What If the Los Angeles Fires Were a Turning Point?
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s widely acclaimed, Obama-praised climate novel, The Ministry for the Future, the climate crisis is already well underway when catastrophic rains drown Los Angeles in water. Recreational kayaks and motorboats become crucial rescue vehicles, thousands die in the floods, and early projections suggest some $30 trillion in damage.
“So now,” the main character muses, “one could imagine that the American people might support action on the climate change front. Better late than never! But no. Already it was becoming clear that LA was not popular in Texas, or on the east coast, or even in San Francisco for that matter.” Despite these public sentiments, “California’s government, one of the most progressive in the world, and the US federal government, one of the most reactionary in the world—both were making efforts to help.” And the devastation of a famed city shocked just enough elites to make a difference: “If it could happen to LA, rich as it was, dreamy as it was, it could happen anywhere. Some deep flip in the global unconscious was making people queasy.” Los Angeles’s disaster becomes one of the key turning points leading to a global carbon coin.
Right now, Los Angeles is burning. But so far, the incineration of over 40,000 acres in America’s second-largest city doesn’t seem poised to be any kind of turning point. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial ridiculing the idea that climate change could have driven both the exceptionally wet winters in 2023 and 2024 and the recent dry spell. (While a full so-called attribution study on climate change’s contribution to the fires will take time, there’s already a lot of research suggesting climate change can, in fact, increase both flooding and fire risks, and early analysis out of UCLA suggests climate change did play a role here.) Georgia congresswoman and renowned random-number-generator Marjorie Taylor Greene asked why “they” didn’t use geoengineering to dump rain on the fires. Donald Trump, days away from his second term as president, blamed the destruction on Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom and a tiny fish called the delta smelt, outlandishly claiming that policies to protect the endangered species had deliberately deprived Los Angeles of water. (This whopper was universally panned by fact-checkers.) And Trump’s pick for energy secretary has previously denied that climate change has anything to do with wildfires.
One line in Robinson’s novel rings particularly true: A lot of people seem to dislike L.A.—or at least a lot of right-wingers seem to dislike its image as haven for California liberals. The Journal also blamed the fires on Democrats: Newsom, the state legislature, and “the mayors of Los Angeles,” in that order, for spending money on climate policy that could have been spent directly on wildfire prevention (wildfire prevention also received funding). Republican Representative Warren Davidson, from Ohio, suggested on Fox Business last week that California should only get federal disaster aid “if they change their policies.” He was a little vague about which California policies needed to be changed. Elon Musk, right-wing actor James Woods, former Fox host Megyn Kelly, and conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings all blamed the unchecked blazes on diversity hiring within the Los Angeles Fire Department. Another favorite target has been the environmental review process, which can delay risk-reduction practices like thinning or prescribed burns. (Libertarian Reason magazine—not a typical defender of regulation—was an unexpected voice debunking the notion that environmental review was to blame.)
The fires in L.A. have thankfully not yet reached the level of devastation Robinson portrayed in his novel. But the cascading effects of this type of disaster also make the scale of the destruction larger than it might seem from any one news story: Not only have at least 24 people been killed, but the smoke hazards threaten thousands or even millions more. The damage from smoke inhalation—not just in terms of immediate respiratory problems but in terms of increased cancer, respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and even dementia risk—may only be tallied years later.
Measuring destruction in terms of the number of homes burned can also be misleading, as if the fires’ effect on individual people and households can be reduced to “Did your home burn down or not?” and “Did you have insurance or not?” Being displaced is expensive, particularly if it means missing work as well. Those who have homes to return to but find their workplace has burned down, or their child’s school or daycare building has burned down, also face significant disruption and expense. Tap water could remain unusable for a while, multiple experts have emphasized. You can’t have destruction at this scale and not face a bottleneck of builders, repair workers, and materials afterward—affecting timelines not just for rebuilding but, most likely, unrelated repairs as well, both for renters and owners. Housing will get even more expensive than it already is. Without massive regulatory intervention, home insurance will get even patchier and less affordable—in a state already plagued by sky-high premiums and cancellations. Beneath the many headlines about how celebrities or Hollywood filming schedules are faring, the reality is that any of these factors alone can spell serious disruption or even financial catastrophe for vulnerable households, and even less vulnerable ones.
Despite this massive upheaval, there’s little sign that the wildfires are serving as a turning point even for policymakers who are trying to address the disaster. A one-year moratorium on insurance cancellations and nonrenewals, recently issued by the state’s insurance commissioner, won’t help much unless state and federal policymakers use that time to come up with a more durable solution. Newsom’s decision to suspend the environmental review process for homeowners and businesses trying to rebuild isn’t a panacea, either.
“For many Angelenos, this is our most jarring confrontation yet with global warming,” Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth wrote this week. “But hundreds of millions of Americans have faced fossil-fueled disasters, and the politics of climate obstruction have hardly budged.” Time will tell whether that eventually changes. For now, the turning points of Robinson’s novel feel a long way off.
Good News/Bad News
Can ants help fight the crop diseases that climate change seems to be intensifying? Read Ayurella Horn-Muller’s intriguing story at Grist about this new research.
While advocates have hoped that states could be a bulwark against the new administration’s anticipated assault on climate policy, early signs from Maryland are not entirely encouraging, Aman Azhar reports for Inside Climate News. Governor Wes Moore has already announced his intention to cut some climate spending—particularly in programs receiving federal support that may soon be slashed.
Stat of the Week
30%
That’s how much average homeowners’ insurance premiums rose nationwide between 2020 and 2023, even prior to recent catastrophes like Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles wildfires.
What I’m Reading
In a First, the EPA Warns of “Forever Chemicals” in Sludge Fertilizer
If you haven’t already read Molly Taft’s remarkable story about PFAS in so-called biosolids fertilizer, made out of human waste—and the people who realized the connection and are now fighting to limit the damage—read that first. Then read the striking update that came on Tuesday. Finally, the Environmental Protection Agency released a study confirming what Maine officials have been warning people about for years: that this type of fertilizer can result in crop contamination wildly exceeding EPA safety thresholds.
The E.P.A. has for decades encouraged the use of sludge from treated wastewater as inexpensive fertilizer with no limits on how much PFAS it can contain. But the agency’s new draft risk assessment sets a potential new course. If finalized, it could mark what could be the first step toward regulating PFAS in the sludge used as fertilizer, which the industry calls biosolids. The agency currently regulates certain heavy metals and pathogens in sewage sludge used as fertilizer, but not PFAS.
Read Hiroko Tabuchi’s full report at The New York Times.
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.