My Latest: Facing the Fires in the Age of Consequences

In Los Angeles, as everywhere, facing up to our new climate reality requires not liberal technocratic tweaks but radical transformation.

Pacific Palisades fire. Photo: CAL FIRE Official.

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Dear friends,

Wildfires are burning on both coasts, in SoCal and D.C.—the former climate-driven, the latter driven by the Orwellian winds of MAGA fascism. The news cycle has moved on to the latter conflagration, but the California fires represent an emergency with no term limit.

Sorry, enough metaphors.

My new piece for The Nation looks at the national media response to the historic wildfires in LA, and the scene is not pretty. Because what’s lacking is any real reckoning with our new climate reality. Here are the opening paragraphs…

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.… We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

So begins the latest “State of the Climate Report” by an international group of 14 leading climate scientists from the United States, Europe, Australia, China, and Brazil, declaring in no uncertain terms that we have entered what’s coming to be known as the Age of Consequences. “Despite [half a century of] warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high,” the scientists report. “We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world.… We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence.”

You might think the harrowing scenes of Los Angeles burning would elicit a similar reckoning in our national conversation, but almost nothing resembling those stark, factual, and, yes, alarming sentences will be found in the pages of our august organs of elite opinion. Rather than such clear language about our global emergency—the all-important context in which LA’s situation must be understood—the mainstream response has largely sought to contain the wildfire narrative within an Overton window of acceptable, i.e., unalarming, discourse. Much of the media is treating LA’s tragedy as extraordinary, yes, and somehow related to climate change, but ultimately manageable and preventable—if only smarter state and local policies and protocols are implemented.

I grew up next door to Altadena, California, in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. I have old friends in the evacuation zones and family members who live in other high-risk areas of Southern California—and as a SoCal native, the scenes of destruction and loss have been especially hard to watch. But as a veteran climate journalist, it’s equally hard to watch the national response. It’s a clarifying moment, in all the worst ways, as we witness our political and media culture stumbling headlong into the era of climate consequences, the dreadful harvest of 30-plus years of denial, obstruction, delay, and centrist greenwashing. …

I go on to offer some examples, and one serious alternative from an expert in urban climate adaptation. You can read the rest here.

In other updates: I’ll be increasing my writing for The Nation this year, as I take on the new role of climate-justice correspondent. So I’ll be in your inbox a bit more often than I was last year, while I worked on longer-range projects, including a long-form reported feature on the climate and political crises in Nepal, coming soon in The Baffler; and my new book, forthcoming from Haymarket in June, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe (you can now read the book description on Haymarket’s site). I’ll be back with more updates on those and other projects in the weeks ahead.

Stay safe and well, everyone. Take care of each other.

-Wen

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