Mill, Westport, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

2025 will go down as the second or third hottest year on record. The last decade has been the hottest decade in human history. Driven by drought and extreme winds, a massive fire burned its way across the LA Basin, incinerating more than 10,000 homes. The estimated damage ranges from $76 billion to $133 billion. Total losses to businesses and workers in income and wages totaled at least $297. The year saw two of the largest, most rapidly intensifying hurricanes in the history of the Atlantic Ocean. Floods in central Texas killed at least 137 people, while massive flooding driven by twin cyclones that tore across Sumatra and the southern Philippines killed at least 1,800 people and left more than a million people homeless. We are in the midst of the largest mass coral bleaching event in history, affecting 83% of the world’s extant coral reefs. The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is accelerating. Its surface is fracturing, causing massive ice falls and rockslides that are warping the southern continent’s geology. A total collapse of the ice sheet, which now seems certain, would raise global sea levels by 12 feet. The Arctic Ocean is now expected to be “ice-free” in the summer by 2030, twenty years earlier than predicted just a few years ago. The Atlantic Current is slowing down and may be on the verge of collapse, which would likely destabilize rainfall patterns for much of the planet. Wildfires in Canada now burn year-round. There were 24,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer from June to August alone. Deaths from extreme heat in the US have increased by more than 50% since 2000.

None of these catastrophic events has left the slightest impact on Trump, who has ordered his administration to slash nearly every restraint on the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Oil drilling has been expanded on federal lands (including the high Arctic) and waters. The dying industry of coal mining has been put on life support with new subsidies and exemptions from environmental regulations, while coal-generating power plants slated for closure have been forced to keep operating. Large-scale renewable energy projects, in the planned for years, have been cancelled and tax credits and incentives for small-scale solar have been gutted. Energy-hogging data centers have been fast-tracked and freed from regulatory constraints. Prior to Trump’s re-inauguration, Bethany Kozma — who now heads RFK’s Department of Health and Human Services Office of Global Affairs— vowed that the administration “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere” in government. And they’ve largely followed through gutting NOAA’s Office of Atmospheric Research; the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, National Center for Atmospheric Research, U.S. Global Change Research program and NASA’s Earth Science program. Climate research stations have been shuttered. References to climate change have been removed from federal websites, documents, databases and signage on federal lands, offices and parks.

And it’s not just Trump. The supposed global protectors of the climate had their annual meeting in Bélem, Brazil this year and likely generated more CO2 coming and going from the confab than they saved during the sessions. That’s in part because they came and went without even mentioning fossil fuels in their final document. These actions go beyond denial and amount to incitement of the wrath of the climate gods. Their vengeance will be a terrible thing to behold. We’ve gone from trying to survive in a global greenhouse into a madhouse.–JSC

January

Pacific Palisades fire from a flight leaving LAX. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)

“The climate crisis reveals that our civilization has never really been organized around science, contrary to the usual Enlightenment narrative. It is organized around capital. Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital and is often ignored when it does not.”

– Jason Hickle

There’s nothing so terrifying as a nightmare come to life. The Santa Ana winds have haunted the dreams of southern Angelinos for decades. Like the Chinooks of the Rockies and the Mistrals of the Rhone Valley, these winds play on the mind. They tell you they’re coming for you. They whisper the dangers they bring with them. Van Gogh believed the mistral inflamed his madness. Another kind of madness seems to be inflicting LA, the madness of boundless consumption.

Some listen to the warnings of the wind. Some don’t. Those who listen are driven mad by those who don’t. In the chaparrals of southern California, the warning of the Santa Anas has always been: fire. Fires that race down hillsides and canyons faster than any Tesla can drive. Fires that leap roads, highways, malls. Fires that ride on the wind.

This is not new. The Santa Ana winds come with the territory–that territory being the desert basins behind the coastal mountains and canyons. They are katabatic winds that rush downhill, dry and fierce, as they pour through the Cajon, San Gorgonio, and Soledad passes. Geography makes them. Climate change and a rapacious real estate industry that has remained deaf to their message have turned them into killers.

