David Sirota has posed the question of the moment: “The Los Angeles fires are either a wake-up call or a funeral pyre. It’s our decision.” As Sirota points out “the ongoing destruction of Southern California offers a horrifying smorgasbord. There is an oil baron’s museum surrounded by fire. There is a McDonald’s about to go up in flames. There is a baby deer scampering across a smoky street. There is the weirdly calm living room scene being engulfed by flames, while the family dog panics.”
It was back in September 2022 that UN Secretary-General António Guterres cited the “immense” task of saving the planet, “which is literally on fire…” Davis Guggenheim, with VP Al Gore, released the film, An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006. Climate change is now a great deal more than inconvenient. Despite the scientific consensus on climate change and the causes of climate change, widespread denial is pernicious among the elite decision-makers in industry and politics.
Less than a month ago, LA’s Fire Chief warned Mayor Karen Bass of “unprecedented operational challenges”
“The Los Angeles Fire Department knew it was severely underfunded long before this fire. “We don’t have enough firefighters and medics, we don’t have enough fire engines, we don’t have enough trucks and ambulances in the field,” Freddy Escobar, an LAFD Captain II told the city during his testimony at a budget hearing on May 1, 2024. “And we don’t have the equipment and staffing that we need to respond to half a million emergency calls for service every year,” added Escobar, who is union president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles City (UFLAC).”
We have procrastinated over tackling greenhouse gas emissions as a consequence of burning fossil fuels. When we burn wood, coal, oil, and gas, we release greenhouse gases safely sequestered over millennia back into our atmosphere, causing it like a greenhouse to cause increasingly catastrophic warming. As The Economist pointed out back in August: “Wildfires are more than a powerful visual metaphor for climate change. Data show they are increasingly fuelled by the extreme conditions resulting from greenhouse-gas emissions. What is more, some researchers believe that they are helping drive climate change themselves, powering feedback loops with destructive consequences for human health and ecological stability.”
The fires raging in Los Angeles are having tragic consequences for people, and they are “a powerful feedback loop’ adding to the greenhouse gas emissions which cause the extreme weather conditions that generate such destructive fires. Rebuilding will strain the insurance markets and cause further greenhouse gas emissions to be generated.
The Economist documented the recent history of significant wildfires.
| late 2019 and early 2020 | The “Black Summer” bushfires burned through 23% of south-eastern Australia’s temperate forests. “Siberia smouldered, as fires from the previous summer simmered beneath the snow, re-emerging to lay waste to an area bigger than Britain. |
| 2021 | A “persistent heat dome over North America’s Pacific north-west produced perfect conditions for widespread burns … The day after temperatures in the Canadian town of Lytton soared to a record-breaking 49.6°C, Lytton was no more. |
| 2022 | “… more of the European Union went up in flames than in any year since 2000, bar one.” |
| 2023 | “more than 950 square kilometres burned near the Greek city of Alexandroupoli in the EU’s largest single wildfire since the 1980s.” The most remarkable blazes of the century, though, engulfed much of Canada between March and October 2023. … fires burned more than 180,000 square kilometres, nearly seven times the average burn area in recent years; 232,000 people were evacuated. Cumulatively, they produced almost 1,800m tonnes of carbon dioxide: three times Canada’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions that year. |
| 2024 | Wildfires are listed on Wikipedia: Attica, Madeira, Portugal, Turkey, Israel-Lebanon, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, New Zealand, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Virginiana, Canada and Russia |
| 2025 | Los Angeles |
Climate change results in drier forests and bush, stronger and drier winds to fan the flames and reduced water supply for fighting fires. While the smoke put into the atmosphere temporarily shades the earth from the sun’s heat, the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from wildfires are a powerful positive feedback loop.
Americans have been moving to riskier places. A report by the First Street Foundation, a non-profit research group, suggests: “6.8m people have seen increased rates…or cancelled policies—due to rising flood, wind or wildfire risk. Another 39m, or about a quarter of all properties in the continental United States, have climate risks yet to be reflected in their premiums. “We are marching steadily towards an uninsurable future in a number of places across the United States,” warns Dave Jones, a former insurance commissioner in California and director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California in Berkeley.”
The Los Angeles fires a wake-up call or a funeral pyre? The latter looks more likely.
