Warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico — oops, the Gulf of America — have become a fueling station for hurricanes, witness the overnight growth of Hurricane Helene, which did billions of dollars flood damage in the Carolinas.
I have warm memories of Hawaiian-language liturgy at the beautiful Church of the Holy Innocents at Lahaina on Maui. It is no more, burned along with much of the Hawaiian town. Lahaina suffered a catastrophe triggered by three climate-related causes. Prolonged drought had dried island vegetation, especially former sugar plantation land. An offshore hurricane triggered high winds. The winds transformed a small fire, thought to be extinguished, into a deadly conflagration.
We first heard warnings of climate change in the hot summer of 1988. In years since, the United Nations has sponsored conferences, corporations have reduced their carbon footprint, coal plants have closed, and some universities and pension funds have divested from energy stocks.
But a key actor, the American government, has been slow to act. The carbon economy has maintained a grip on our nation’s capital and economy, resisting a transformation in energy sources. The world is falling short of modest goals of limiting the increase in carbon emissions set in the Paris accords. The energy industry and Republican Party have adopted as the battle cry for expanded drilling in the rapidly-warming Arctic, “Drill, baby, drill.”
We are about to inaugurate a president who has proclaimed man-caused climate change “a hoax.” Chief adviser Elon Musk makes electric cars, but blasts “alarmists” who warn of imminent dangers of a warming Earth.
To celebrate the second Trump presidency, a bevy of Big Oil nabobs and the American Petroleum Institute are throwing a lavish inauguration party at the Hay-Adams Hotel, the invitation promising “a vibrant atmosphere of celebration.” The oil and gas industry invested an estimated $75 million in Trump’s 2024 campaign.
What, then, is their responsive to outsized weather events? The California fires evoke a political response: Blame public officials, notably those who have warned of global warming and sought to shrink the state’s carbon footprint. Trump has blamed the Southern California fires on “incompetence” of local and state governments. Earlier, he threatened at the time of the 2018 Paradise disaster to withhold federal money and firefighting resources from the Golden State.
Trump has spoken of diverting rivers in Northern California to meet needs of the south land, saying river flowing water is “wasted.” In reality, Klamath River water in northern California irrigates thousands of acres, supports local economies, with efforts underway to restore its once-great fisheries.
Elon Musk has chimed in with an attack on “nonsensical overregulation” saying cause of fires was a “shortage of water.” House Speaker Mike Johnson talks of putting “conditions” on any aid package. “We have to get a pound of flesh for any dollar that is spent on California,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-South Carolina. Of state officials, Rep. Don Bacon, R-Nebraska, opined: “They’re worried about fish and not people.”
Ignorance spreads on the Internet faster than a Santa Ana-driven fire. But the facts of these firestorms are indisputible. The fire danger forecast was spot-on. Firefighting equipment was deployed in vulnerable areas. CalFire crews were on the ready, far better prepared than usual. The resources deployed were simply overwhelmed by hurricane-force winds and parched vegetation ready to explode in flame.
“Trump is already out there making up stuff about this event and who is responsible,” Dave Jones, director of the University of California-Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, told The New York Times. The counter-narrative goes further, and the response to a California disaster has been to depict California as a disaster. The right’s propaganda apparatus depicts a land of homeless encampments, street crime, addicts, and dangerous immigrants.
Shortly before his death, my Uncle Chet reminisced about long-ago firefighting days but also California’s mellow climate and beauty after rains brought a greening-up. He groused, however, of smog getting in his lungs and blurring his views of coastal mountains.
The smoke from a year-round fire season would be getting in his lungs today. Seventeen million Californians are covered by the latest air advisory due to the fires. I feel your pain: with British Columbia burning, I drove 640 miles from Seattle to Canmore, Alberta, every mile through acrid fire smoke.
Uncle Chet would move up to Eureka, but never forgot beaches of Malibu or the nearby coastline. Patti Davis, daughter of our 40th president, in a New York Times essay, waxed eloquent about winter storms turning the land green, of flowers and oak trees. The Reagans owned a ranch in Malibu. Fire was a part of life, writes Davis, “but the land would heal.” It was the era of “California Dreamin” the famous 1960s song celebrating the southland. Davis’ title for her essay, “The Dream of California is Up in Smoke.”
We mitigated the smog and protected the ozone layer, but otherwise have acted as if we could pump poisons and pollutants into the atmosphere forever. As temperatures set an all-time record last year, so did the earth’s carbon emissions.
“We have thrown an entire planet out of balance,” Davis warned, “and now we are suffering the consequences — weather patterns so severe we have no idea how to combat them, and the resulting fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes more severe than anything we have known before.”
Accountability is more than finding out who’s responsible for a dry hydrant. We have a planet to keep it habitable. Take it from the daughter of a president who had solar panels yanked from the roof of the White House.
This essay also appeared in Cascadia Advocate.
