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8 hours ago
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Donald Trump’s response to the catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles has provided a stark prologue to how his US presidency will likely handle the growing threat of such disasters – through acrimony, brutal dealmaking and dismissal of a climate crisis that is spurring a mounting toll of fires, floods and other calamities.
As of Thursday, four fires, whipped up by wind speeds more typically found in hurricanes, have torched 63 sq miles (163 sq km) of Los Angeles, a burned area roughly three times the size of Manhattan, destroying more than 12,000 homes and businesses and killing at least 25 people. The Palisades and Eaton fires, the largest of the conflagrations that have turned entire neighborhoods to ash, are still to be fully contained.
Fire has always been part of the Californian story but the state is becoming more incandescent – the amount of burned area has increased fivefold since the 1970s as its rainy season shifts later and soils and plants dry out in rising heat. Southern California has barely had any rain since May, on the heels of a “megadrought” worse than any time in the past 1,200 years.
“Climate change is adding fuel to the fire and it is absolutely outpacing our ability to adapt in certain areas,” said John Abatzoglou, a climatologist at the University of California, Merced.
Yet Trump’s focus during the fires has been to assail the Democratic leadership of California and its stricken largest city, baselessly claiming the habitat protection of an “essentially worthless fish” stopped water flowing to LA as overwhelmed fire hydrants ran dry.
“Gavin Newscum should resign,” the incoming president posted on Truth Social about Gavin Newsom, California’s governor. “This is all his fault!!!” Trump also reposted a doctored image of the famous Hollywood sign, flames flaring in the background, that had been changed to “Trump was right.”
The disaster has unfolded to the backdrop of a new Trumpian era of political knife fights, unleashed conspiracy theories and the exaltation of a fossil fuel industry that has helped ferment climate-driven disasters.
In Washington DC this week, Republicans threatened to withhold unconditional disaster aid for California, an echo of Trump’s first term where he allegedly halted assistance for states he felt were politically hostile to him.
Meanwhile, Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, vowed in a nomination hearing to boost oil and gas production because “there isn’t dirty energy and clean energy”. Wright, who said he accepts climate change is real, came under some pressure for previously saying that “wildfires are just hype.”
Fossil fuel executives have swooned at the thought of a second Trump term, having pushed tens of millions of dollars to his election campaign after he promised to delete a slew of environmental regulations and subject more of America’s land and waters to drilling.
On Monday, this triumph will be marked by an exclusive inauguration day party for the fossil fuel industry on the roof of the Hay-Adams hotel, a block away from the White House, organized by Harold Hamm, the billionaire oil and gas executive who helped bankroll Trump’s election.
Climate advocates, reeling from these reversals, now even have former allies turning on their cause. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and leading Trump backer, wrote to his 212m followers on X that while climate change is real it is “much slower than alarmists claim” and that the fires are due to “bad governance at the state and local level that resulted in a shortage of water”.
Musk even took aim at the Sierra Club, the US’s largest environmental group that he previously donated more than $6m to. The Tesla chief executive accused the organization of aiding the fires by opposing the removal of flammable vegetation. “Defund Sierra Club,” Musk, once hailed as a hero by environmentalists, posted on X.
“Musk is indulging in disinformation and lies, that is who Elon Musk is right now,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of Sierra Club. “It’s disappointing and a far cry from the man we got to know when he was one of the largest donors in the history of the Sierra Club. He’s a different person.”
Protecting the environment remains popular with Americans and progress can still be achieved at the state level and via the courts, Jealous claimed. But there is a sense of a more exhausted and divided public now, with Jealous admitting that the uptick in green donations since the election has decreased from when after Trump last won in 2016.
“It felt like last week was a microcosm of what the next four years will be like – it’s going to be rough,” he said. “The modern Republican party operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry and we now have a president who seeks to confuse and confound the American people. It’s unconscionable.”
Trump calling the climate crisis a “giant hoax” and dwelling upon political conflict and conspiracies after disasters such as fires and hurricanes can obscure how a fevered planet is increasingly overwhelming efforts to contain its destruction, experts say. Even wealthy places like California, which has some of the most firefighting resources in the world, is struggling to keep pace.
When the fire hoses ran dry in Los Angeles, different funding decisions and the availability of a shuttered reservoir could have made some difference to save homes. But the scale of the fires simply obliterated a system designed to battle one or two urban house fires, rather than a forest-scale conflagration.
“The LA county fire department was prepared for one or two major brush fires, but not four,” said Anthony Marrone, chief of the department, who added that nothing that he chose to do differently would have altered the outcome.
“No firefighting system in the world based on fire hydrants can produce enough water to put out fires at this scale, it’s a civil engineering impossibility,” said Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University.
The focus instead, Keenan said, should be on preventing the further sprawl of housing into areas that have long had wildfire and are only becoming more prone to blazes. While California has some of the toughest regulations in the US around home construction and fire safety, it is also facing a lack of affordable housing and will build an estimated 1m new homes in and around risky forested areas by 2050.
“Even without climate change these fires will happen, the climatic conditions just make them more likely and more extreme,” Keenan said. “There’s been a gross indifference to risk, people have made trade-offs to live in these areas and the construction industry has killed off any attempt to stop building in these risky areas.”
Difficult decisions around where Americans are able to live in a changed climate will likely to be accelerated by an escalating insurance crisis that is pushing up premiums in some of the country’s most vulnerable areas.
Reconstruction of ruined places, meanwhile, will be made more expensive by any requirements to make homes more fire- and storm-proof, Keenan said, while Trump’s attempts to crack down on immigration may push up the cost of labor as immigrants are often the people doing reconstruction work.
But even amid these convulsions, the climate crisis is retreating from the national conversation. Large institutions such as banks are scaling back their environmental commitments and the federal government is set to follow Florida’s lead by burying mere mention of global heating. Globally, climate has fallen down the agenda even as countries miss emissions reduction goals and costs and disasters pile up. The past year was, yet again, the hottest ever recorded.
“It’s mind-blowing to see how many people will just blame all this on bad government decisions, people don’t seem willing to connect climate change to this,” said Sheila Morovati, an environmentalist and non-profit founder who lives in the Pacific Palisades. While her house was spared, Morovati said dozens of her friends lost their homes.
“It felt like our city was gone in 24 hours, the blink of an eye,” Morovati said. “It’s heartbreaking, our community is like a war zone. The ferocity of the fires is just on a whole new level. Climate change is here, even if you have an aversion to the words ‘climate change’. Call it something else if you like, but it’s here.”
