As I watched Los Angeles burn, I kept thinking about the “slave song” “O Mary, Don’t You Weep.” In particular, the verse: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” And, of course, “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin’s extraordinary essay on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Emancipation. His need to move beyond the usual rhetorical niceties and nonsense so many white people spoke/speak about the horrors of slavery and segregation and the daily indignities of plain old American racism prefigures our now-desperate obligation to scream about the maybe-too-late need to address the climate crisis.
Baldwin wrote:
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
[Emphasis added.]
I recently found myself transfixed before the television—and thanks to YouTube for providing near-constant coverage from Los Angeles of the brave firefighters, and especially the helicopter crews whose cameras captured the vast expanse of the fires. As is often the case, the pictures provided by CAL FIRE do a much a better job than words of capturing the unimaginable horror as the flames leapt from tree to tree, home to home, neighborhood to neighborhood.
Like many of you, I had several times driven along the Pacific Coast Highway marveling at the extraordinary view so many of our richest enjoyed of the magnificent ocean. This time, my eyes could see the ashes, the ghoulishly now-charred empty lots, but my brain fought the certitude that the fire had so quickly and completely erased so many of the Malibu homes I had driven past.
Thankfully—and I sincerely thank them—there are a few observers who won’t let us forget the deeper meaning presented to us. In an opinion piece entitled “As a Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time to Leave Los Angeles,” Dr. Peter Kalmus explained for The New York Times why he had abandoned the Los Angeles neighborhood that hardly exists anymore:
Often called L.A.’s ‘best kept secret,’ Altadena is a quirky hamlet nestled in the foothills, hidden from all the city’s traffic snarls, where everyone seemed to know everyone. I arrived with my family in 2008 to start a post-doctorate degree in astrophysics. It felt like we’d landed in paradise: unlimited guacamole from a huge avocado tree in our backyard; flocks of green parrots squawking overhead; Caltech’s perfect lawns in Pasadena to lie on with my children, even in January.
I started worrying about climate change as a graduate student in 2006. My concerns grew stronger as the planet grew hotter. In 2012, unable to look away, I switched my career from gravitational waves to climate science, taking a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
[Emphasis added.]
For Kalmus, it was the Bobcat Fire in the foothills of Altadena that made the difference, as well as the heat wave of September 2020 and the heat exhaustion he experienced:
… unlike the fires raging now, the blaze was mostly contained to wilderness areas. Still, for weeks, my family and I were enveloped in a cloud of smoke. My lungs burned and my fingers had a constant tingle.
After the Bobcat fire, Los Angeles no longer felt safe. I feared for the health of my family, and I wondered how we would evacuate if the neighborhood started to burn. In 2022, my wife was offered a job in Durham, N.C., and we moved.
I’ve been watching this week’s tragedy unfold from afar, piecing the story together through local news reports and texts and videos from friends, some of whom have lost homes, trying to figure out what has burned and what hasn’t. Our dog’s pet hospital, gone. The church where our boys’ string recitals took place, gone. The weird Bunny Museum I’d wonder about on my bicycle, waiting for the light to change; the friendly hardware store I went to a hundred times; the coffee shop where I’d meet friends and climate activists; all gone.
My former neighbor texted me Thursday to say that our little cul-de-sac burned, his house and ours and all our neighbors’ homes except for one. The beautiful house we raised our children in, gone; and my tears finally came.
[Emphasis added.]
Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope made clear for the UK Guardian that “The media needs to show how the climate crisis is fueling the LA wildfires.” They wrote:
The Los Angeles fires represent a seminal moment for the climate crisis – and for journalism. These are not the wildfires of seasons past. They are mega-fires that have now burned an area larger than the entire city of San Francisco. They are likely to be the costliest disaster in US history, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has predicted. At last count, a staggering 6 million people remained under a critical fire threat. Alas, these mega-fires have called forth a mega-failure by much of the news media. A review of coverage to date shows that most journalism is still not accurately representing how the climate crisis is upending our civilization by driving increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather.
