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We’re worse off than ever — but on a better track.
What a strange time to be thinking about climate change. I can remember few previous moments where the danger of the climate threat was as apparent — or as inescapable.
A massive heat wave has covered much of the Northern Hemisphere, sending temperatures from Beijing to New York to Rome into the 80s or 90s. Phoenix, Arizona, has just recorded — for the first time ever — 19 days in a row with a high above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. On Sunday, a weather station in western China recorded that country’s all-time hottest temperature: 126 degrees Fahrenheit. Wildfires are raging across southern Europe and northern Canada.
Nor is the land alone aflame. The oceans have set an all-time heat record, smashing the previous record set in 2016 and continuing to meander higher. The Atlantic Ocean is particularly stricken: The water near southern Florida, normally in the mid-80s at this time of year, has reached a stunning 98 degrees.
Courtesy of the Climate Change Institute from the University of Maine
But this is only a symptom of a broiling year. Last month was the warmest June ever measured, and 2023 is now more likely than not to be the warmest year ever measured. The nine hottest years on record are now the most recent nine years. If 2023 sets the all-time record, we will go 10 out of 10.
Even the stranger symptoms of climate change are becoming apparent. Scientists have long warned that as the climate warms, the atmosphere will hold more moisture, potentially turning what were once “normal” rain storms — summer thunderstorms that did not originate as a hurricane or tropical storm — into torrential downpours. Well, a series of normal seasonal storms just deluged the Northeast, flooding Vermont’s capital and paralyzing regional travel. On Sunday, six inches of rain fell in less than one hour in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, killing five people. Although these extreme events have not been directly attributed to climate change, they are exactly what climate scientists expect to see more of as global warming continues.
The effects of climate change are becoming unavoidable, omnipresent. In Washington, D.C., where I live, we are locked in a particularly perverse summer pattern where the air will either be extraordinarily hot and humid (because a south wind is blowing) or cooler but filled with toxic wildfire smoke (because a north wind is blowing). There is, in other words, no respite from climate impacts for the next several months: We get extreme heat or dangerous air.
It is shocking, astonishing, almost unreal. The MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes has compared these weeks to the moment in the film Don’t Look Up, when a comet, bound for a collision course with Earth, first appears in the night sky. The thing that we — in the broadest definition of we — were warned about has arrived. It is all the worse for the fact that, in all likelihood, this is one of the chillier summers of the rest of our lives.
And yet — although this may strike some readers as delusion — I will be honest that I am not filled with despair. In all honesty, I felt far worse about our ability to address, deal with, and adapt to climate change last summer. My mood was blackest almost exactly a year ago.
Perhaps you have forgotten. For more than a year, Senator Joe Manchin had been negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer over a capacious spending package called “Build Back Better.” It was a messy and frustrating thing to watch. Manchin could be a fickle negotiator, backing programs one day only to renege the next, but Schumer too sometimes seemed incapable of understanding Manchin’s demands.
Then, on July 15, 2022, Manchin abruptly pulled out of the talks. It seemed like the effort to pass a reconciliation bill had fallen apart. For the third time in as many decades, the Democratic Party — and specifically the Senate — had blown its chance to pass a climate law. The United States would remain the global laggard, if not the antagonist, of the fight against climate change.
And I despaired. Even though I had reported on climate change for eight years, the outlook then seemed worse than during any moment of the Trump administration. At least during that farce of a four-year term, one could point to hopeful signs in the real economy — like the rapid growth and falling cost of renewables — and wonder if decarbonization might eventually win the day.
But Manchin’s betrayal was an irreversible defeat, one that would condemn the United States to a backwater and retrograde role in the global energy system. China and the European Union, it seemed to me, were now set to dominate the renewable and electric vehicle industries while their American competitors fell behind. As an American who wished to see his country play a positive role in the climate fight, that mortified me; as an American who had to live in the United States, it scared me. Oil and gas companies would now deepen their influence over national politics, I feared, turning America into the world’s most powerful petrostate. Manchin, almost single-handedly, had set back the global climate fight almost a decade and locked in millions of tons of dangerous, wasteful carbon pollution.
