The Sunset Fire as it appeared from the rooftop of an apartment building in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles on the evening of January 8, 2025 (Courtesy photo)
Like a three-pack-a-day smoker who blames their chronic cough on allergies, or a recent flu shot — everything but their addiction — President-elect Donald Trump continues to embrace an absurd and criminally irresponsible brand of denialism on the subject of climate change.
This hard truth was exposed yet again by the latest horrific California wildfires.
As someone who grew up in Southern California in the 20th Century, I can attest that destructive fires are nothing new for the region. I have vivid memories of watching nearby hillsides burn from my college dormitory at UCLA, and of a relative learning their Orange County hillside home had survived a fire — one that had consumed neighboring homes — via the happy discovery that an old-fashioned answering machine was still picking up.
Yes, more people than ever inhabit the state – a population that, as is the case here in North Carolina, continues to transform more and more previously uninhabited areas into vulnerable suburban sprawl – but it’s also true that things have changed dramatically in some other very important ways in the Golden State in recent decades.
As the news outlet CalMatters reported last week, California has 78 more annual “fire days” — days on which conditions are ripe for fires to spark — than it did 50 years ago. In effect, what once was mostly a seasonal issue in the late summer and early fall for certain areas, has become a year-round, statewide plague.
And the chief cause is no mystery; it’s climate change that has, among many other things, prompted repeated droughts, given rise to more lightning and windstorms, and created an epidemic of parched and dead foliage.
If one was ever looking for reason to treat climate change and its destructive impacts with the utmost urgency, it’s hard to imagine anything more compelling than the myriad threats it so obviously poses to the nation’s largest and most economically important state.
Amazingly, however, even as the Los Angeles area was burning and just a few months after Hurricane Helene inundated the mountains of western North Carolina with unprecedented flooding, Trump was spreading preposterous misinformation and promoting toxic, shortsighted policies.
Rather than acknowledging the irrefutable truth that climate change spurred on by carbon pollution is slowly and effectively asphyxiating the planet, Trump advanced cockamamie and easily debunked claims that the L.A. fires were the fault of politicians he doesn’t like and environmental regulations. At the same time, he reiterated his “drill, baby drill” pledges to expand our nation’s use of fossil fuels and torpedo efforts to grow sustainable energy.
And it’s hard to overstate just how utterly insane all of this is.
As fleets of scientists have repeatedly demonstrated, the climate crisis will continue to worsen even with swift and decisive action to tackle it. Sadly, even under the best scenarios, humans are faced with the grim reality that we are now in the business of acting to save what we can.
But to tack dramatically in the opposite direction – as Trump and his allies say they will – is like a drunk driver taking another swig of vodka and punching the gas pedal as he leaves the scene of a wreck.
As environmental advocates have noted in recent months, the Biden administration took several enormously important steps – most notably securing hundreds of billions of dollars in new investments for expanding sustainable energy sources like wind and solar, subsidizing electric vehicles and the construction of charging stations, and strengthening the electric grid — that, if allowed to continue, will do much to mitigate important causes and ramifications of climate change.
Reversing course, on the other hand, is sure to leave us in even more desperate straits than we already find ourselves.
But to tack dramatically in the opposite direction – as Trump and his allies say they will – is like a drunk driver taking another swig of vodka and punching the gas pedal as he leaves the scene of a wreck.
Will Donald Trump and the legion of devoted followers he commands ever see the light? Is it even possible?
The indicators remain pretty grim at this point. But it’s also true that, sometimes, it’s the people who’ve been in denial the longest who ultimately become the most passionate advocates for a cause. The nation’s anti-tobacco advocacy community has long been peppered with ex-smokers who were converted into health advocates by a lung cancer or heart disease diagnosis. And in this case, even many fossil fuel producers acknowledge the need for change.
While the idea of a relentless truth-o-phobe like Trump admitting the error of his ways strains the imagination, one can envision a scenario in which a handful of Republican senators who actually read and think and take Trump’s blather with a grain of salt (think of North Carolina’s Thom Tillis) could, when push comes to shove, follow the lead of the late John McCain when he refused to vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act and prioritize the wellbeing of their children and grandchildren over the outcome of the next GOP primary.
In short, the Southern California catastrophe has reminded us yet again that climate change – through its impacts on everything from human health to immigration to the economy — is the existential policy issue of our times. And whether they do so out of genuine delusion or mere cynical self-interest, the politicians and their allies who try to evade this undeniable fact willfully endanger us all.