Too much of the coverage has simply ignored the climate crisis altogether, an inexcusable failure when the scientific link between such mega-fires and a hotter, drier planet is unequivocal. Too many stories have framed the fires as a political spat between President-elect Donald Trump and California elected officials instead of a horrifying preview of what lies ahead if humans don’t rapidly phase out fossil fuels. Too often, bad-faith disinformation has been repeated instead of debunked. And rarely have stories named the ultimate authors of this disaster: ExxonMobil, Chevron and other fossil fuel companies that have made gargantuan amounts of money even as they knowingly lied about their products dangerously overheating the planet.
[Emphasis added.]
Nature’s triple threat seems to have collaborated to bring Los Angeles its catastrophe: drought, the fire, the wind. Theirs is a famous wind. Writers as varied as Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler have described the Santa Anas. In 1965, Didion wrote:
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior … ‘On nights like that,’ Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, ‘every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.’ That was the kind of wind it was.
The New York Times offered its summary of this mega-fire:
The review showed a series of planning failures, delayed evacuations and significant shortfalls in firefighting resources that together hampered efforts to limit the spread. Fire dispatch transmissions suggest that firefighters did not arrive on scene until about 20 minutes after the first 911 call in Pacific Palisades, a possible missed chance to stamp out the blaze while it was still small, the review showed. About 40 miles east in Eaton Canyon, where a second fire that spread through the community of Altadena killed 17 people, residents reported the first sign of fire at 6:10 p.m., but the first evacuation order didn’t go out until 7:26 p.m. — after residents started leaving on their own. An entire nursing home was forced to evacuate before the authorities arrived. Firefighters repeatedly called for reinforcements, only to be told that none were available. Hydrants went dry. One firefighter was forced to fill a trash can with water from a pool.
Looming over it all was a weather challenge that firefighters had rarely encountered in decades of Southern California wildfires: a lethal confluence of wind and drought that might have doomed any response. Kristin Crowley, the Los Angeles fire chief, said she was extremely proud of the work that crews did and continue to do. ‘Our firefighters are doing an incredible job,’ she said.
In the days after the fire, Anthony C. Marrone, the Los Angeles County fire chief, hammered the same message over and over: The flames were too ferocious and the winds too intense to stop the infernos of Tuesday night, Jan. 7. ‘There’s nothing you can do to suppress the fire at that time,’ he said in an interview. Asked how he would advise preparing to avoid a similar situation in the future, he was blunt. ‘I don’t have the ability to make this not happen again,’ he said.
[Emphasis added.]
As I have listened over the last many days, I have been struck by the all-too-human habit to blame. There is this almost delusional sense that we can always prevail. There are things we can and must do—and if we don’t, it is because someone failed to do them. Then, almost as an addendum, what follows is the half-hearted acknowledgment of the deepest truth that firefighters, first responders, even politicians were facing a larger, more desperate reality: “a lethal confluence of wind and drought that might have doomed any response.”
And there the exceptional, modest assessment by one who fights these fires: “I don’t have the ability to make this not happen again.”
To the unproductive, even dangerous, noise, you can add the pathetic desire of the Republicans to blame a Democratic governor and a Democratic mayor. I certainly don’t want to deny the obvious failings: the communications lag, lack of preparation, funding shortfalls. Yes, only nine extra fire engines mobilized in the face of the “particularly dangerous situation” flagged by the National Weather Service. Humans invariably fail.
I can’t help but think that we have entered the era when it is just time to accept that there is not a fair fight to be fought. We have frittered away any advantage that would normally have been awarded for human ingenuity. For so many decades, our embrace of fossil fuels to power our desire to drive, to fly, to divert rivers and streams, to transform deserts into Las Vegas, to build dream palaces in places that almost demand nature’s retribution have sent us careening to judgment days. Yes, pretty much everything about the human interaction with Los Angeles—and you can certainly extend this to our similar decisions to deny, defy, and conquer the underlying geographical reality of cities like New Orleans and Miami Beach for that matter—has brought us a war with nature we seem no longer to be able to win. The odds have clearly shifted to the side of the hurricanes, the floods, the tornadoes, and the fires.
