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wildfires
Total Devastation as LA Suffers What Could Be 'Costliest Wildfire Disaster in American History'
One estimate put the damage and economic losses from the fires—which are still burning—at $135-150 billion.
Jan 10, 2025
"Will this be the event that finally wakes everyone up?" wondered climate scientist Peter Kalmus on Thursday, with Los Angeles in its third day of multiple fires consuming large swaths in and around the city, forcing residents to flee and leaving destruction in their wake.
Late Thursday, the Los Angeles Times, citing officials, reported that at least 10 people have been killed by the blazes and upward of 9,000 homes, businesses, and other buildings appear to have been destroyed or damages in the two largest fires, the Palisades and Eaton fires.
The fires, now in their fourth day and still largely not contained, could be "at least collectively, the costliest wildfire disaster in American history," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles told the LA Times.
AccuWeather, a weather data and news company, on Thursday estimated damage and economic losses from the fires at $135-150 billion. A JPMorgan analyst, Jimmy Bhullar, gave a smaller figure to The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. He said that losses from the fires are pegged "close to $50 billion."
AccuWeather chief meterologist Jonathan Porter said that "fast-moving, wind-driven infernos" have spawned "one of the costliest wildfire disasters in modern U.S. history."
"To put this into perspective, the total damage and economic loss from this wildfire disaster could reach nearly 4% of the annual GDP of the state of California," Porter said.
For comparison, Hurricane Katrina, which devastated parts of the American South including New Orleans in 2005, cost $101 billion in 2023 dollars, according to the Insurance Information Institute, citing numbers from the insurance company Aon (other sources have put the cost of Hurricane Katrina at higher).
All told, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection counts five "currently active incidents" of fires burning in Los Angeles County. The Palisades Fire, which has so far burned over 20,000 acres, is 8% contained, and the Eaton Fire, which has burned more than 13,000 acres, is 3% contained. The Kenneth Fire, which has grown to 1,000 acres, is 35% contained. Two smaller fires, the Hurst Fire and the Lidia Fire, are 37% and 75% contained, respectively.
One homeowner in the Pacific Palisades remarked that his neighborhood "looks like Berlin—or it looks like some part of World War II...Everything is burned down. It’s just terrible."
The fire are also expected to deepen California's insurance crisis. San Francisco Chroniclereporting from last summer on data from 10 of the largest insurance companies revealed that more than 100,000 Californians lost their home insurance between 2019 and 2024. Insurance companies "overwhelmingly cited" wildfire risk as the reason for rolling back coverage.
California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara on Thursday issued a one-year moratorium on homeowners insurance nonrenewals and cancellations for ZIP codes impacted by the fires.
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Critics Say Trump Got 'Nothing Right' About Causes of LA Wildfires
One observer blasted MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."
Jan 09, 2025
Progressive critics were left shaking their heads this week as Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA allies absurdly blamed the Los Angeles County wildfires on everything from an ichthyophile governor to diversity policies—while ignoring what experts say is the true cause of the deadly infernos.
On Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth social media platform to falsely accuse Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—whom he repeatedly called "Newscum"—of refusing "to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water... to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way."
Newsom's office responded to Trump's accusation by correctly noting that "there is no such document as the water restoration declaration."
Trump also accused Newsom of wanting "to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water," a red herring and false statement given that the state's plan to protect the endangered delta smelt actually involved increasing the amount of fresh water flowing into its habitat.
Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, toldMSNBC newsletter editor Ryan Teague Beckwith on Thursday that Trump got "nothing right" in his post.
Summarizing his interview with Mount, Teague Beckwith wrote:
Without getting into too much detail, here's what did happen... During Trump's first term, his administration sought to divert some of the water coming into a river delta near San Francisco to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, among others. They came up with a plan for the water, which Newsom challenged in court. The Biden administration later negotiated a new plan with California on how to divvy up the water.
This is basic stuff, so the fact that Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed should give you a sense of how disengaged he is with his own policy.
Meanwhile, MAGA acolyte and soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency co-leader Elon Musk used his X social media network—formerly Twitter—to amplify racist posts disparaging Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, an antisemitic diatribe by defamatory conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, implicitly sexist and homophobic attacks on Los Angeles' fire chief, and his own frequent aspersions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Slate web editor Nitish Pahwa condemned MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."
"Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we're getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future," Pahwa said.
"In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes," Pahwa added. "Climate change doesn't just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too."
Climate experts and defenders weighed in with science-based explanations for the increase in extreme weather events like the Los Angeles County wildfires.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Thursday, Aaron Regunberg, Public Citizen's Climate Program senior policy counsel, noted that "a recent study found that nearly all of the observed increase in wildfire-burned area in California over the past half-century is attributable to anthropogenic climate change."
