We’re in serious trouble. That’s the message I saw written in the ashes of Los Angeles. And by “we,” I mean every human on this planet, rich or poor, young or old, Black or white or brown. In L.A., an $83 million house with 18 bedrooms and six bathrooms burned just as fast as fixer-uppers next to the freeway. We’re in trouble not because we’re helpless, or because we have broken the planet beyond repair. We’re in trouble because we live in a world that was built for a climate that no longer exists, and the rebuilding of our world to adapt to this new, hotter, more dangerous climate is a task that we have hardly begun to undertake. We are like dinosaurs wandering around after the meteor hit, thinking that the ash that is blocking out the sun is going to dissipate at any moment and everything will go back to normal.
We are much smarter than dinosaurs. But we are also deeply stupid in our own way. Millions of Americans think that because they have their own YouTube channel and AI on their phones and overnight Amazon deliveries that they have Mother Nature whipped, that she is just some old hag they have banished to the basement of modern life.
The Los Angeles fires were burning evidence of how dangerous this delusion is. The fires were a bonfire of bad ideas that had piled up over decades, from suburban sprawl into wildfire zones to the flammable plastics that now fill many people’s homes. But behind all that is the larger fact that the Los Angeles fires have demonstrated to anyone who cares to look how unprepared we are for what is coming for us on a superheated planet. You could argue that lots of other climate-related disasters demonstrated that, too, from broken levees during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the fire tornadoes during the Camp Fire in Northern California in 2018 to the epic heat wave in the Pacific Northwest in 2021. But the Los Angeles fires peeled back the fire blanket of unpreparedness to reveal a new level of vulnerability to the human-induced mood swings of Mother Nature.
“If there has been a single, fatal flaw in the design of Southern California as a civilization,” California historian and urban theorist Mike Davis wrote in his classic 1998 book, Ecology of Fear, “it has been the decision to base the safety of present and future generations almost entirely upon shortsighted extrapolations from the disaster record of the past half century.”
First, let’s get one thing out of the way: No, climate change didn’t cause the L.A. fires. The sparks that ignited the fires were almost certainly human-sparked, likely by power lines or fireworks. Whatever the ignition source was, fires have been a part of the chaparral ecosystem in the mountains around L.A. since the beginning of time. Native plants that thrive in the San Gabriel Mountains — behind Altadena, the community in the northeastern part of Los Angeles County where the Eaton Fire destroyed more than 9,400 buildings and at least 17 people died, as well as above Malibu and the Pacific Palisades, where another 6,800 buildings burned and at least 12 people died — are exquisitely adapted to fire. The California lilac, a common plant in these mountains, drops seeds that only germinate in the aftermath of fire. Chamise and manzanita are glossy with oils and resins that seal in moisture during hot, dry periods, and easily explode into flame during a wildfire.
THE MOUNTAINS WERE LIKE A GIANT PILE OF KINDLING. ANY SPARK WOULD IGNITE AN INFERNO.
The best way to think about the role of climate change in the L.A. fires is as an accelerant. Last year was the hottest on Earth ever recorded by humans. Ten of the hottest years have all been in the past decade. And the source of all that heat is no mystery: It’s mostly a consequence of our addiction to coal, oil, and gas. With more heat comes more fire. A study released a few weeks after the fires found that the hot, dry, windy conditions that drove the L.A. fires were about 35 percent more likely due to warming caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
“A thirstier atmosphere is an inevitable consequence of a warmer era,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. Swain talks about a hotter atmosphere as a bigger sponge, one that soaks up seven percent more water for every one Celsius degree of warming. That means it sucks the moisture out of the ground, and out of plants. As anyone who has ever tried to build a campfire knows, drier wood burns easier than wet or damp wood. And when that wood does catch fire, it burns faster and more intensely. A 2023 study found that climate change is responsible for “nearly all of the observed increase” in wildfire-burned area in California over the past half-century.
A hotter climate is also a more extreme climate. Swain was lead author on a recent study that described climate’s role in amplifying weather extremes. He and his co-authors coined the term “hydroclimate whiplash,” in which decades of drought are followed by periods of heavy rainfall and then a return to very dry conditions, causing vegetation to grow rapidly before becoming a landscape of tinder ready to combust.
This is exactly what happened before the fires in L.A. The two years prior to 2024 were extremely wet, causing plants to grow like crazy and, luckily, filling up California reservoirs. Then, starting in May 2024, the rain stopped. Plants dried out. In L.A., the summer was hot. But the fall was even hotter. Starting in early September, daytime temperatures were 10 to 20 degrees above normal for that time of year. A weather station in Long Beach (south of Los Angeles) hit 109 degrees on Sept. 6 — a new daily record that was 25 degrees hotter than normal for that day of the year. By that time, the mountains around L.A. were like a giant pile of kindling. Any spark would ignite an inferno.