Some realities can’t be “misinformation-ed” away:
The New York Times continues:
From the beginning, there had been warnings that this winter day would not be typical for Southern California, where it often rains in January. There had been no serious precipitation in months, and forecasters cautioned that the Santa Ana winds coming in off the desert could reach an astonishing 100 miles per hour as they blew through the dry, brushy hills …
It was at 10:29 a.m. when the first 911 call came in: A fire had broken out high on a sandy ridge in the Palisades, in the same area of the earlier fire on New Year’s Day …
The wind was already intensifying, and it didn’t take long before smoke and embers were tumbling down the hillside toward the Highlands neighborhood.
Alan Feld, who lived near where the fire started, said the initial blaze had been limited to a fairly small area for the first 15 minutes or so, and might have been stopped. But by the time the first two fire engines got there, he said, it had already spread toward the houses …
The first broad evacuation order, covering a wide swath of the Palisades, came at 12:07 p.m., nearly two hours after the fire had first begun tumbling down the hillside. ‘Gather people and pets and leave immediately,’ it said. Video shows that by 12:51 p.m., an enormous plume of smoke was billowing across the Palisades. CL-415 firefighting planes dropped load after load of ocean water on the flames.
There can be little doubt these are complicated issues. There will always be human error, and as long as there is such an enormous income gap, unfair taxation, and limited governmental resources, there will always be financial shortfalls when it comes to public services. Complexity will never stop those who resort to simplistic solutions. Some of the most powerful men in the world will continue to vociferously deny the climate crisis. Let me remind you of what newly reelected President Donald Trump has previously said about global warming.
Here is one of his early tweets dismissing climate science:
Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2013
Meanwhile, global carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise and continue to endanger us all:
Here are the figures for our and other industrial powers’ contributions to the world’s increasing carbon dioxide emissions:
Of course, once he won the White House in 2016, and now once more, Donald Trump had/has the opportunity to turn those opinions into federal policy. As The New York Times recently wrote:
Mr. Trump’s election comes at a crucial moment in the global effort to fight climate change. Scientists say that by 2030, major economies must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels to avoid tipping into a world wracked by far more devastating impacts of warming, including famine, displacement, drought, deaths from extreme heat and storms.
Under Mr. Biden’s policies, the United States was on track to cut roughly 40 percent of its emissions by that date …
During his first term in his office, Mr. Trump’s administration rolled back more than 100 major environmental rules and regulations, including every major Obama-era climate regulation. He withdrew the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accord, under which 195 nations had committed to work together to reduce planet-warming fossil fuel pollution.
Mr. Biden spent four years restoring, expanding and strengthening those protections. He rejoined the Paris agreement and pledged to the rest of the world that the United States, the world’s largest fossil fuel polluter historically, would be a reliable leader in the effort to tackle climate change. The Inflation Reduction Act was the nation’s first law to significantly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr. Trump’s likely policies to encourage more drilling and burning of oil and gas would add four billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, according to a study by Carbon Brief, a climate analysis site.
The president-elect has taken particular relish in describing how he plans to ‘kill’ the Biden administration’s largest climate rule, which is designed to accelerate Americans’ transition away from polluting gasoline-powered cars and into electric vehicles. He also intends to reverse another powerful regulation aimed at reducing emissions from power plants, along with dozens of other rules that protect endangered species and limit other kinds of air and water pollution …
Much of [Biden’s climate] legacy could soon be shredded.
[Emphasis added.]
Now that he is Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of energy, Chris Wright, the founder and CEO of fracking firm Liberty Energy, is at least for now slightly moderating his stance on the climate crisis. As The New York Times reports:
Chris Wright, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for energy secretary, tried to reassure Democrats at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday that he believed climate change was a ‘global challenge that we need to solve’ and that he would support the development of all forms of energy, including wind and solar power.