And then a miracle happened — one so familiar to us now that perhaps we have forgotten how astonishing it seemed at the time. In those final weeks of July, Manchin — motivated, perhaps, by the wave of popular revulsion that greeted his initial withdrawal — had secretly restarted negotiations with Schumer. On July 27, the two men unveiled a new deal on climate, healthcare, and taxes. The ever-canny Manchin christened it “the Inflation Reduction Act.”
More miracles, now. The Senate — the long-standing enemy of global climate policy, the legislative body that had euthanized climate bills in the 1990s and 2010s — quickly passed the IRA. The House of Representatives galloped behind it. Biden signed it into law. And suddenly, for the first time in my life, the United States had something approaching a climate policy.
As the one-year anniversary of the IRA approaches, we’re going to see many reflections on how the law is going. (I’ve already written one.) Is the IRA working?, we’ll ask. Will it decarbonize the economy fast enough? What other policy do we need?
Those are crucial questions — and questions that this publication was founded to cover. But I hope we can remember how astonishing it is that the IRA exists at all. In November 2016, in March 2020, in November 2021 — even in July 2022 — I was not certain that America would ever pass a climate law.
From 1990 to 2022, the defining and unavoidable fact of American climate policy was that it barely existed. That is — somewhat unbelievably to me — no longer the case. It cedes neither perfection to the IRA nor improper deference to the Biden administration to say that it is okay to feel pretty good about that. Progress is possible. The one sure thing about the status quo is that it will change.
And it will change again. In the coming years, America will discover what much of the world already knows, which is that decarbonization is an extraordinarily difficult task. It will be grueling as a political question, as a policy question, as economics, as engineering, as techne. Meticulous mineral, industrial, and agricultural supply chains must be spun up at the same time that others — primarily the fossil-fuel industry, but also the global steel and cement complex that breeds humanity’s environment — must be profoundly reformed or shut down.
And climate change’s impacts — many times worse than this summer’s — will keep afflicting us. Scientists have warned for 20 years about the “hockey stick” rise of global temperatures, but as the writer Tim Sahay has put it, we are about to get whacked by that hockey stick, over and over and over again. It will hurt. Future political ruptures and defeats are coming, too, perhaps even more dreadful and deadly than those of the 2000s or 2010s.
But when and if those calamities surround us, I will want to remember that progress is possible, and that we can be as astonished by grace and rescue as by anguish and peril. Years ago, I read about a newspaper headline that announced the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg. “TREMENDOUS VICTORY IN PENNSYLVANIA,” it said, and then, below: “Reverent Gratitude of the People.” Reverent gratitude — not a phrase that climate writers use too often, and not one that I would ever use to describe a politician. But when and if humanity triumphs over climate change, and brings our little biosphere into a peaceful and teeming bounty, I do think we will feel a reverent gratitude — for what we will have learned, for what we will have done, and for what we will have averted. And on that day, a billion anonymous heroes will have helped secure that victory, and a trillion contingencies will have whispered it into being.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the day is searing and the rains are agonizing. The way before us is long and darkening. If you find yourself surprised by gratitude, hold fast to it.
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Recovering from the Los Angeles wildfires will be expensive. Really expensive. Insurance analysts and banks have already produced a wide range of estimates of both what insurance companies will pay out and overall economic loss. AccuWeatherhas put out an eye-catching preliminary figure of $52 billion to $57 billion for economic losses, with the service’s chief meteorologist saying that the fires have the potential to “become the worst wildfire in modern California history based on the number of structures burned and economic loss.” On Thursday, J.P. Morgan doubled its previous estimate for insured losses to $20 billion, with an economic loss figure of $50 billion — about the gross domestic product of the country of Jordan.
The startlingly high loss figures from a fire that has only lasted a few days and is (relatively) limited in scope show just how distinctly devastating an urban fire can be. Enormous wildfires thatcover millions of acres like the 2023 Canadian wildfires can spew ash and particulate matter all over the globe and burn for months, darkening skies and clogging airways in other countries. And smaller — and far deadlier fires — than those still do not produce the same financial roll.
It’s in coastal Southern California where you find large population centers areas known by all to be at extreme risk of fire. And so a fire there can destroy a whole neighborhood in a few hours and put the state’s insurance system into jeopardy.
