A Double Firestorm

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Special to United Methodist Insight | Jan. 11, 2025

It is a time for prayerful mourning.  Lives have been lost, thousands of homes incinerated, hundreds of thousands of people are suffering fear and shock.  Human-caused climate change catastrophe has arrived in southern California.

Roberta and I live 80 miles north of Los Angeles, so we've been spared the immediate danger and terrible air from the apocalyptic fires.  More Santa Ana winds are coming, however. Our bone-dry inland valley is very much at risk, as is much of the rest of the region. Friends have lost their homes. Others are in evacuation zones with go-bags packed. My daughter's family stayed with us to escape the toxic smoke drifting across northwest Los Angeles.

There's no question that this staggeringly enormous disaster was made substantially worse by human-caused climate change. The wind was stronger, the drought more dire as a consequence.  But climate change deniers are working overtime to drown out awareness of this reality with a firestorm of nonsense, blaming the devastation on "wokeism" and "DEI", among other tropes.  I'm watching this baloney spread on social media among people I know - some of them folks I thought would know better. California Democrats are being blamed for mismanaging the fire response, but all the water and all the firetrucks in America would have been unable to make much difference in the outcome.  (For one thing, the winds were too strong for helicopters and airplanes to drop water on the fire lines.)

When the ash settles, of course there will be a reckoning about what could have been done differently to respond to the fires.  Meanwhile, those of us who live in the fact-based world must gently but firmly remind our fellow citizens that while wildfires have always been a fact of life in southern California, the intensity of this one is certainly and significantly attributable to the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere by our burning of fossil fuels. If we wanted to play the blame game, we could remind folks that Republicans have been obstructing the transition to clean energy for half a century, and are striving now to reverse the progress that has been made.  (Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House. Ronald Reagan took them down.) But now is really not the time for pointing fingers.

Acting against climate change is task number one in the aftermath of this disaster. And then we can talk about other preventative measures. I'm going to conjecture that, while obviously important, tweaks to fire department and water system management will have less impact on mitigating future infernos than other measures. The building industry lobby (hardly a hotbed of leftist activism) has for years obstructed efforts to prevent housing development close to high fire-risk wildlands. Perhaps the present debacle will convince lawmakers to insulate populated areas from California's mountains and canyons studded with resinous chaparral vegetation that has evolved to depend on periodic wildfire in order to thrive. Hardening building codes and mandating fire-safe landscaping can make a significant difference. 

Let's picture this disaster in the frame in which it belongs.  Let's douse the misinformation inferno with messages of compassion for the tens of thousands of climate-change refugees in Los Angeles.