The New York Times continues:
The founder and chief executive of Liberty Energy, a fracking firm, Mr. Wright has been a longtime evangelist for fossil fuels like oil and gas. He has frequently shrugged off the risks of global warming, saying in 2023, ‘There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either.’ He has also criticized renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, calling them ‘unreliable and costly.’
Appearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, however, Mr. Wright struck a more diplomatic tone. In his opening statement, he said his top priority was to ‘unleash’ domestic energy production, including liquefied natural gas and nuclear power. Yet under questioning from Senate Democrats, he suggested that he agreed with many of their priorities as well.
[Emphasis added.]
But it was only a bit more than a year ago that Wright posted the following:
More commonsense backed by data from @BjornLomborg. The hype over wildfires is just hype to justify more impoverishment from bad government policies. #EnergySobrietyhttps://t.co/OfthRB85Re
— Chris Wright (@ChrisAWright_) August 1, 2023
Meanwhile, as Donald Trump was being inaugurated in Washington, D.C., CAL FIRE was issuing yet another red-flag warning for the residents near Los Angeles:
As The Washington Post reported:
The Los Angeles region, still reeling from this month’s firestorm, is under a ‘particularly dangerous situation’ red-flag warning from noon Monday into Tuesday afternoon. A ‘powerful and damaging’ Santa Ana windstorm begins in Southern California, bringing extreme fire risk to the region on Monday and Tuesday — just two weeks after a pair of devastating, wind-driven blazes ignited and spread rapidly over swaths of Los Angeles.
The Post continued:
The storm is the latest of several dangerous wind events that have unfolded this winter after months without rain here. The landscape is now so flammable, experts warned, that fires that spark during high winds are likely to be uncontrollable. ‘All of the alarm bells are ringing, and all of the lights are flashing red,’ University of California at Los Angeles climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a briefing Sunday, referring to the messaging surrounding this week’s wind event. Winds will ramp up quickly Monday morning, and a ‘particularly dangerous situation’ red flag warning is in effect for large portions of Los Angeles and Ventura counties from noon Monday through 2 p.m. Tuesday. The highest-risk zone — which includes the Malibu coast, Oxnard, Ventura and Burbank — could see sustained winds of up to 50 mph and gusts between 60 and 80 mph, possibly reaching 100 mph in the windiest mountain locations.
On Tuesday morning, The New York Times reported that “3 Small Fires Break Out in San Diego Area, Forcing Evacuations”:
The blazes ignited in San Diego County early Tuesday, keeping Southern California on edge as dangerous fire conditions persisted …
The Lilac fire, which broke out south of Pala Mesa, Calif., near Old Highway 395 and Lilac Road around 1:20 a.m. Pacific, prompted a mandatory evacuation order and warnings for other residents to leave their homes. The fire had burned about 50 acres, according to Cal Fire …
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, another vegetation fire, the Pala fire, broke out north of Interstate 15 and Highway 76, according to Cal Fire. An evacuation order was briefly put in place for an area north of Pala Mesa, but was lifted after 4 a.m. The Pala fire burned about 17 acres, and its progress had been stopped by firefighters, Cal Fire said.
As Californians faced the prospect of yet more danger, President Trump used the occasion of his inauguration to scapegoat local and Biden administration officials and proclaim his contempt and opposition to the Democratic attempt to actively combat the climate crisis:
Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency, as recently shown by the wonderful people of North Carolina, been treated so badly, and other states who are still suffering from a hurricane that took place many months ago. Or more recently Los Angeles, where we are watching fires still tragically burn from weeks ago without even a token of defense. They’re raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don’t have a home any longer. That’s interesting, but we can’t let this happen. Everyone is unable to do anything about it. That’s going to change.
