0
THE words ‘hellish’ and ‘hellscape’ have been repeatedly deployed lately as shorthand for the fate of vast localities in America’s second largest city. This is not the first time that large parts of Los Angeles have gone up in flames, but the scale and intensity of the inferno is seen as unprecedented.
The blame game has blazed forth even before the flames have been tamed. The governor of California and the mayor of LA have attracted much of the Republican flak, with diversity initiatives and clean-energy endeavours absurdly being derided as part of the problem. Anyone daring to count climate change among the causes of the catastrophe gets slammed down as an ideological opportunist.
Never mind that 2024 was the planet’s hottest year on record, or that the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit has been breached, let alone the broad consensus among climate scientists that global heating is exacerbating the frequency and ferocity of storms, floods and fires, alongside droughts — and the famine that follows in some parts.
This month’s southern Californian inferno is believed to have been fuelled by uncommonly dry weather patterns and the unusual velocity of the hot Santa Ana winds that transported embers from fires in one locality to potential tinderboxes in nearby areas. Decreased funding for firefighters and hydrants that ran dry obviously were part of an inadequate response, but it’s convenient for some to ignore the likelihood than any other state might have fared even worse in similar circumstances.
There could be worse to come under Trump.
California — the south-western state’s name is apparently derived from ‘calif’, the Spanish word for ‘caliph’ — has been familiar with fires through much of its history, and has some of the most stringent construction regulations in terms of building resilience. Those rules proved inadequate. Besides, they apply only to new developments. Existing conurbations, including some in attractive areas considered unfit for habitation, are not covered.
Back in 1998, the late urban theorist, historian and political activist Mike Davis, describing Malibu as “the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world”, predicted that “periodic firestorms of this magnitude [referring to the 1993 southern California disaster] are inevitable as long as residential development is tolerated in the fire ecology of the Santa Monicas”, and reminded readers that “mountain infernos repeatedly menaced Malibu throughout the 19th century”.
Such information could easily be pounced upon by climate change deniers such as the incoming US president to claim that the scientists ignore historical trends, while conveniently overlooking the intensification of natural phenomena catalysed by human activity — primarily the burning of fossil fuels, previously indispensable to industrialisation.
Far less harmful alternatives are now feasible, yet Donald Trump again brings to the White House a ‘drill, baby, drill’ mentality that must thrill the oil and gas oligarchs who fund US politics precisely so that they can continue to elevate corporate profits above the diminishing opportunities for the survival of the species. It’s no coincidence that several Wall Street stalwarts have rescinded their net zero goals in the run-up to Trump’s second inauguration. Detractors sometimes compare him to the blustering Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, but perhaps an even more striking analogy would rope in Emperor Nero, who played the lyre as Rome went up in flames in AD 64.
Of course, Trump knows only how to fiddle his finances, and the sole instrument he has mastered is blowing his own trumpet. But the mentality he brings to the presidency may set back efforts to control climate change by more decades than the planet can afford. Nero, renowned for his debauchery, was the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynas-ty. The Roman Empire survived for a few centuries after that. The American empire, already complicit in a despicable genocide in the Near East, might prove less resilient. The question is, will it take the rest of the world with it when it goes down in a blaze of ingloriousness?
Early in the 20th century, California was a magnet for dust bowl refugees from Oklahoma and adjacent states, but it wasn’t exactly welcoming. “California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see,” sang the folk troubadour Woody Guthrie in the 1930s, “But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot/ If you ain’t got the do re mi.” Hard cash was the entry ticket. Three decades later, one of Woody’s cultural offspring, Phil Ochs, reminded us: “So this is where the Renaissance has led to/ And we will be the only ones to know/ So take a drive and breathe the air of ashes/ That is, if you need a place to go.” The song was titled The World Began in Eden and ended in Los Angeles.
We can only hope he was mistaken, but who knows?
Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2025
