The Rich Get Richer As Los Angeles Burns Out of Control

"Kill the facts we hate."

Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash

Last week as the fires began to rage out of control in Los Angeles, the national information landscape was full of toxic rhetoric from the right attacking Governor Newsom, the fire department, local Democrats, and trolling LA and California. It was the hateful stuff we’ve all become so accustomed to that we are pretty much immune to it, except perhaps in contrast to the kind of quiet dignity displayed by many of the victims of the fire, the firefighters working round the clock to stop it, and others who are mobilizing to help the community in a multitude of ways.

One thing that did stand out, however, is how many folks were out there preemptively attacking climate scientists before most even had a chance to grok the scope of the disaster. As Bill McKibben noted on his Substack, allies of the in the incoming Trump administration were already talking about how to shut down climate science as soon as they got into office. Specifically, he observes:

It’s the web of climate science targeted by Project 2025, which envisions an end to federal support even for the web of thermometers that measures our descent into something like hell. That’s because they understand (correctly) that this science is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” As Marc Morano, perhaps the country’s most indefatigable climate denier, put it on Fox yesterday when asked about climate researchers: “You have to cut the funding. You have to cut the program. You have to fire the employees, or at the very least, since it is hard to fire people, reassign them.”

Perhaps they were out there up front because they knew that they were getting ready to steer the ship of state as far away as possible from being able to address the climate crisis, so it’s important not just to deny it, but to attack, defund, and fire anyone who can talk about it credibly. And while they’re at it, make sure to politicize every climate related fire, flood, drought, mass migration of people fleeing dire conditions fed by climate, so you have someone else to blame. The key is not to identify root causes or solve problems but to keep the hate going along with the endless war on the truth, the assault on our last shreds of decency, and the ginning up of disdain for everyone and everything that is not part of the distorted MAGA universe.

Kill the facts we hate.

What they don’t want is for folks to realize that what we are seeing in Los Angeles is the new normal now that we have gone past the emissions limits that the Paris Accord proposed. And they certainly don’t want people to realize that the climate-denying policies of the Trump administration will only put us in graver peril with each year driving us further down the road to normalized planetary disaster where every climate-related catastrophe is deemed to be the fault of some demonized other, foreign or domestic.

As Doug Porter noted last week over at Words and Deeds, there was disgracefully little to no mention of climate change in the mainstream media coverage of the fires, but by week’s end, the Los Angeles Times did report this:

“We’re in a whiplash event now, wet to dry, in Southern California,” said Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who led the research. “The evidence shows that hydroclimate whiplash has already increased due to global warming, and further warming will bring about even larger increases.”

The devastating wildfires that have ravaged Southern California erupted following a stark shift from wet weather to extremely dry weather — a phenomenon scientists describe as “hydroclimate whiplash.”

New research shows these abrupt wet-to-dry and dry-to-wet swings, which can worsen wildfires, flooding and other hazards, are growing more frequent and intense because of human-caused climate change.

The same day, the BBC also cited this study and underlined that “Scientists say in a new study that climate change has boosted what they call these ‘whiplash’ conditions globally by 31-66% since the middle of the 20th Century.”

Of course, there are other factors like wrongheaded planning and overdevelopment, as Mike Davis observed in Ecology of Fear, but the fact that these conditions will continue to make us more and more vulnerable is undeniable. Be ready for the next catastrophic fire or flood—they will happen. And Trump will blame Democrats or immigrants or homeless people or anything else but the elephant in the room.

If any future administration is ever going to do something to adapt to and blunt the hard edges of our warming world, it will cost exponentially more with each year we waste not addressing it. Saving what can be saved will take enormous focus, will, and a bounty of new resources. It will take BIG government and global cooperation on a scale we’ve never seen before. That is why climate scientists have targets on their backs.

In fact, while Trump and company are busy attacking folks pointing out the inconvenient truth, their real agenda will be slashing the government’s ability to address climate while redirecting resources to those who are both the most responsible for the crisis and least likely to suffer from its consequences—the super-rich.

As Portside Labor reports, on the verge of the coming rush to provide tax cuts to the already obscenely wealthy, the news comes that their personal worth is already higher than it has ever been:

Of the world’s 15 richest individuals, the Bloomberg data show, 14 call the United States home. The richest of these rich: Elon Musk. He started 2024 with a personal fortune worth a mere $229 billion. He ended it with a net worth of $442 billion, the largest personal fortune the world has ever seen.

