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18 hours ago
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When I send anxious texts to friends in Los Angeles – friends who have been evacuated or who are waiting to leave , friends escaping a fire zone, wondering if their life’s work has been destroyed, worrying about the smoke’s effect on an asthmatic child – I always begin with the same three words:are you OK?
But a continent away, watching photos and videos of a city I love being incinerated, overcome by waves of terror, grief and mourning, I have other questions.
For example: when are we going to universally acknowledge that climate change is a current crisis and not (as even Elon Musk admits) a future possibility? When are we going to admit that the fires in California are not just “what happens in California”. We’ve read our Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, so we know that the Santa Ana winds are a thing. But when are we going to understand that this isn’t just local – or normal?
When are people going to agree that the fires (not just this fire, but a plague of recent conflagrations) have been fueled, in speed and intensity, by our warming environment? When are we going to notice that climate disasters are happening not just in California but in Hawaii, North Carolina, Greece and Sudan? For how long can we continue to think that we are – that anywhere is – immune? How are we not horrified when politicians deploy the misery and loss as ammunition aimed at the other team, blaming someone or something for a global disaster, much of it caused by carbon emissions?
It’s not as if people haven’t been saying this for a while. Thinking about Al Gore makes you realize how unfortunate it is that being concerned about our planet’s future, about our children and grandchildren’s future, suggests that we are all Debbie Downers, wimpy crybaby snowflakes.
Days ago, in the New York Times, a climate scientist explained his decision to leave Los Angeles, two years ago. The city had become frightening, unlivable. Its future was all too clear. The damage to the climate, and its accelerating pace, he noted, has been obvious to the petrochemical industry for decades, but its executives have used their influence to block legislation that might have controlled it.
There’s plenty of information out there about how dire our situation has already gotten. The (largely older) people who watch network evening news will surely have noticed how many broadcasts lead with houses swept away by a flood, with pans along the wreckage left by a tornado. To reporters and producers, the Los Angeles fires must seem like a godsend from hell.
But the media know that the public has a short attention span. During the early days of the fire, Los Angeles was briefly displaced in the news by speculation about the supreme court’s ruling on the TikTok ban. Much of the press coverage focuses on what the city needs to do in order to be prepared for future disasters, with only a passing mention of the fact that they’re part of a larger problem. It’s a little like having a long, impassioned argument about how best to insulate the attic when the roof is caving in.
Maybe the widespread inability to focus on the root cause of the problem is part of the problem. Maybe our brains have been so effectively rewired by screens and scrolling that we’ve lost the ability to connect the dots. We view the fire and floods and mudslides as separate events, when the fact is that they’re connected. And part of the population is so busy trying to keep food on the table that they don’t have the time or energy to think about the planet. The struggle for survival enables those who aren’t struggling to do pretty much what they want.
In any case, our leaders and their friends in the oil and finance communities would rather we not connect the dots, rather we not get worked up about climate disaster. Offshore drilling looks good on the balance sheets. Let the future worry about the future. It’s not hard to see that strict controls on emissions and fossil fuels are in conflict with personal greed, and that personal greed is winning.
We need a leader who can convince the American people (and actually, the world) that what is happening in Los Angeles today is a portent of the future. Instead, we have elected a president who blames the destruction on Governor Gavin Newsom and a program designed to protect an endangered species of fish. Is there anything more cynical and cruel than turning the intense suffering of so many into a joke about threatened smelt that your political base can snicker at?
The news from California is clear, but we don’t want to see it. It’s too confounding, too big, too complex. But we can sense the danger.
We can only hope against hope that the pain of the people of Los Angeles inspires us to find a way forward, to insist on a course more expansive and comprehensive than a plan to beef up fire hydrants and local emergency preparedness.
