The west coast wildfires reveal Washington’s failures

I published an article yesterday reflecting on crises including the wildfires across Los Angeles. That post reflected on the unique international identity of Los Angeles, and the sad irony of cities on both coasts of the United States suffering climate disasters while Congress continues to sit on its hands, deferring to a predatory fossil fuel industry that will make future climate fueled disasters only worse and more frequent.

This post will look beyond Congress, particularly at socioeconomic dimensions of the wildfires and some impacts that will continue to be felt long after the fires are finally extinguished.

We’re all in this together

The state of American politics might suggest that some (or, more accurately, a great many) wealthy Americans think that their wealth can insulate them from the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

The particular voters who have kept corporate Democrats and fascist Republicans in office have made choices to privilege their bank accounts above Climate Justice.

None loom larger than the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. He not only invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Trump’s (potentially illegitimate) victory, but has long envisioned humanity pursuing his vain dream of colonizing Mars.

It would not be unfair to say that Mr. Musk is willing to sacrifice millions of human lives in the service of his own personal aggrandizement. Every mass murderer in human history has pursued more limited, less devious ambitions.

Beyond Musk, any number of other figures have chosen any number of other ways to put their personal fortune before values including sustainability or the survivability of the future for their children and grandchildren.

Intergenerational irony

The profound idiocy embodied by Washington is exposed by indigenous perspectives of intergenerational solidarity and accountability. In some indigenous communities, communities are invited to consider the impacts of their decisions today across the next seven generations. This perspective stands in sharp and dramatic contrast from a civilization most concerned with the opulence of its most thankless and least praiseworthy figures.

There is a great deal of poetic justice in the suffering endured by America in the present, given our country’s abject refusal to consider the needs of the future at any point in the recent past.

At least three further ironies emerge when examining this disaster and its impacts that will continue to be felt across the region for decades.

Neighborhoods doomed by decisions made elsewhere

Like most of California, Pacific Palisades voted by large margins for Democrats, including in the most recent presidential election.

The failures of corporate Democrats to prioritize climate justice place them in the disturbing role of betraying their own base. It should be no surprise to anyone that the Democratic Party’s leaders are more concerned about their own careers than anyone else, or the future we all share.

But the idea of allowing conditions to fester that will eventually kill the party’s own supporters takes the notion of oblivious political narcissism to a whole new level.

Ultimately, the neighborhoods in Los Angeles that burned to the ground over the last week were doomed by people who live in other neighborhoods in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, where politicians and their aides made conscious—and continuing—decisions to ignore decades of warnings.

Wealth won’t save you

Beyond Elon Musk, many Americans who enjoy wealth imagine that their resources can offer them some sort of respite from the mounting global climate catastrophe. This week reveals the futility of that pretense.

One wealthy real estate investor who posted a plea on social media for private firefighters to save his home—after having previously bragged about not paying taxes—was dragged so mercilessly by the Twitterverse that he ultimately deleted his account.

The market for underground bunkers has found a steady stream of buyers eager to exempt themselves from the problems that decades of ignorant social policy have invited. For instance, Atlas Survival Bunkers claims to be the world’s number one supplier of bunkers. Based in Texas, the company offers:

a wide range of survival shelters designed to safeguard you and your family in the event of a pandemic outbreak, civil unrest, malicious mobs, and threats such as biological, nuclear fallout, or EMP attacks originating from either domestic or international sources.

The company's precast concrete options start at $20,000, and many of their other models are undoubtedly more expensive. Every one of their customers, it seems, is willing to throw away tens of thousands of dollars in a futile hope to save themselves from calamities that can only be addressed collectively.

So-called climate preppers imagine that their individual actions can provide a pathway to sustainability. Entire bodies of fiction have been dedicated to this premise, like the Fallout series of games and movies. If I manage to find enough time away from work to write another post this week, I hope to focus it on the prescience of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

But wealth offers no insulation from the climate crisis. The fate of Pacific Palisades should make that painfully and inescapably clear.

Before the wildfires burned the neighborhood to the ground, the median listing price of a home in Pacific Palisades was $4.7 million. An entire neighborhood of some of the richest people in the second largest city of the world‘s richest country just went up in flames.

If that doesn’t offer a wake up call to wealthy Americans in other cities to finally start prioritizing the needs of the future over their own bank accounts, nothing likely ever will.

Housing

Meanwhile, the state of California continues to struggle with a housing shortage made only worse by the recent and ongoing calamity.

California was grappling with a profound housing shortage even before the ongoing fires burned tens of thousands of homes to the ground and reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble.

Our state includes the largest homeless population of any state in the country, driven largely by evictions of long-time residents unable to compete with other renters and buyers in housing markets that ultimately serve the interest of property developers, more than working families or people who need shelter.

Millions of other Californians who do have homes remain precarious. According to a recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California, “one in six middle-class renters in California are now spending over half their income on housing.”

Because our system treats housing like an opportunity for private investment, rather than a human right, we have remained entirely reliant on private developers to build the housing stock needed by the state’s diverse workforce and our families.

This moment reveals the inadequacy of that approach, as well. To the extent the profit motive constrained the ability to mobilize resources to house the state’s residents even before the wildfire, things just got immeasurably worse. Hundreds of thousands of Southern California residents have been displaced, and at least tens of thousands of them have lost their homes entirely and will be unable to return to them.

Where do leaders in either Washington or Sacramento envision them going when the fires subside and the smoke clears?

Countries with robust public housing models are more resilient in the face of these climate disasters. We could learn from their examples, or instead continue making stupid decisions that make predictable—and preventable—problems immeasurably worse.