Overall, the world’s 500 richest ended 2024 worth a combined $9.8 trillion. Some 34 percent of the $1.5 trillion they gained over the course of the year came in the five weeks after Donald Trump’s election.

With this explosion of wealth for the richest of the rich, Portside observes that many in elite circles have now come to see $100 million as the “new yardstick” defining what it takes to be comfortably wealthy with all the accompanying costs. What do to about this problem? The GOP has an answer:

Leaders in the new Republican-majority Congress, Politico reports, are already busily debating just how they can most expeditiously lower the already low taxes the richest among us need to pay. Their goal: to at least extend the expiring Trump tax cut originally enacted in 2017.

In 2025, households in America’s top 1 percent will save an average $61,090 thanks to that 2017 tax cut. Households in the top 0.1 percent will pocket even more, with an average savings of $252,300. And households in the bottom 60 percent? They’ll on average save less than $500 each.

So the next time you hear someone protesting that we just don’t have the resources to address these problems on a scale that is commensurate with the challenge, consider that the man who will likely be in charge of making our federal government more “efficient” by slashing and burning his way through it, is the richest man on earth, ever, and the GOP is rushing to give him a massive tax cut while Los Angeles burns and armies of the dispossessed roam our streets in search of shelter. If you are lucky, you might walk away with 500 bucks for your trouble.

Back in Los Angeles, some of the folks who won’t be getting an obscene tax cut are worried that the same class dynamics may affect the way resources are distributed in the aftermath of the disaster. As Reuters reports:

While the fires that have devastated celebrity neighborhoods near Malibu have caught the world's attention, a similar-sized blaze in Eaton Canyon, north of Los Angeles, has ravaged Altadena, a racially and economically diverse community.

Black and Latino families have lived in Altadena for generations and the suburb is also popular with younger artists and engineers working at the nearby NASA rocket lab who were attracted by the small-town vibe and access to nature.

Many residents . . . were concerned that government resources would be channeled towards high-profile areas popular with A-Listers, while insurance companies might shortchange less affluent households that do not have the financial means to contest fire claims.

If history is any gauge, those concerns may turn out to be justified. We’ll see what emerges from the ashes in the coming weeks.

Coda: What’s Being Lost

Among the many who lost everything last week was my best friend. He lost his home, all the stuff of his family memories, everything. But his family and their dogs got out safely while he was at work, so there’s that. Still, I can’t stop thinking of the fact that for twenty years or so I used to visit him in a small, cramped, rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica that he lived in with his wife and three kids while he worked long, hard weeks and saved to pay off his medical school debt and buy a dream house for his family by the time he was already later in his career. As we all know, housing in Southern California is so expensive that even some professionals have to stretch to afford it.

He’s a doctor, a liver specialist who I credit with saving my life when I developed acute liver failure while traveling in Maui a year and a half ago. When I told him what the tests revealed at the local clinic, he diagnosed the problem over the phone, called in the proper medication to help get me safely home on a flight and to the emergency room in San Diego. He’s saved a lot of other lives besides mine. When we last communicated, his first words were, “It’s good to be alive.” That’s the kind of person he is.

When we were younger, sometimes we used to drive with other friends from the San Fernando Valley where our families all lived to the beach in Malibu or Santa Monica by taking Topanga Canyon Boulevard over the mountains to the west. My friends and I would hike in Will Rogers State Historic Park or stop somewhere just off Pacific Coast Highway for some food.

Other times we’d cruise around Hollywood, up across Sunset to the hills or back toward the boulevard to see music at a club—X, Los Lobos, Jane’s Addiction, and more. We explored the whole city over the years from the back country to downtown, UCLA, Dodger Stadium, the Coliseum, Pasadena, Venice, you name the neighborhood. It felt like the whole world could be found in one city because it could. And that was beautiful.

My family knows people in Altadena too, and my brother had a friend he’d visit there frequently. They lost their house too. We have friends who’ve been evacuated and are waiting on pins and needles. Which way will the winds of fate blow? Nobody knows.

Unlike many San Diegans, I have no animus toward Los Angeles, having grown up there and here in San Diego as well. I find joy in both places and love them equally. They are home.

But today I mourn for Los Angeles and everything that has and will be lost as fires scorch through the region, street by street, turning memory after memory, home after home, into wreckage and ash.