In the fall, the Santa Ana winds arrived in Los Angeles. These winds are not a product of climate change — they are created by temperature changes related to the topography of the West. They begin out in Nevada’s Great Basin, where high-pressure zones cause the air to sink and flow toward lower-temperature zones along the coast. On their way west, the winds blow across the Mojave Desert, where they dry out. They blow through canyons in the San Gabriel Mountains and arrive in L.A. hot and dry and fast, and full of mythological significance. “It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination,” Joan Didion wrote in the 1960s. “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.”
Usually, rains come to L.A. in the late fall, dampening the risk of fire with the Santa Anas. Last fall, no rains came. But in January, the flames did. Gusts measured up to 90 mph. Within a few hours, what started as a small fire in the chaparral quickly spread to homes built at the edge of the wildlands, many of them big, expensive homes with nice views that had been built by people who wanted to be close to nature or wanted some buffer from the chaos of urban life. And that is when the fire changed from something that has been happening in the L.A. mountains since time began into a human-created nightmare.
For the past 100 years or so, Los Angeles spread like pancake batter over a hot, dry griddle. From the core of the city, the population moved horizontally out toward the beach and valley. But the bigger the flatlands grew, the more the mountains beckoned. Movie stars sought refuge in the Hollywood Hills. Others were looking for cheap real estate or an escape from the smog. White people wanted distance from the Black and brown people on the flatlands. Zoning has encouraged this. No politician wants to get in the way of a Californian’s God-given right to own their little piece of paradise.
LOS ANGELES SPREAD LIKE PANCAKE BATTER OVER A HOT, DRY GRIDDLE.
It was there, in the places that city planners called the Wildland-Urban Interface, that the fire began to change from the kind of wildfire that has burned through these hills for millions of years into an urban fire the likes of which no one has seen in America since the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 devastated that city, killing approximately 300 people and leaving a third of its residents homeless.
Twenty-first-century cities aren’t supposed to burn. After the urban fires of the 19th and early 20th century, building codes had been passed, fire standards implemented, and modern firefighting technology embraced. The problem in L.A. was none of that mattered much. In fact, in some cases, dependence on better firefighting technology made the situation worse. Or at the very least, provided a false sense of security.
Consider the airplanes and helicopters that the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection keeps ready to fight fires in mountainous, difficult-to-reach areas. Cal Fire has the largest state-owned firefighting air fleet in the United States, which includes 23 airtankers, 11 helicopters, and 14 air-tactical aircraft. The largest of these aircraft can dump more than 9,000 gallons of water or fire retardant (basically, water and ammonium phosphate fertilizer mixed with pink dye) on fires, slowing their spread. But during crucial hours of both the Pacific Palisades and the Eaton fires, the high winds made it too dangerous to fly the aircraft, leaving them sitting on the tarmac while the fires spread into residential areas.
Similarly, well-trained teams of firefighters and expensive fire trucks are of little use if they can’t get to the fires. Many of the houses that were most at risk at the edge of the wildland burn zone — especially in the hills and canyons above the Pacific Palisades Fire — had been built in places that were difficult or impossible to access with fire engines and crews. Often, there was only one access road jammed with vehicles of panicked people trying to escape — at one point, the L.A. Fire Department used bulldozers to push cars off the road so fire trucks could gain access.
But the biggest fire accelerant was the homes themselves. Modern homes are full of plastic, making them burn hotter, faster, and more toxic than the house your grandmother grew up in. The couch you flop on to watch TV is probably made of polyester fabric wrapped around polyurethane foam and held together with engineered wood made with polymer-based glues. When it catches fire, it goes up like a can of gasoline — or worse. When polyurethane foam burns, it releases deadly hydrogen-cyanide gas. Then there is the foam insulation, vinyl flooring, laminate countertops, and the synthetic textiles in curtains and carpets and many of the clothes in your closet. In a fire, a modern house is its own flaming toxic Superfund site. And it can burn for hours, at temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees. In L.A., each burning home sent what Swain calls “a blizzard of embers” into the gusting wind, which eventually landed on dry roofs or were sucked into ventilation ducts of distant houses. Within a few hours, entire blocks were aflame.
For Trump, the L.A. fires were like a Netflix series in which he played the King of Chaos. He waged his usual war of disinformation and lies, doing everything he could to blame the fires on his nemesis, California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Among other things, Trump accused “Newscum” (as Trump calls him) and California Democrats of diverting water from L.A. in order to save smelt, an endangered fish in the California delta. He threatened to withhold federal relief funds if California did not send more of its water from the northern part of the state to L.A. It was all bullshit, of course. Los Angeles gets its water from underground aquifers, reservoirs in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains, and the Colorado River Aqueduct. In fact, the state reservoirs that store water used by Southern Californians were at or above full capacity for that time of the year. The problem was that the fires were so big and so fast-moving that the water-supply system was quickly overwhelmed (imagine trying to take a shower at the same time 10,000 neighbors also decide to shower — the pipes simply aren’t designed for that kind of flow). “There was enough water in storage in Southern California to drown the fire-affected areas in 20 feet of water, but you couldn’t get it to those places,” one water expert told The New York Times.
