Greater Los Angeles is reeling from conflagrations that rival the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which killed approximately 300 people, destroyed roughly 3.3 square miles of the city, including over 17,000 structures, and left more than 100,000 residents homeless. It’s hard for anyone, on the scene or not, to fully appreciate the savagery which nature has deployed to even its score with humanity.
I try to suppress my sense of schadenfreude when contemplating the transformation of whole hillsides of multi-million-dollar homes to charred rubble. I find myself more upset about the devastation of humbler abodes in places like Pasadena and Altadena, where a lot of non-white families live(d). Hundreds of them are pleading for aid on GoFundMe. Should you wish to help them, follow the last link in this quote from Luke O’Neil’s recent Welcome to Hell World blog:
Please take a look at this lengthy list of resources compiled by Mutual Aid Los Angeles for people and animals displaced by the fires. It also includes donation and volunteer suggestions. This is a list of music industry people who have lost their homes including a number of fundraisers you might consider giving to. And here is a list of displaced Black families who can also use help.
So who’s to blame? To hear the media tell it, it’s not the fossil fuel industry. Some Republicans even claim illegal immigrants and homeless people like to set fires. Luke opines:
There are so many different moving parts to this story of course but the one that I have chosen to be personally pissed off about is the utterly disgusting and utterly predictable move by the right to – as they always do – blame all of this on immigrants and the homeless and “DEI.” In their worldview it is always always always the least powerful among us who are responsible for anything that ever goes wrong and never the actual culprits.
Meanwhile, please know that undocumented workers are funding America’s social safety net, programs they may never get to take advantage of:
The Social Security Administration receives billions in free money each year from an unexpected source: undocumented immigrants.
This group paid an estimated $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes in 2022, according to a recent analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning tax research group. Since unauthorized workers cannot collect retirement and other Social Security benefits without a change to their immigration status, the billions they pour into the program effectively act as a subsidy for American beneficiaries.
Wealthier property owners are resorting to hiring private firefighters. Arizona’s precious water is being siphoned off to save California billionaires’ estates. NYT reports on how a shopping mall developer imported water tankers from Arizona to make sure his mall in downtown Palisades escaped the flames. Demand for private firefighters in the region is strong and growing among those who can afford them, not that they all succeed. It’s kind of like auctioning off lifeboats on a sinking ship. Once they’re gone, grab a life preserver, if you can find one that’s not being held for ransom by the First Mate.
Say what you want about California Governor Gavin Newsom (who’s a bit too slick and ambitious for my taste, and should cut the hand-waving), but how many political leaders would be able to articulate what needs to be done as he does here (see around 3:30 in the NBC News video below). He and other officials have taken a lot of flak for low water pressure in fighting the Pacific Palisades fire. In part it was due to having emptied Pacific Palisades’ Santa Ynez reservoir for repairs, but the fire ruptured water pipes in homes and businesses, compounding the problem.
California’s Insurance Commissioner slapped a one-year moratorium on cancelling home insurance policies. That won’t help too many homeowners in Pacific Palisades, though:
Many homeowners cannot get or keep coverage. Last summer, 70 percent of State Farm’s customers in Pacific Palisades, about 1,600 homeowners, lost coverage when the insurer dropped policies in and around the Santa Monica Mountains. An analysis of state data by the San Francisco Chronicle found that more than 100,000 Californians had lost coverage from 2019 to 2024. The actor James Woods, who had to evacuate his Pacific Palisades home, posted on the social media site X at 1:14 a.m. on Wednesday that a major insurance company had “canceled all the policies in our neighborhood about four months ago.” (NYT 12/8/25)
In a wide-ranging article on California’s housing crunch last October, North Coast Journal said “In the late 1960s, the value of the typical California home was more than four times the average household’s income. Today, it’s worth more than eleven times what the average household makes.” This climate catastrophe won’t help, given how much housing stock has just vaporized with displaced residents needing places to live. But in the course of a year or so, the inability of homebuyers to afford down payments, mortgage interest, and home insurance ought to put brakes on the market, and home prices may stall or fall. But then, what will prevent monied investors who know how to profit from disasters, like hedge funds and real estate investment trusts, from buying up devastated properties at fire sale prices?
What California (and a lot of other states) need to do is to curb investors bent on acquiring residential properties to turn them into overpriced rental units. Since the 20008 mortgage crisis and then the pandemic, this has been the fate of many properties across the nation in or close to foreclosure.
Some less wealthy victims of these firestorms will be forced to abandon California, as have victims of severe weather, firestorms, floods, and water shortages elsewhere. Communities to which they flee will be strained to supply housing, schools, infrastructure, and fire and police protection. It’s a shell game that nobody without considerable assets can win.
And those who stay and attempt to rebuild will face labor shortages in construction and retail, schoolteachers, first responders, nurses, and domestic workers who can’t afford to live in the Golden State any longer, even as renters. Either that or they will be living out of their cars and pickup trucks.
There is little beyond reducing fossil fuel dependency that California can do to halt the vicious cycle of floods and droughts that climate change has wrought along the Pacific coast. Beyond criticizing the state for inadequate preparedness, there has been little willingness among major news outlets to point fingers at fossil fuel consumption and the energy companies that refuse to take any responsibility for climate change, despite hundreds of lawsuits aimed at holding them accountable. But as long as we continue to embrace our cars, air conditioning, and energy-sucking innovations such as cyber-currency mining and AIs, we are part of the problem.
And it won’t go away until enough of humanity and the resources we are depleting die off to force us into sustainable environmental stewardship. In my opinion, the planet will be much happier without us.
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