One reason why the projected economic impacts of the fires are so high is that the structures that have burned and the land those structures sit on are very valuable. Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Santa Monica contain some of the most sought-after real estate on planet earth, with typical home prices over $2 million. Pacific Palisades itself has median home values of around $3 million, according to JPMorgan Chase.
The AccuWeather estimates put the economic damage for the Los Angeles fires at several times previous large, urban fires — the Maui wildfire in 2023 was estimated to cause around $14 billion of economic loss, for example — while the figure would be about a third or a quarter of a large hurricane, which tend to strike areas with millions of people in them across several states.
“The fires have not been contained thus far and continue to spread, implying that estimates of potential economic and insured losses are likely to increase,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote Thursday.
That level of losses would make the fires costlier in economic terms than the 2018 Butte County Camp Fire, whose insured losses of $10 billion made it California’s costliest at the time. That fire was far larger than the Los Angeles fires, spreading over 150,000 acres compared to just over 17,000 acres for the Palisades Fire and over 10,000 acres for the Eaton Fire. It also led to more than 80 deaths in the town of Paradise.
So far, around 2,000 homes have been destroyed,according to the Los Angeles Times,a fraction of the more than 19,000 structures affected by the Camp Fire. The difference in estimated losses comes from the fact that homes in Pacific Palisades weigh in at more than six times those in rural Butte, according to JPMorgan.
While insured losses get the lion’s share of attention when it comes to the cost impacts of a natural disaster, the potential damages go far beyond the balance sheet of insurers.
For one, it’s likely that many affected homeowners did not even carry insurance, either because their insurers failed to renew their existing policies or the homeowners simply chose to go without due to the high cost of what insurance they could find. “A larger than usual portion of the losses caused by the wildfires will be uninsured,” according to Morningstar DBRS, which estimated total insured losses at more than $8 billion. Many homeowners carry insurance from California’s backup FAIR Plan, which may itself come under financial pressure, potentially leading to assessments from the state’s policyholders to bolster its ability to pay claims.
AccuWeather arrived at its economic impact figure by looking not just at losses from property damage but also wages that go unearned due to economic activity slowing down or halting in affected areas, infrastructure that needs to be repaired, supply chain issues, and transportation snarls. Even when homes and businesses aren’t destroyed, people may be unable to work due to evacuations; businesses may close due to the dispersal of their customers or inability of their suppliers to make deliveries. Smoke inhalation can lead to short-, medium-, and long-term health impacts that take a dent out of overall economic activity.
The high level of insured losses, meanwhile, could mean that insurers’ will see less surplus and could have to pay more for reinsurance, Nancy Watkins, an actuary and wildfire expert at Milliman, told me in an email. This may mean that they would have to shed yet more policies “in order to avoid deterioration in their financial strength ratings,” just as California has been trying to lure insurers back with reforms to its dysfunctional insurance market.
The economic costs of the fire will likely be felt for years if not decades. While it would take an act of God far stronger than a fire to keep people from building homes on the slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains or off the Pacific Coast, the city that rebuilds may be smaller, more heavily fortified, and more expensive than the one that existed at the end of last year. And that’s just before the next big fire.
Suburban streets, exploding pipes, and those Santa Ana winds, for starters.
A fire needs three things to burn: heat, fuel, and oxygen. The first is important: At some point this week, for a reason we have yet to discover and may never will, a piece of flammable material in Los Angeles County got hot enough to ignite. The last is essential: The resulting fires, which have now burned nearly 29,000 acres, are fanned by exceptionally powerful and dry Santa Ana winds.
But in the critical days ahead, it is that central ingredient that will preoccupy fire managers, emergency responders, and the public, who are watching their homes — wood-framed containers full of memories, primary documents, material wealth, sentimental heirlooms — transformed into raw fuel. “Grass is one fuel model; timber is another fuel model; brushes are another — there are dozens of fuel models,” Bobbie Scopa, a veteran firefighter and author of the memoir Both Sides of the Fire Line, told me. “But when a fire goes from the wildland into the urban interface, you’re now burning houses.”
This jump from chaparral shrubland into neighborhoods has frustrated firefighters’ efforts to gain an upper hand over the L.A. County fires. In the remote wilderness, firefighters can cut fire lines with axes, pulaskis, and shovels to contain the blaze. (A fire’s “containment” describes how much firefighters have encircled; 25% containment means a quarter of the fire perimeter is prevented from moving forward by manmade or natural fire breaks.)