HIGH WINDS MADE IT TOO DANGEROUS TO FLY AIRCRAFT, LEAVING THEM SITTING ON THE TARMAC.
The problem with Trump’s lies is not only that they’re insultingly stupid and divert time and attention when first responders are trying to save people’s lives, but they also make it ever more difficult for many people to see the true risks of life on a superheated planet, including the health risks that come from, say, breathing in air that contains the toxic aerosolized remains of everything from bowling trophies to lithium batteries.
Nowhere is this more clear than with homeowner’s insurance. Insurers are in the business of making money by accurately assessing risk — an increasingly tough thing to do in a rapidly-changing climate. Insurers could face $45 billion in claims from the L.A. fires alone, increasing the likelihood that many companies will either dramatically jack up prices or leave the state altogether.
Even before the fires, California’s insurance market was already in crisis, as leading insurers had crunched the numbers and decided to abandon the state or not renew policies in fire-prone areas. More and more homeowners were forced to buy insurance from the state-backed FAIR Plan, which is the insurer of last resort in these areas. Statewide, the number of FAIR Plan policies in 2024 increased 41 percent from 2023, and 85 percent in the Pacific Palisades. But state-mandated insurance plans are a big loser for insurers. A few weeks after the fires were put out, California regulators said they would allow the FAIR Plan to assess insurance companies an additional $1 billion to help cover its claims.
As insurance costs soar, more homeowners may struggle to keep up with mortgage payments, risking widespread defaults. What will that do to the real-estate market in Los Angeles? “All the state’s efforts so far — raising money to support the FAIR Plan, sending money in for cleanup, making it easier for insurance companies to charge more — are aimed at mopping up the debris and keeping the mortgage machine going,” says climate-finance writer Susan Crawford. “The shell game is ending.”
And this is not just a problem for L.A. It’s a problem for America. The scale of known risks from climate change, amplified by future uncertainties, is so enormous that a Treasury council called it a “threat to the financial stability of the United States.”
Then there is the invasion of the grifters, who circle over disaster zones like vultures over a dead body. Virtually every homeowner I talked to in Los Angeles said they had received calls from someone — sometimes they identified themselves, but often they didn’t — who offered to buy their burned-out home for a fraction of its former value, or to loan them money at an outrageous rate. “It’s predatory,” says Samantha James, 24, who is a sixth-generation Black Californian. Her family lost one home in a fire, and they had other homes damaged.
MODERN HOMES ARE FULL OF PLASTIC, MAKING THEM BURN HOTTER, FASTER, AND MORE TOXIC.
“Our family received multiple calls from predatory investors within one day of the fire,” she says. “My dad yelled at them and hung up.”
In L.A., where some wealthy residents hired private firefighters to protect their homes and private security guards watched over the burned-out streets, you can see a foreshadowing of what disaster relief will look like under the Trump administration. Goodbye FEMA and any notion of a government response designed to aid those who need it most. You need help? OK, but it’s going to cost you.
But disasters also have a way of bonding communities together. James, who co-founded a group called the Altadena Recovery Team to help residents in need, says she and her family were eager to rebuild their homes and resume their lives. So was virtually everyone else I talked to. “Altadena Strong: We Will Rebuild” read a big banner downtown.
Yes, they will. But at what cost? And how? The future of L.A. is a future of heat, which means it is a future of fire. “What will the extreme [fire] risk days in 20, 30, or 40 years look like?” Swain asked during an interview on CNN. “It’s pretty clear that they will be even more extreme than what we’re seeing today.” And that’s not only true in L.A., but also in cities from Austin to Asheville, North Carolina, and San Diego to Vancouver. In this new, hotter world, fire is no longer just a wildland threat. It is a threat that is coming to a city near you.
It’s clear that Trump sees climate chaos as a feature, not a bug. So don’t expect a bold, forward-thinking response to help rebuild Los Angeles from any federal agency. Newsom probably grasps the risks of the climate crisis as well as any politician in America, but he also understands the need to rebuild the burned-out city quickly. He has already signed a $2.5 billion “Marshall Plan” to clean up debris and cut red tape for reconstruction. In the short term, the politically expeditious thing to do is to allow everyone to build back more or less exactly what they had before. If that happens, it’s like passing out tickets to a disaster theme park. Instead, city and state officials should push for higher-density zoning, which would allow more green space and fire-buffer zones. Tougher building codes could reduce flammable materials in home construction. Water infrastructure needs to be upgraded and power lines buried. And most important, development should be restricted in high-risk areas that are guaranteed to burn again.
None of this will be easy. There will be years of political infighting, courtroom battles, and financial chicanery. And even if all of these reforms happen, it would still only be a small step in the much-longer journey toward reinventing life on a hotter planet.
As one gun-toting security guard standing watch over a burned-out bank in the Pacific Palisades puts it to me: “This is a fucking catastrophe. I sure hope we all learn something from it.”