"This devastation is the direct result of Big Oil's conduct," Regunberg asserted.
As Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, "This is exactly the sort of disaster that Exxon's own scientists predicted more than 50 years ago, but they spent billions to keep us hooked on fossil fuels."
According to the U.S. National Park Service, the area burned annually by California wildfires has increased fivefold since the 1970s.
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The Big Bang, Horrifying LA Fires, and Our Self-Destructive Species
What you can now quite easily see from space is the failure humanity is achieving down here on the ground.
Jan 09, 2025
What’s happening right now in Los Angeles is almost too painful to write about. I’ve spent much of the day writing and calling back and forth with friends and colleagues. All report: horror. And since it’s playing out against the most familiar backdrop on earth, the scene of more movies and tv shows than any place on our planet, I think it will be as iconic as Pompeii in our collective imagination. If, you know, people in Pompeii had had smartphones.
So let me pull back a minute and tell a broader story. Though I’ve spent most of my life in the mountains of the East, my early boyhood was in California—my earliest recollections are of our house in Altadena, the neighborhood currently being consumed by the Eaton fire. And the sharpest memories of those are of climbing the fire road to the observatory at Mt. Wilson, which you could see from our backyard. I guess those must have been the first hikes in a lifetime of hikes, the first time to see the world spread out below.
I didn’t know it at the time—I was five—but the telescopes at the observatory at the top of the road were the place where humankind first really saw the universe spread out above. Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch Hooker telescope, then the largest in the world, made a series of pivotal discoveries in the 1920s. First he showed that the Andromeda nebula was outside our galaxy, taking the universe past the Milky Way. And then, a few years later with Milton Humason, he demonstrated that those distant galaxies were receding from ours—that the universe was expanding. This was the crucial groundwork for the Big Bang theory.
The last time I was up there, you could press a button on a display and the reassuring voice of Hugh Downs would explain that “Hubble’s discoveries were the last great step in the Copernican revolution of thought concerning man’s place in the cosmos. Hubble showed that our galaxy is not the center of the universe. There is no center.”
These discoveries were of a piece with the other great revelations of the 20th century—things like the invention of the solar cell at Bell Labs in 1954, or Jim Hansen’s pathbreaking climate science at NASA’s labs in the 1980s. They were the product of the human instinct for observation, nurtured in America’s unprecedented complex of university, government, and commercial labs. Scripps Oceanographic, MIT, Caltech, JPL, on and on. These were the kind of institutions that took us to the moon, and that indeed just last month shot a spacecraft closer to the sun than ever before.
And it’s this kind of science that lets us understand what’s happening in LA today; the descendants of Hubble and Hansen have continued the kind of painstaking research that make clear the result when a climate-induced drought (it’s only rained 0.16 inches in LA since May) and climate-induced heatwaves (the LA basin had some of its hottest stretches ever this past summer) and perhaps the climate-induced increase in the intensity of Santa Ana winds combine to created a firestorm unlike any other. It’s both simple and complicated: here’s a remarkable paper from Nature explaining how the melt of Arctic sea ice, by affecting the jetstream, is making West Coast fires worse.
In some ways, all this human intelligence is still being put to good use. Sammy Roth has written powerful recent accounts of Los Angeles’s push to build solar farms on all its margins, en route to becoming one of the world’s most renewably powered cities.
But in other ways that legacy of highly developed human intelligence is starting to disappear. It’s not just the polio vaccine (RFK Jr. told reporters yesterday, by the way, that he was “very worried” about his LA mansion). 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 inedfatigable 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.
And yesterday the incoming president published a particularly memorable rant on his Truth Social platform
Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!
That this is all nonsense should by now be taken for granted. His reference is to some effort half a decade ago to allot yet more water to California’s big corporate farms; there is no river of water that the governor could somehow have diverted to Los Angeles to fight the fires. (And if you look at the videos it’s painfully absurd to imagine that a phalanx of firemen with hoses were going to beat down this maelstrom). Elsewhere on social media MAGA aficonados (and U.S. Senators) have taken turns blaming DEI initiatives, the war in Ukraine, and so on.
The great casualties in California today are people and animals and buildings—homes, synagogues, schools, libraries. The great casualty in the month’s ahead may be the insurance system of the world’s fifth biggest economy, which is going to buckle under the strain of these losses. But the steady loss of intelligence in our nation and our world worries me the most. Even as the stakes grow higher, we’re losing our hard-won ability to understand the world around us.
One of the mysteries of Hubble’s universe is why we haven’t found other intelligent species. One explanation is that most civilizations do themselves in before they can reach out into space.
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