Once a fire moves into an urban community and starts spreading house to house, however, as has already happened in Santa Monica, Pasadena, and other suburbs of Los Angeles, those strategies go out the window. A fire break starves a fire by introducing a gap in its fuel; it can be a cleared strip of vegetation, a river, or even a freeway. But you can’t just hack a fire break through a neighborhood. “Now you’re having to use big fire engines and spray lots of water,” Scopa said, compared to the wildlands where “we do a lot of firefighting without water.”
Water has already proven to be a significant issue in Los Angeles, where many hydrants near Palisades, the biggest of the five fires, had already gone dry by 3:00 a.m. Wednesday. “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quiñones explained in a news conference later that same day.
LADWP said it had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the fires started, but the city’s water supply was never intended to stop a 17,000-acre fire. The hydrants are “meant to put out a two-house fire, a one-house fire, or something like that,” Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, told me. Additionally, homeowners sometimes leave their sprinklers on in the hopes that it will help protect their house, or try to fight fires with their own hoses. At a certain point, the system — just like the city personnel — becomes overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the unfolding disaster.
Making matters worse is the wind, which restricted some of the aerial support firefighters typically employ. As gusts slowed on Thursday, retardant and water drops were able to resume, helping firefighters in their efforts. (The Eaton Fire, while still technically 0% contained because there are no established fire lines, has “significantly stopped” growing, The New York Times reports). Still, firefighters don’t typically “paint” neighborhoods; the drops, which don’t put out fires entirely so much as suppress them enough that firefighters can fight them at close range, are a liability. Kearns, however, told me that “the winds were so high, they weren’t able to do the water drops that they normally do and that are an enormous part of all fire operations,” and that “certainly compounded the problems of the fire hydrants running dry.”
Firefighters’ priority isn’t saving structures, though. “Firefighters save lives first before they have to deal with fire,” Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the author of an ongoing case study of the 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, California, told me. That can be an enormous and time-consuming task in a dense area like suburban Los Angeles, and counterintuitively lead to more areas burning down. Speaking specifically from his conclusions about the Camp fire, which was similarly a wildland-urban interface, or WUI fire, Maranghides added, “It is very, very challenging because as things deteriorate — you’re talking about downed power lines, smoke obstructing visibility, and you end up with burn-overs,” when a fire moves so quickly that it overtakes people or fire crews. “And now you have to go and rescue those civilians who are caught in those burn-overs.” Sometimes, that requires firefighters to do triage — and let blocks burn to save lives.
Perhaps most ominously, the problems don’t end once the fire is out. When a house burns down, it is often the case that its water pipes burst. (This also adds to the water shortage woes during the event.) But when firefighters are simultaneously pumping water out of other parts of the system, air can be sucked down into those open water pipes. And not just any air. “We’re not talking about forest smoke, which is bad; we’re talking about WUI smoke, which is bad plus,” Maranghides said, again referring to his research in Paradise. “It’s not just wood burning; it’s wood, plastics, heavy metals, computers, cars, batteries, everything. You don’t want to be breathing it, and you don’t want it going into your water system.”
Water infrastructure can be damaged in other ways, as well. Because fires are burning “so much hotter now,” Kearns told me, contamination can occur due to melting PVC piping, which releases benzene, a carcinogen. Watersheds and reservoirs are also in danger of extended contamination, particularly once rains finally do come and wash soot, silt, debris, and potentially toxic flame retardant into nearby streams.
But that’s a problem for the future. In the meantime, Los Angeles — and lots of it — continues to burn.
“I don’t care how many resources you have; when the fires are burning like they do when we have Santa Anas, there’s so little you can do,” Scopa said. “All you can do is try to protect the people and get the people out, and try to keep your firefighters safe.”
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Thursday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Five major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event this week:
Officials have not made any statements about the cause of any of the fires yet.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At about 27,000 acres burned, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 2,000 structures damaged so far, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 1,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between very wet and very dry years over the past eight decades. But climate change is expected to make dry years drier in Los Angeles. “The LA area is about 3°C warmer than it would be in preindustrial conditions, which (all else being equal) works to dry fuels and makes fires more intense,” Brown wrote.