really the right way to think about it.
Julia Pyper: I do want to ask you, how do you think we get away from some of the polarization politically around wildfires? And it seems to me that it’s not just left-right, but kind of like local versus national. There’s a lot of different dynamics at play around who wants what occurring in their community, where people can build, who’s going to invest, who actually pays for it. To your point, it seems like there’s multiple dynamics at play and different priorities. I’m just wondering how do you think we can align around some solutions here? What’s the lowest common denominator or like the uniting driver?
Anukool Lakhina: I think there is. I mean, if you look at all the kind of political blowback that’s happening from the LA fires, it just boils down to two things, right? One, why was there not enough water. Okay, that, we could debate that one, but I don’t have a point of view on that. I don’t want to get into that world. But the second one is, okay, why was there not more brushwork done. That’s like taking out the trash. It is like we got to just clean up that garbage. It should not be there in the first place, and like taking out the trash, you got to do it continuously. You can’t just do it one off and forget about it. And that’s not a forest management issue. That’s a basic city management issue.
So I think we can just… and by the way, that’s where these fires start. Most ignitions happen next to road sites, next to critical infrastructure, next to homes, and many times those ignition events then go into the forest. So, sure, you have lightning that happens in the forest and travels to the urban environment, but a lot of ignitions happen where humans are. So let’s clean our environment. Let’s clean our surroundings. It’s just basic city planning 101 that we got to get back to basics on, and I think that’s what everybody can agree on. No, I don’t see anybody saying, “No, no, no, we shouldn’t take out the dead vegetation that creates all this risk.” I have not heard anyone say that.
Now people can argue about, hey, is there an ecological way to do it, hey, is that economically efficient, hey, who pays for it. Sure, those are great, great topics to have, but I don’t think it’s any of… it’s not up for debate that vegetation treatment, and again, we don’t even have to look beyond LA. Wind-driven fires, I’ve also seen a lot of this verbiage, “Hey, these winds come in and everything, nobody can stop it.” And the reality is just go back to 2020, the Silverado Fire, 85 mile per hour, wind-driven fire. Fire was extreme. It ran through Orchard Hills, hit kind of a 300-feet belt of mulch, and the fire just died. It just stopped right there. I’d give a shout-out to Gabriel Mann who made this amazing documentary called Hotshot. Anybody who wants to understand how this thing works, go watch that documentary.
Julia Pyper: Well, certainly I didn’t lose a home luckily, but as somebody who’s kept my kid inside for two weeks now because there’s still ash blowing around everywhere that’s got metal in it and asbestos and who knows what the heck, you’re certainly like, “Why didn’t this happen sooner?” I am only one voice that’s not directly impacted, so I can only imagine where this is going to go. So you’re giving us some optimism, but like you say, it’s the good and the bad if we could have done something, but here we are.
Brandon Hurlbut: Unfortunately, Anukool, I’m going to date myself. When you said Hotshot, the movie, I thought you meant the one with Charlie Sheen, Hotshots.
Anukool Lakhina: Oh no, this is Hotshot. Good point, good point, yeah. Hotshot, singular. So this is Hotshot from Gabriel Mann.
Brandon Hurlbut: Okay. All right.
Anukool Lakhina: Great, great, great, great movie.
Emily Domenech: It’s a good documentary. You should watch both.
Julia Pyper: Double-header.
Anukool Lakhina: There you go.
Julia Pyper: Barbie-Oppenheimer or Hotshot-Hot Shots.
Anukool Lakhina: There you go. But just coming back to the ash and the smoke, you make a really good point. I mean, that’s part of the reason why I got into this space because the smoke came in and my daughter kind of struggled with the smoke during the Paradise Fire. Only now we’re starting to dig deeper and find out how this could be lifelong, especially for kids, the smoke that comes out of these wildfires, and I mean the smoke from the Australia fires, they went around the world twice.
Julia Pyper: And they have lead in them and other things that they found 150 miles away from the Paradise Fire.
Anukool Lakhina: You got it.
Julia Pyper: So it’s not even just a local problem anymore. It blows halfway across the country, or the world, to your point.
Anukool Lakhina: 100%, and that’s why the urgency of treating this is not lost on us. Like I said, these are preventable. Humanity should not live with destructive fires. There’s absolutely no reason. I mean, if we can build self-driving cars, if we can catch rockets, we can build our society to not have destructive fires. There’s absolutely no reason. It’s not like we don’t know what to do. The know-how is there. The expertise is there. The technology is coming in. Now we just got to go do it. I look forward to the very near future where we live with fires but we are resilient to it, and destructive wildfires are a thing of the past.
Julia Pyper: I think that’s a great note to end on.
Emily Domenech: Yeah.
Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah. Sounds great. Way to go, Anukool.
Julia Pyper: Yay. Thank you so much. This was really enlightening.
Anukool Lakhina: I appreciate it. Thank you.
Julia Pyper: Super insightful to hear from Anukool. Brandon, I know Overture VC invested in BurnBot. So what is your outlook on where technology like that goes? Clearly it’s a space where you see opportunity.
Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah, we were excited about Anukool. We invested in him over a year ago, and now with all this attention on wildfire we feel like he’s positioned well to really protect these communities, and we do think this is a bipartisan issue and very excited about what he is developing and how he can create some of these public-private partnerships.
Julia Pyper: Emily, what do you make of solutions like his that seem like they could even be in private land, like where developers maybe still own some of the surrounding areas, not just public land? Are there things that federal lawmakers can do to address the private land piece as well? I’m wondering how solutions like his might get on lawmakers’ radars, not just for public lands, but things they can do to encourage near urban centers to also adopt solutions. What does that look like?
Emily Domenech: It all depends on what land you’re looking at here. So if it’s a state level or a municipality that needs to make some investments in managing those shared spaces, is it helping to bring the cost curve down on technologies like this that might be deployed by private companies? Or is it, like I think one of the things he mentioned in our interview is that it was a… Anukool sort of said we need these public-private partnerships where we’re looking to sort of leverage what we can get in terms of the federal management side. So maybe it’s a… one of the things we saw when we were looking at protecting the giant sequoias from wildfires was bringing together stakeholder groups that represented your industry partners, your state officials, your city councilmen, all those sort of people. So maybe the federal government and federal lawmakers in particular can help in that sort of convening, information-sharing authority.
Julia Pyper: Does anything in the Fix Our Forests Act address technologies like his specifically or is that out of scope?
Emily Domenech: It wouldn’t be specific to technology, and that’s something I would just note. The Forest Service actually has a really robust capability to do contracting and partnerships with folks who use all kinds of different technology for controlled burns. Where they’re limited is when you’re dealing with a historic landmark, for example, where you can’t do any mechanized burns. So you can’t bring a Gator or your golf cart into this land, much less use a robot. So that’s a place where we could be looking at policies, perhaps, to say, where can innovative technologies play in to better care for this land that is a historic preservation area where we’re not supposed to be using mechanized stuff, but maybe we need to because we need to better take care of these lands.
Julia Pyper: Great. Well, I think we’ll leave that section there. That’s it for today’s show. Political Climate is a co-production of Latitude Media and Boundary Stone Partners. Max Savage Levenson is our producer. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. You can get all of our show notes and transcripts at latitudemedia.com, and if you want us to talk about a specific topic like wildfires or anything else, email us at politicalclimatepodcast@gmail.com. Please feel free to help spread the word about Political Climate on LinkedIn, X, and beyond. I’m Julia Pyper. See you again in two weeks.