He took the opportunity to remind us what kind of change will he usher in:
The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices and, that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill. America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth and we are going to use it, and they use it. We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again — right to the top — and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.
With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal, and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers. In other words, you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice. We will build automobiles in America again at a rate that nobody could have dreamt possible just a few years ago, and thank you to the autoworkers of our nation for your inspiring vote of confidence. We did tremendously with their vote.
Somehow, in Trump’s world, discouraging the sales of electric vehicles will save the auto industry. In fact, according to NBC News, the auto industry has been increasing its sales of electric vehicles and joined former President Biden when he announced his electric vehicle mandate:
The 50 percent goal, while nonbinding and largely symbolic, aims to set federal expectations for automakers to rapidly make the transition from gas-burning cars and trucks to electric ones, a key component of Biden’s climate change strategy. Transportation accounts for the largest share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Auto companies appearing alongside Biden made their own announcements about plans to sell 40 percent to 50 percent zero-emissions vehicles by 2030. Some automakers have made similar pledges already; GM has said it will sell only electric vehicles by 2035.
Meanwhile, President Trump has once again removed the United States from the worldwide effort—the Paris Climate Agreement—to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and prevent irreversible climate disaster:
In recent years, the United States has purported to join international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives. Moreover, these agreements steer American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people.
Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of my Administration to put the interests of the United States and the American people first in the development and negotiation of any international agreements with the potential to damage or stifle the American economy. These agreements must not unduly or unfairly burden the United States.
Sec. 3. Implementation. (a) The United States Ambassador to the United Nations shall immediately submit formal written notification of the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The notice shall be submitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Depositary of the Agreement, attached as Appendix A. The United States will consider its withdrawal from the Agreement and any attendant obligations to be effective immediately upon this provision of notification.
(b) The United States Ambassador to the United Nations shall immediately submit written formal notification to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, or any relevant party, of the United States’ withdrawal from any agreement, pact, accord, or similar commitment made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Let’s return to the scientists and the science. The United States Geological Survey explains in its section of the “Effect of Climate Change on Wildfires” that “[o]ver the last several decades, climate conditions, especially in the western United States, have grown hotter and drier. If climate change continues to play out as predicted, the likelihood of wildfires will worsen.”
According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States during the last two decades. Wildfires require the alignment of a number of factors, including temperature, humidity, and the lack of moisture in fuels, such as trees, shrubs, grasses, and forest debris. All these factors have strong direct or indirect ties to climate variability and climate change.
A 2016 study found climate change enhanced the drying of organic matter and doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015 in the western United States. A 2021 study supported by NOAA concluded that climate change has been the main driver of the increase in fire weather in the western United States.
A May 15, 2023, article in Phys.org notes that a “[n]ew study quantifies link between climate crisis, wildfires.” They write:
[I]n a first, US climate scientists have quantified the extent to which greenhouse gasses from the world’s top fossil fuel companies have contributed to wildfires. Their analysis, published Tuesday in Environmental Research Letters, found that carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the so-called ‘Big 88’ firms were responsible for more than a third of the area scorched by forest blazes in western North America over the past 40 years.
First author Kristina Dahl, of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), told AFP wildfires in the western United States and southwestern Canada have been worsening for decades: they are burning more intensely, over longer seasons, covering larger areas and reaching higher elevations.
To date, the cost of rebuilding and increasing resilience has largely been footed by the general public, ‘so we wanted to better understand the role that fossil fuel industry emissions have had in altering the wildfire landscape, she said. ‘We really wanted to put a spotlight on their role in that, so that they can be held accountable for their fair share of the cost.’
Let me return to James Baldwin. I am asking that you use your imagination and extend what he is saying about race relations to our relationship to the Earth itself. And yes, I do believe they are intertwined:
And here we are, at the centre of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfilment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!
Because in our ignorance, our arrogance, our greed, we have wasted decades to finally confront the increasingly impossible-to-deny effects of the climate crisis, it is no longer the fire next time. It is the fire this time!
