American Climate Apocalypse
California is the beating heart of the American economy. Climate disasters are threatening to kill that.
In 2007, I was living in Los Angeles during what was the most destructive wildfire season Southern California had known at the time. I still have vivid images of a number of occurrences—the smoke rolling in and blotting out the sun, the thick ash piled on every vehicle I walked past that was parked, the smudgy orange-brown look of everything. It vividly reminded me of the aftermath scene from The Day After, the 1983 movie about a nuclear war. It was the first time that I had experienced a fire season like that, and after the economy began collapsing, I ended up moving back to Michigan. I never forgot that year, and it made me acutely sensitive to what residents of the state endured year after year, especially during dry seasons, which have seemed to multiply exponentially in recent decades.
None of that has prepared me for this week. A hurricane-force windstorm swept through Los Angeles, starting two grotesquely large wildfires—one in the mountains above Pacific Palisades and Malibu, the other north of the entrance to the San Gabriel Valley, where Pasadena, Altadena and its smaller sibling towns reside. The Palisades Fire, closer to the ocean and the insanely fierce Santa Ana winds gusting at over 100 mph, has quickly become the most destructive wildfire in the history of Los Angeles. Over forty percent of the Palisades has been leveled—damage on par with Hiroshima. The Eaton Fire has consumed much of Altadena and the north end of Pasadena, destroying historic buildings dating back to the early days of the film industry. Over 5,000 structures are gone, maybe as many as ten thousand. The death toll officially stands at ten, but many of the areas have not been safe to inspect because the winds will not stop gusting, and the fires will not stop flaring up. The Eaton Fire continues to threaten the communication towers of the Southland (metro Los Angeles and its exurbs), as well as the historic Mount Wilson observatory.
I have watched in shocked silence coverage of the fires since Tuesday morning, seeing neighborhoods that I roamed nearly twenty years ago be evacuated, destroyed, or lingering under threat of destruction. Santa Monica, where I once worked, is a beach town, and evacuation warnings nearly reached the pier with its famous Ferris Wheel. Pacific Coast Highway, which long served as a safe firebreak, failed this time. The winds blew embers across it, causing people to run for their lives as their vehicles went up in flames at the side of the road, mere feet from the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Every time it seemed as though relief was coming, the wind warnings kept being extended, and new fires sprouted up, both natural and arson-caused. It will be a long January.
In the direct aftermath of this disaster, our soon-to-be President has again been threatening to withhold disaster relief from California as punishment for not electing Republicans. Even if that were relevant, and it surely is not, there are a lot of very important reasons to help California as much as possible.
California is the fifth-largest economy in the world and would qualify on its own for G7 membership.
California is our largest, most populous state—were it to be lost, the United States would be deprived of enormous amounts of produce, dairy products, wine, military bases, tax revenue, shipping port capacity, and more.
When the total tax revenues collected from California are added up and then divided by every single resident of the state, each Californian contributes $68 more in taxes than federal funding received. No other state comes close. California’s tax revenue pays for roughly half of the Pentagon’s budget each year.
The state is by and large self-sufficient: if it did not export, it could feed itself. If it was sovereign, it would have the infrastructure to defend itself. Social services would likely be cut dramatically to help fund natural disaster protection and recovery, but it could still thrive. Again, it is the heart of our economy.
It astonishes me, after all these years, that even those directly affected by these disasters deny what is driving them. James Woods, who has spent years on Twitter behaving terribly, alternately sobbed over the loss of his house and his belongings on CNN, then took to Elon Musk’s playground of bullies to scream that climate change had nothing to do with these fires, just liberal incompetence and DEI hires. This, of course, is the same repetitive mantra of the collective MAGA chuds in this country—blame liberals (of which California has far more of) and “DEI hires” (code language for minorities and women in charge—Los Angeles has a female mayor, fire chief, and emergency services director). Many have bleated that the city deserves it—an opinion that should be thrown back at them the next time a tornado or hurricane destroys their homes and takes the lives of their neighbors.
Nobody deserves any of this. If your first opinion, upon seeing that an entire neighborhood has been rendered into melted metal and ash like the aftermath of the atomic bomb, is that the victims deserved it, get help. If you think that blaming women and minorities is the correct response (which started at the top with Papa Trump and Cocaine Junior) to historically destructive disasters, go touch grass and stay off the Internet. If you have any emotion that doesn’t involve compassion and sympathy for a terrifying situation, the problem is not with the victims, but with you.
The climate disaster unfolding will not stop in California. It will not stop with these wildfires. It will not stop with hurricanes in Florida, or deep freezes in Texas, or tornadoes across the mid-South. It will slowly but surely erase parts of our continent and everything with it. The list of areas being lost to climate disasters includes the city of Rancho Palos Verdes, south of Los Angeles, which has been so devastated by recent natural disasters that it has been condemned by the state as unfit, and the residents have to be moved out by September. Coastal areas in the Carolinas flood over in clear water because the tides are higher than the ground, causing roads to close without warning and vehicles sometimes swept out to sea. Nearly every coastal city along the Gulf of Mexico, in states that are firmly right-wing, are sinking fast.
These are the people who will be most affected by climate change, and because the moneyed interests of those states hold a direct stake in maintaining the status quo, they have been indoctrinated to show no empathy to others suffering from climate disasters. They’ve had it driven into their brains that these disasters are God’s wrath on liberals, or that it’s the incompetence of minorities, or that climate change is all a hoax, and this has always happened. None of that is true, but people with billions to spend on keeping their billions away from the public good have invested for decades, and it is working. Society is regressing back to a neo-feudalism with lords and serfs, while middle class status evaporates under the compression caused by the growing numbers of the improverished beneat it and the staggering wealth of a scant few at the top, using it to smother our hopes and dreams to death.
California is the bellweather of worse to come. If we do not meet the challenge there, if we fail to help its recovery and protect it against future disasters, it will drag the rest of us down into the same climate hell. Fires, drought, and starvation will follow. Never before has a choice been so obvious and those making the decision so oblivious. God help us all.
Amen.