Historically, the Santa Anas (ponder the resonance of that name in our time of mass xenophobia) are autumn winds, warm winds that carry the dust of the Mojave. Now, Santa Anas can erupt any time of year. That’s climate change, for you. Yet a threat that is omnipresent often seems somehow less ominous, making it more likely to catch you off guard.

Even so, LA wasn’t entirely taken by surprise this week. They had two days to get ready. The Santa Anas create the conditions for catastrophic fires on their own. They are fire-making weather events that dry out already parched landscapes, lowering the humidity and raising the temperature as they blow through.

On November 13, 2008, 50-mile-per-hour Santa Ana winds whipped up a bonfire started by college students into an inferno that spread across neighborhoods in Montecito and Santa Barbara. The Tea Fire burned for three days, destroying 210 homes. Then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger described the charred landscape as “looking like Hell.”

The next day, the still-roaring winds, gusting to 80—mph, supercharged a fire in the Santa Clarita Valley that ravaged the town of Sylmar. The Sayre fire burned for a week and destroyed more than 600 buildings, including 480 mobile homes.

We don’t know how this week’s fires originated—cigarette, campfire, truck spark, downed power line, or arson. But the Hollywood Hills, Santa Monica, and San Gabriel Mountains were already primed to burn. Chapparal is born in fire and thrives in it. In their natural state, the chappal landscapes of southern California experience low-intensity fires once every 20 to 50 years.

After a couple of relatively wet years, the southern California coast has now flipped back into drought conditions. It hasn’t experienced any measurable rainfall in eight months. Climate change has made southern California drier, increasing the frequency and intensity of the region’s natural fire regime. Even fully functioning fire hydrants will never replace the amount of moisture climate change has stolen from the ecosystem.

They talk about the “urban-wildland” interface. In So Cal, that interface is under relentless siege as new luxury homes, condos, and “mixed-use” buildings creep inexorably up the hillsides and canyons, undeterred by the rugged geography, faultlines, or flammability. The boundaries between the natural and the manufactured have been shredded, both on the ground and in the atmosphere. The buffer zones are gone and now nothing is standing between you and the wind.

Yes, you were warned. But no number of red flags could really fortify you for what was coming; no amount of preparation at this late stage could save you from hundred-mile-per-hour winds from a hurricane of fire.

Even palaces burn.

Pacific Palisades fire. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)

You don’t have to be versed in Mike Davis’s The Ecology of Fear to understand that the people who always pay the heaviest price for these kinds of cataclysms in So. Cal–even in elite zip codes like Pac Palisades–aren’t Hollywood moguls or hedge funders, but LA’s mostly brown and black working poor…

In 2019, Eric Garcetti, then the mayor of Los Angeles, told David Wallace-Wells: “There’s no number of helicopters or trucks that we can buy, no number of firefighters that we can have, no amount of brush that we can clear that will stop this. The only thing that will stop this is when the Earth, probably long after we’re gone, relaxes into a more predictable weather state.”

An initial estimate from AccuWeather Inc. puts the total cost of the LA fires at between $52 billion and $57 billion, making it the most expensive fire event in history.

In July, State Farm, one of the biggest insurers in California, canceled 1600 homeowner policies in Pacific Palisades. A year earlier, the same insurance company had dropped more than 2,000 policies in the nearby neighborhoods of Brentwood, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, and Monte Nido, all of which have now been ravaged by devastating wildfires. But the big insurers who have canceled policies for homeowners and businesses in climate-vulnerable states continue to insure the fossil fuel industries that make people’s homes uninsurable.

19 of the 20 largest fires in California history have ignited since 2000…

Environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne, author of Fire in America: “If we keep fighting a war with fire, three things are going to happen. We’re going to spend a lot of money, we’re going to take a lot of casualties, and we’re going to lose.”

