It’s Time to Recruit the Rich

As wildfires spread through the Los Angeles area, one resident of a tony neighborhood made a desperate plea for help on social media. “Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home in Pacific Palisades?” asked Keith Wasserman on X. “Will pay any amount.” The reaction was predictable: Some users expressed their wish that Wasserman’s house would burn down, while others found earlier tweets in which he had cheered Donald Trump’s pledges to lower taxes, and even once said “Real estate ballers don’t pay any taxes!”

It’s hard to feel too much sympathy for a rich guy getting what looks like a pointed object lesson in the necessity of universal services: If you’re disappointed that the government wasn’t able to save your house in a disaster, perhaps you should reconsider your advocacy for lowering the taxes that fund things like the fire department. But once we get the mockery out of our systems, perhaps we should approach Mr. Wasserman and his like-minded peers with a more open heart, and see this particular disaster as an opportunity to convince more people like him that we’re all in the path of the same threats.

Because like it or not, addressing climate change requires the help of the wealthy — not just a small number of megadonors to environmental organizations, but the rich as a class. The more they understand that their money will not insulate them from the effects of a warming planet, the more likely they are to be allies in the climate fight, and vital ones at that.

As of this writing the fires in Los Angeles are still burning, but it already appears that they could be among the costliest in history, not because of their size but because they are reducing some of the priciest real estate in America to ashes. It’s another vivid lesson in a truth more people need to learn: Climate change will affect everyone, no matter how much money you have.

Yes, those most affected will be people without resources, who live in vulnerable areas they can’t easily flee, and who are unable to harden their homes and communities against the most destructive effects of warming. Those with the lowest incomes feel the brunt of climate change in multiple ways.

But there’s a difference between being less vulnerable and being invulnerable. There are only so many times you can rebuild your beach house, only so many private firefighters you can hire, and only so often you can turn up the air conditioning. We saw in Asheville how a place believed to be a “climate haven” turned out to be just as susceptible to natural disaster as anywhere else. In the end, climate change comes for us all. And experiencing a climate-related event has a significant impact on whether people both accept the reality of climate change and prioritize it as a political issue.

The more wealthy people believe that climate change is a threat to them and support policies that mitigate emissions, the better the chances that those policies will be translated into law. A number of studies by political scientists in recent years have shown that the policy preferences of the wealthy are more likely to prevail; it’s one of those findings that no one is surprised by, but it’s useful to have it demonstrated empirically. The wealthy are more politically active, donate more money, and are generally treated by politicians as though they cannot be ignored.

So while mass mobilization is a key component of successful movements, it doesn’t hurt to have rich people on your side, too. Surveys already show that higher-income voters are somewhat more likely to support policies to address climate change, though the differences are not that large. And if increasing numbers of them decide that the government has to institute more climate-friendly policies, wealthier voters might even put pressure on the party that usually represents their interests as a class: the GOP.

Admittedly, getting the wealthy to unite with the rest of us in common purpose will not be easy. One of the primary functions of wealth is to insulate the privileged from negative externalities of existence, both large and small. It separates them from ordinary people and the ordinary headaches of life. The wealthy glide through the world as though on a moving walkway, exempted from having to wait in lines or get their hands dirty or spend time worrying about their vulnerability. And they often use their political influence to insulate themselves even further, advocating for policies that starve the government of funds and exacerbate inequality.

Moreover, disasters like the fires we’re seeing right now wind up being interpreted through existing political lenses; Donald Trump is blaming them on the governor of California, to whom he refers, classy and mature as ever, as “Gavin Newscum,” while other conservatives are angrily denying that warming temperatures had anything to do with the destruction in southern California.

Nevertheless, there’s room for a generous response, to say even to the wealthiest of victims that we’re sorry they suffered the consequences of warming and hope they’ll become allies in the fight against climate change, because we’re all in it together. We all need robust public infrastructure (including an effective fire department), along with policies that will make wildfires and other disasters less destructive. The more people who come into the tent — even if it was only once they had to flee a disaster they only thought would affect the little people — the better off we’ll be.