Welcome! This week’s post is sponsored by Nearness, which runs small-group online conversations to help people connect more deeply with themselves and others. A new series for parents, called Rooted in Values, is starting later this month: it's an 8-week online program that helps parents learn how to help ground their kids in core values, outside of religion. Yes, it’s more time on Zoom — but this is quality time. Best of all, thanks to philanthropic support, it's free of charge. There are information sessions coming up on January 18 and January 23 – learn more at www.nearness.coop/journeys/rooted-in-values .
Now onto the newsletter.
1.
When I was a child, I was terrified that my house might burn down. It seemed like the worst thing in the world: not just losing one or two precious things, but everything. As a kid who hadn’t experienced much death, it seemed like the worst thing in the world.
In some ways, this fear, irrational but primal, has stayed with me. Just last night, I had yet another version of a frequently recurring dream that I must suddenly leave where I’ve been living and have no time to pack. Last night, my family had just missed a flight, our overstuffed suitcase wouldn’t close, and new guests had already moved into our hotel room. Sometimes, it’s the end of a year living abroad, or the discovery of a new wing of a house filled with stuff I’d forgotten, and there’s no hope of gathering everything in time. In these dreams, I try desperately to save books, pots, pans, all sorts of absurd and unpackable things.
2.
So now, of course, the nightmare is real. Like almost everyone I know, I have friends whose homes have burned down, and I have family members who have evacuated and are fearing the worst. I personally have not suffered. But I find myself once again haunted by the news of the fires, unable to get it out of my mind, like in the run-up to the election, or after October 7. I masochistically read and watch heartbreaking stories of artists whose life work was destroyed, or archives and libraries burnt, or ordinary people learning that everything they love has lost. As of this writing, over 100,000 people have been displaced. Their grief seems unimaginable.
This is, anyone not in denial must admit, our new normal.
There is no actual disagreement here, despite what Fox News or Elon Musk says. Smoking causes cancer, high blood pressure (and other factors) causes heart disease, and anthropogenic climate change causes more extreme weather events. In this case, the fires were caused by a perfect storm of a ‘once in a century’ wet year followed by a ‘once in a century’ dry period, causing ‘unprecedented’ amounts of dry vegetation to be vulnerable to flamed fanned by the Santa Ana winds. That’s what happened.
This is not surprising to scientists, or to anyone who listens to scientists. Here’s UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, speaking to LAIst: “There is a set of weather and climate conditions that are so extreme under which there's not a whole lot that even very well prepared places can do to manage the most extreme wildfire events,” Swain said. “We're seeing the limits of what technology and preparedness can actually achieve in conditions like this.”
The graph of global temperatures is tracking predictions made forty years ago. 2024 was the hottest year on record, with most days exceeding the 1.5 degrees above average that, for decades, we’ve been told is the threshold for catastrophe. The flood-then-drought swing was entirely predictable, as was the danger of massive fires. Even Joe Rogan knows it.
Ok, enough graphs.
3.
Nowhere seems safe anymore. Nowhere is safe anymore. Not only vulnerable places like New Orleans or South Florida, but supposedly safer places like Asheville (hurricane Helene) and Vermont (‘once in a century’ floods) have all suffered recently. I have a false sense of security here in Northern New Jersey, since the meadowlands are a vast, spongy protection against cataclysmic floods. But we had massive fires only a few miles away from my home last summer, and the nearby Passaic River now floods on the regular. No wonder Montana has gotten so expensive.
I’ve once again noticed myself cycling through the classic five stages of grief: denial (this will all be over soon), anger (at climate deniers and fossil fuel companies), bargaining (maybe I can stay safe somehow), sadness, and, sure, some acceptance as well. I’ve noticed that the rage I feel is laced with resignation. After all, I wrote a law review article in 1998 arguing that we’d never cut carbon emissions enough to avert disaster. That’s a long time to hit one’s head against the wall.
I’ve also noticed how parenthood distorts my empathy: eight billion human beings may be in trouble, but what can I do to protect this one human being who is my offspring? I’m sure, if I had a spare hundred million bucks, I’d be building a bunker somewhere too – like Elon is apparently doing, even as he minimizes the threats of global warming and spreads conspiracy theories about the fires. Evolutionary biology has wired us for bizarre forms of selfishness.
4.
The Right’s entirely predictable Fire Denialism has demonstrated (as if we needed another demonstration) the human incapacity for cognitive dissonance, and our corresponding capacity to blame and scapegoat anyone or anything, in order to avoid it. No, say the Jesse Wattereses of the world, this couldn’t possibly have happened because of what literally every reputable climate scientist has been saying for decades. It must be because of DEI. It’s the lesbian fire chief, the black female mayor, the misguided (though straight white male, so otherwise qualified) governor of California.
Really – the Right is saying this. Here, watch:
Or here’s Megyn Kelly weighing in: “What we are seeing [was] largely preventable. LA’s fire chief has made not filling the fire hydrants top priority, but diversity.”
Or Musk, who posted screenshots of the Los Angeles Fire Department's ‘racial equity action plan,’ and said “They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes.”
