I keep rewatching a video of a McDonald’s in flames in Los Angeles. Blazing palm trees are buffeted by extreme winds. Sparks fly from the golden arches. It feels like an image out of Mike Davis’s 1998 book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.
Writing there about a fire five years earlier, Davis argued that if Southern Californians seemed “unprepared for this trial by fire,” the region had little excuse. “The conflagrations of 1993 came down grimly familiar pathways” and there had been “no shortage of omens.”
In the case of today’s still-raging fires in Los Angeles, it’s far too early to know precisely what caused them. But omens have been plentiful.
For decades, environmental activists have been shouting from the rooftops that Southern California will be increasingly vulnerable to more and worse wildfires as global temperatures continue to climb. But despite their urging, little movement has been made. In 2019, the phrase “Green New Deal” was everywhere, a punchy way of summarizing a range of proposals for the federal government to take dramatic action to arrest climate change, rapidly converting the nation’s energy infrastructure, and creating millions of union jobs in the process. Today the slogan can feel like a curious relic of a bygone era, like those Whip Inflation Now (WIN) buttons from the Gerald Ford administration.
The institutional breakdown starts at the federal level, with years of climate policy paralysis, and cascades down through California’s state government to Los Angeles County and City Hall. We don’t have the full picture yet of how these fires happened, but we know, for example, that the state government’s failure to force for-profit energy monopoly PG&E to properly secure its transmission lines has made the state far more vulnerable to similar blazes.
We also know that in a city, county, and state historically resistant to redistributing their considerable…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