Mike Davis: ‘The loss of more than 90 percent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom mentioned reason wildfires increasingly incinerate such spectacular swathes of luxury real estate.”

It’s worth noting that one of the reasons California likes to keep its prisons as full as possible is that inmates make up around 30% of the state’s firefighting force. For risking their lives on the firelines, prisoners are paid between 16¢ to 74¢ an hour (maxxing out at $5.80 to $10.24 a day) and rewarded with a bologna sandwich and an apple for lunch on the job.

When there’s a mass shooting, the response from MAGA is “thoughts and prayers.” When there’s a climate-driven cataclysm, the response is: “Drill, baby, drill, rake, baby, rake, and log, baby, log.”

The LA fires will be used as Trump’s Reichstag fire against environmental regulations.

He’s deliriously wrong about everything in this post, except for the incompetence of Gavin Newsom, a preening servant of the real estate and energy industries.

President Empathy struts his stuff one more time…

If Biden keeps this up, he may be destined to end his presidency less popular than Trump was after Jan. 6, 2021.

Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire: “In this story of the outside world and the inside world with a fire between, the outside world of little screwups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup but shaped by little screwups that fitted together tighter and tighter until all became one and the same thing–the fateful blowup.”

In 2000, the global warming trend predicted the world would hit 1.5C warming in 2041. It happened in 2024.

According to a new study by Aurora Energy Research, rescinding the Inflation Reduction Act’s technology-neutral clean energy tax credits could increase Americans’ electricity bills by 10%. Some states, like Texas, could see increases of more than 20%.

Last year, the European Union imported more Russian LNG than ever.

The Federal Trade Commission announced that crude oil producers XCL Resources Holdings, LLC (XCL), Verdun Oil Company II LLC (Verdun), and EP Energy LLC (EP) will pay a record $5.6 million civil penalty for illegal coordination that led to a crude oil supply shortage. Before merging, the crude oil companies started working together, limiting the oil supply when the US faced shortages and inflated prices.

As more green power plants have gone online, German gas imports dropped by 11% in 2024.

After the first week of congestion pricing in NYC, the commute times into Manhattan were cut in half….

Drone image of Pacific Palisades.

Number of destroyed or severely damaged buildings in LA (so far): 20,000
Population of LA County: 10 million

Number of destroyed or severely damaged buildings in Gaza (so far): 80,000
Population of Gaza: 2.1 million

In only five days, the Pacific Palisades fire destroyed more structures (> 12,500) than any fire in California history, except the Camp Fire of 2018, which burned for 18 days.

In the 1980s, the US experienced around three weather-related disasters that caused more than $1 billion in damages. Now, the average is around 18 a year. (NOAA)

More than 1000 incarcerated people are out fighting LA’s fires, but their families aren’t allowed to contact them to see if they’re safe.

Jason Oppenheim, owner of the celebrity real estate firm featured on Selling Sunset, told the BBC that his clients are being price gouged in post-fire LA. One landlord was asking $13,000/month, but when his client went to rent the home, the landlord demanded $23,000. Welcome to the club…Meanwhile, California State Attorney General Rob Bonta said that his office has received numerous reports of hotels and rental properties in southern California increasing their prices by more than 10%, which violates the state’s anti-price gouging law. According to the LA Times, the asking price for single-family homes in the Los Angeles area are being listed for nearly 20% higher since the wildfires started.

Florida’s state residual insurance plan is on the hook for $525 billion in losses, twice the amount in 2022, while California’s state insurer faces $290 billion in liabilities, a sixfold increase from 2018. Thirty-six states now have residual insurance plans, but 21 of the states don’t explain how they will pay when the liabilities overwhelm their assets.

A report by researchers at the University of Colorado and the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimates that three-fourths of homeowners may not have enough insurance to fully cover losses after a disaster.

Shed a few tears for the investment bankers of So Cal, one of whom shelled out $27 million to buy a now incinerated mansion on ‘Billionaire’s Beach.’ He told Fortune that he only expects $3 million from insurance. He’ll probably write the loss off on his taxes for the next decade, assuming he’s paying any.