Do these people not hear how transparently, idiotically racist they sound? I guess they don’t — most bias is unconscious, after all.
For the record, Fire Chief Kristin Crowley is astonishingly qualified: a 22 year veteran, with a personal history of heroism, and, yes, a commitment to end the department’s legally-proven frat-boy culture that was discouraging qualified people from signing up. And to the extent anything other than natural conditions is responsible for this disaster, Crowley has been loudly complaining about budget cuts for some time (and, for good measure, ‘filling the fire hydrants’ is the job of LA’s water department, not the fire department, and the shortage was more about sudden demand than unavailability).
As a kid (trigger warning: Godwin’s Law confirmation ahead) I couldn’t understand how Germans and other Europeans could’ve blamed the Jews for all their problems in the 1930s. What could we possibly have had to do with it? Hyper-inflation, the Treaty of Versailles, a humiliating defeat in war — none of that was because of us. And yet, there we were, the already-despised minority, in the wrong place at the wrong time, ready to be scapegoated.
It really does feel similar now. Here’s this massive catastrophe, the result of a lot of complicated causes, all beyond our immediate control, but some which, if we had ever been serious about addressing them, would run afoul of the rich and powerful. It’s mostly our fault, but only in a vast, collective sense; right now there’s nothing we can do. And so people reach for the scapegoats close at hand: the blacks, the queers, the woke. It must feel very natural to do so, almost instinctive.
And this is hardly the first time “DEI” has been blamed for disasters it had absolutely nothing to do with. It also caused, the Right tells us, the Baltimore bridge collapse last March and the Secret Service’s failure to stop the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last summer.
I wonder if people like Watters and Kelly really believe what they’re saying, or if they see an opportunity to weaponize the catastrophe for their favorite political cause, or if they’re just victims of audience capture, throwing red meat to the masses for ratings. I do assume they, like me, are sincerely horrified by what’s happening in L.A. We’re all human beings. So they are reaching for explanations and these are the ones at hand.
Or not. Maybe they’re just craven. I probably will never know.
5.
Often, when I write about global warming, I feel like someone putting a message in a bottle, or burying a time capsule for my daughter to discover two decades from now. I am fully aware that climate science, realism, hope, action, and rationality utterly lost the 2024 election, and that America is about to accelerate the conditions for more disasters like this one.
Is there hope? For a moment, I thought that if the Hollywood Sign burned, that could be a symbol that could wake people up. I also, as I’ll write about soon, have a perverse hope that some in the Trump orbit (including Elon) may actually steer us toward effective climate action that does not require cutting into the profits of oil companies.
There’s that denial and bargaining again.
Really, though, it’s hard to see anything prevailing over denial, scapegoating, and massive misinformation funded by extremely wealthy individual and corporations.
The only, very limited consolation I can find is that we science-based, fact-based realists are definitely right, and someday people will appreciate that. Of course, those same people can quite rightly blame us for not caring or doing enough. We’ll deserve whatever contempt they throw at us, just like Baby Boomers, broadly speaking, deserve the contempt of Gen-Zers today. Like the Boomers did a generation ago, we’re blowing through our inheritance, living large while we still can, not caring enough about the children we claim to love. Collectively speaking, we are guilty as charged.
I bury these time capsules as, if nothing else, dissenting opinions. I don’t know if anything will dislodge the tragically human capacities we all have for denial, scapegoating, and twisted reasoning to defend our desires – desires amplified by hyper-capitalism and the structural features of American politics. If the unbelievable heartbreak, devastation, and economic disaster we’re seeing right now won’t do it, maybe nothing ever will. Maybe all we can do is mourn and dissent.
Thanks for reading, and if you’ve gotten this far, for subscribing as well. I’m thinking of making ‘Mourn and Dissent’ swag — would anyone buy a t-shirt….
What I’m reading this week:
I linked to this above, but this climate scientist’s article on his decision to leave Los Angeles several years ago is absolutely essential reading. We should all be thinking about this.
If you’re wanting to check in on “Horrible Trump Appointees Who No One Is Talking About,” check out this comprehensively dreadful array of Project 2025 folks about to enter office by Project2025Admin.com. I especially dreaded this fact sheet on Ross Vought, slated to head OMB.
Ezra Klein’s elegaic piece ‘Now is the Time for Monsters’ on AI, Climate, and population is excellent, and along similar lines to my newsletter last week. I still don’t get the Times’s focus on natalism, though.
- again pulls at my climate heartstrings in a profound way. I’m glad, Anya, you’re coming around to the “individual actions aren’t centrally important” camp. (Note: she is not really doing that.)
I don’t have any new pieces to link to, however. I am hard at work preparing two classes for Harvard Law School, one on Psychedelics, Law & Religion, the other on Antinomianism. Thanks to a cool open-source site called Open Casebook, I’ll be making these publicly available in a couple of weeks. I’m also focused on the symposium on psychedelics and religion that I’m co-convening in March.
Sending blessings of safety and consolation to all my L.A. friends.