Burned out

Over winter break, my wife and I took our young daughters to visit her mother in Pasadena, California. Barely a week later, much of that city lies in ruins. Places where we ate, drove, and played are now smoldering heaps of ash. Several family friends — people we spent the holidays with — are among the thousands who have lost their homes. My mother-in-law fled the city yesterday with one of them, carrying only essentials and her beloved parrot. It’s unclear when it will be safe for her to return, or what she’ll find when she does.

It’s surreal to write a paragraph like that about people you love and a place you were just in. (And I say that as someone who has lived through the destruction of an entire city in the past, including the house I was in at the time.) The paragraph above could have been written by others, with a few minor adjustments, about recent wildfires in Maui, Texas, or Chile; not to mention flooding and landslides in Western North Carolina, Spain, the Philippines, Ethiopia, or Nepal, or the countless tragedies to fall in the past year on Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, or Yemen, to name a few.

It is exhausting to have to explain, again, what links a world of climatic and geopolitical disasters. To have to walk everyone through how stressing the climate leads to wars, which then further exacerbate the climate crisis. Not to covering the basic stuff, like how these unprecedented fires in Los Angeles are a clear result of global warming: combine a worsening drought and the hottest summer in LA’s history with an unusually fierce eruption of hurricane-strength katabatic winds, likely caused by the melting of Arctic ice and the destabilization of the jet stream, and this is a likely result. (Eric Holthaus has the details). And no, I’m not drawing an equivalence between all the examples listed above: there is a difference between the accidental burning of a neighborhood and the intentional eradication of a country. But they’re on a continuum, and they feed one another, just as sure as sparks from one uncontained fire can be sure to spawn several more.

Yet the clear story here — industries burn fossil fuels, the Earth gets hotter, disasters and wars become more frequent and more intense — is a subplot of the national conversation at best. It’s being drowned out by the noise of irrelevant partisan bickering (“Karen Bass was out of town!”¹ ) and conspiracy-mongering (“They’re burning evidence in the Diddy case!” “It’s a space laser!” “It’s nonwhite people having power!” “It’s the Jews!”). This is all fed and exacerbated by the billionaire-sponsored murder of the news industry — and their true goal: the death of social trust. (LA newsman Matt Pearce has the local angle on that one.) I’ll repeat what I wrote after the Lahania fire in 2023: The intent is to help the powerful shift the blame, and thus the responsibility for bearing the burden of solving the crisis, away from its actual drivers—the oil companies, tech billionaires, and their political handmaidens—to whatever safer targets are available: a rival political party, racial and ethnic minorities, or those who advocate for holding capital accountable through social change.²

At this hour, firefighters appear to be making progress against the Eaton fire (the one burning Altadena and Pasadena) and have reportedly beaten back the fires in Sylmar and the Hollywood Hills. The Palisades Fire remains entirely uncontained. Even once the fires are out, the disaster won’t be over; as my mother-in-law puts it: “The air is unbreathable and the water undrinkable.” It’s hard, in these last days before Trump brings the most powerful and rapacious billionaires on the planet with him back to the apex of power, not to feel like the headline says — exhausted, worn down, torched inside. But homes can be rebuilt, and communities too, so long as there are people who survive them. It just takes more work to come back each time.

One other update: In the Hanukkah issue of The Racket I promised I’d donate a portion of the proceeds of new subscriptions from that post to two organizations coordinating donations for Gaza. In the days since, new questions have arisen about one of those, Operation Olive Branch. I understood that to be a social media-driven initiative that focused on routing direct aid to verified families. But it seems that the organization has made other, unsupported claims about itself, such as being a registered nonprofit. (The employer identification number listed on the group’s FAQ, for instance, doesn’t show up at the IRS or any of the other databases I consulted.)

1  Karen Bass is the mayor of the City of Los Angeles, which the people laundering this talking point pointedly ignore is a) “‘a weak mayor system,’ in which the chief executive’s ability to wield power unilaterally is limited, unlike in some other metropolises,” and b) is part of, but not the same as, Los Angeles County, which means regardless of where she happens to be at any given time, she has no authority over places like Altadena or Pasadena, the neighboring cities where the so-called Eaton Fire is burning. (Pacific Palisades, where the first fire is concentrated, is part of LA city.)

2  The Maui Fire Department and U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives determined that the 2023 fire was an accident caused by sparks from a broken utility line. No lasers were involved.