The New York Post reported on Wednesday that Los Angeles landlords have increased rents by as much as 124% after the wildfires.

Here’s a spreadsheet tracking rental price-gouging by landlords in LA County…

Potential insurance exposure to the Los Angeles fires is $458 billion. The state’s FAIR insurance program only has $700 million cash on hand to pay claims.

From Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism:

Out of approximately 700 homes destroyed in the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Lightning Complex Fire, only 95 have been rebuilt and occupied 4 years later, with only 158 more in construction. Nearly two-thirds are not being rebuilt.

The top five least affordable metro areas in the US are all in California. According to Redfin, someone living in LA Country who makes the median income in 2024 would need to spend 77.6% of their earnings on monthly housing costs if they bought a median-priced home. How long can this go on?

Octavia Butler wrote about a climate-change-ignited wildfire in her path-breaking novel, the Parable of the Sower. The cemetery in the historic black community in Altadena where Butler is buried was burned in the LA fires.

A new paper by Zeke Hausfather published in Dialogues on Climate Change exploring climate outcomes under current policies finds that the planet is likely headed toward 2.7C warming by 2100 (with uncertainties ranging from 1.9C to 3.7C), which, if it pans out, is a little better than the 4C warming many of us feared.

More than 11 million Californians now live in high-risk wildfire zones, including large areas of Los Angeles County, San Diego, and the wine country of Napa and Sonoma.

$2,000: cost per hour of private firefighting teams employed by wealthy homeowners in southern California.

If you’re looking for a book to help explain the political ecology behind the LA fires and other climate-driven cataclysms, try this one by a couple of writers you might be familiar with: The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink…

As he prepared to go out the door, Biden took time this week to sign an Executive Order cutting regulations for “energy sources” (nuclear, among them) for AI data centers, which are expected to consume around 12% of U.S. electricity by 2028.

From an FT story on the coming collapse of the Atlantic Circulation Current: “Data uncertainty is substantial. But uncertainty is not our friend. Uncertainty could mean the tipping point is passed early.”

In Ventura County, farmworkers are harvesting strawberries in the dense, toxic smoke from the still-spreading Hughes Fire. Employers are required to provide them with respirator masks when the Air Quality Index hits 150. Many don’t.

Image: United Farm Workers.

In one 24-hour Arctic blast, Pensacola, Florida, was buried under 8.7 inches of snow, more snow in one day than 8.0 inches the Gulf Coast City had experienced in the previous 124 years combined.

Climate scientist Daniel Swain on the LA fires: “I don’t see this as a failure of firefighting. I see it as an indication of what you can achieve when conditions are this extreme.”

A third of Alaska’s vast tundra, once one of the Earth’s greatest carbon sinks, is now a carbon emitteras the permafrost melts, releasing tons of carbon dioxide and methane gas.

February

Number of fire alerts in LA County during the first three weeks of 2024: 183

The average number of fire alerts in LA County in the first three weeks of the year from 2012 through 2024: 1.5

So, maybe the problem isn’t the Delta Smelt?

Maybe part of the problem was private equity’s increasing stranglehold on the fire truck industry, which left more than half the fire trucks in Los Angeles out of service as the fires raged through the Palisades and Altadena.

The once giant Ogallala Aquifer, the largest groundwater source in the nation, dropped by more than a foot last year in western Kansas.

A new study published in Environmental Research under the ungainly title, Quantifying the Acceleration of Multidecadal Global Sea Surface Warming Driven by Earth’s Energy Imbalance, warns that: “Policy makers and wider society should be aware that the rate of global warming over recent decades is a poor guide to the faster change that is likely over the decades to come, underscoring the urgency of deep reductions in fossil-fuel burning.”

The rate of ocean warming has more than quadrupled since 1985, which is pretty clear evidence that global warming is rapidly accelerating.

Outside of China, the oil sheikhdoms of the Middle East are the world’s fastest-growing markets for solar power.........

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