California Wildfires Are a Climate Wake-Up Call — But Is Anyone Listening?

Raging wildfires continue to scorch communities across the Los Angeles area, killing at least five people, displacing about 100,000 more and destroying thousands of structures. With firefighters unable to contain much of the blaze, the toll is expected to rise. The wildfires that started Tuesday caught much of the city by surprise, quickly growing into one of the worst fire disasters in Los Angeles history. Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council have come under criticism for cutting the fire department’s budget by around 2% last year while the police department saw a funding increase. Nearly 400 incarcerated firefighters are among those who have been deployed to battle the fires. Journalist Sonali Kolhatkar, who evacuated her home to flee the destruction, says it has been “frustrating” to watch the corporate media’s coverage of the fires. “No one is talking about climate change in the media,” she says. We also speak with journalist John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, who says the L.A. wildfires should be a wake-up call. “This blind — frankly, suicidal — loyalty to the status quo of keeping fossil fuels preeminent in our energy system is creating an increasingly difficult situation and unlivable situation,” says Vaillant.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to the wildfires scorching communities across Los Angeles in one of the city’s most destructive firestorms in history. Over 100,000 people have been evacuated, more than 2,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed, and at least five people are dead — a toll that’s expected to rise. One of five fires now burning started Tuesday in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, which has now burned some 17,000 acres. The Eaton fire burned more than 10,000 acres. Fires also prompted evacuations in the Hollywood Hills and Studio City. On Wednesday, President Biden pledged assistance from the Department of Defense.

This comes as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and City Council are facing new scrutiny for cutting the fire department’s funding by around 2%, while increasing the police department budget. Nearly 400 incarcerated firefighters are among those deployed to battle the fires. Democracy Now! reached former incarcerated firefighter Amika Mota with the Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition.

AMIKA MOTA: You know, and many of these people are going home tonight to cells, to fire camps. Also, in Malibu, you know, we have a fire camp there that is under threat. We’re really concerned about the folks there. We also know that there’s a youth fire camp in Malibu, so we have a lot of young people facing some pretty terrible conditions. I can also say that we’re really concerned — you know, Karen Bass has ordered an evacuation within a mile of the juvenile hall in Sylmar, where we have a hundred incarcerated young people. So we’re also really thinking about, you know, our currently incarcerated folks that are really vulnerable to these conditions.

AMY GOODMAN: To see our interview with incarcerated firefighters, you can go to democracynow.org.

But right now for more on the unprecedented fires and the role of climate change, we’re joined by two guests. In Dana Point, California, about 50 miles south of L.A., John Vaillant is an award-winning journalist, author of several books, including, most recently, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. And in Pasadena, we’re joined by Sonali Kolhatkar, who evacuated with her family, her kids and her parents, from the fires, award-winning journalist, author and host of the radio and TV show Rising Up with Sonali. Her forthcoming book, Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Sonali, please describe what you have gone through with your family and how you escaped the fires.

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Thank you so much, Amy.

You know, you don’t expect that you’re going to be in the middle of a disaster that captures international attention. And in my sleepy town of North Pasadena — I’m just two blocks from Altadena — that’s precisely what has happened.

We heard the winds rattling in the middle of the night, more ferocious than they’d ever been. We knew that we hadn’t had rain in hundreds of days. And, you know, we have our neighborhood chat group, and people started talking about whether they should up and leave. I have two elderly disabled parents. And I decided that I would evacuate them before the official evacuation notice came. And already the hotels were filling up on Monday night. We luckily had power, but many of our neighbors didn’t. And we’ve been holed up at this hotel. All the hotels are packed. The convention center up the street is packed.

It’s just devastating — 1,100 businesses in Altadena. This community of incredible people has been utterly devastated. The speed, the ferocity with which these winds have blown the fires has been hard to imagine. I went back yesterday to get my father’s medications, because he’s a diabetic and we couldn’t find his meds at the pharmacies, and I just risked it, went home and grabbed the medication. The air was thick with smoke and ash raining down. And all I could think of was this house that I’ve lived in for more than half my life is still standing, but I don’t know if it’s going to be standing tomorrow or the day after. You know, my husband and I, Jim and I, went back there, and we thought, you know, “Should we hose it down?” But then it will take water from the firefighters. The air is so bad right now that I’m sitting in a hotel lobby miles away from the fires and the internal air is hard to breathe, and I’m having to use a mask. It is just unbelievable. I feel like it is a nightmare.

And I have more than 12 people in my — 13 people, and counting, now in my network of friends who have just lost their homes. And I know many more have, that I’m not even aware of, absolutely lost their homes. I saw some of them on Saturday at my birthday party, and now their homes are gone. And I can’t even picture that. And I don’t know if I will have a home tomorrow or the day after, because these winds are not over. They’re dry. They’re rushing through ferociously.

The firefighters are overstretched. There were fire trucks that were speeding past burning homes because they didn’t have enough firefighters to stop and put out the fires there. And so, some people are staying, because they think that if they make a stand, they can save their homes. They’re risking their lives. And it’s a tempting prospect, because your whole life is in your home. What do I do with my parents and my kids if I don’t have a home to go back to tomorrow or the day after? I don’t know. This is — it’s just — it’s mind-blowing. It’s devastating.

And no one’s talking about climate change in the media. No one’s talking about it. And it’s just — you know, it’s frustrating. So, just, if you believe in a god, pray for us.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, John Vaillant, could you respond to these devastating accounts that Sonali has just given us of what’s happening and what she herself and her family have experienced as they’ve had to flee? And talk about this issue, the issue of climate change. You’ve spoken about this concept of wildland-urban interface and why we all have to understand what that means.

JOHN VAILLANT: Yeah. Good morning, Nermeen. And, Sonali, I’m really, really sorry to hear what you’re going through. And this might be cold comfort, but I’ve spent the last eight years studying fires like this and talking to people who have gone through what you’re going through right now, many of whom lost their homes ultimately.

We’re in a situation now, we’re realizing, or L.A. residents are waking up to the fact, that the climate really owns our communities. It owns our landscape. And L.A. County, you know, the most populous urban region in the country, is now literally at the mercy of fire. And it’s at the mercy of climate. And as Sonali said, it’s desperately dry there, and the winds are still blowing, and the winds control these fires. So, despite the fact that California is famous for its devastating fires and has lost thousands and thousands of homes over the past 30 years to major fires just like these, it’s still shocking when it happens to you. I think all of us, human beings, are defended against that possibility even when it’s happening all around us, and in this case, other parts of California. Now it’s L.A. County’s moment to experience this. And nothing really prepares you for the kind of psychic and physical assault of these kinds of fires.

And this notion of the wildland-urban interface, known to firefighters as the WUI, is that place where the wildland, you know, the hills of the San Gabriel Mountains, San Fernando Valley, butt up against the built environment, the places where we live. And increasingly, very powerful fires are coming into cities, into urban spaces, from these wildlands. And the interface is where they meet.

And what is really alarming — and it’s another thing people don’t talk about — is what excellent fuel the modern house is. So, these wildfires are raging through forest, which is natural. Fire is a normal part of the California landscape. But coming into these built environments, houses nowadays, the modern house, has so many petroleum products in it, in terms of vinyl siding and Formica counters and polyurethane stuffing and the rubber tires and the gas tanks in the garage. There are all kinds of explosive petroleum products built into our lives that we don’t even think about. Look at what your shoes are made out of. When they get hot enough, they are explosively flammable. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. And if you start looking around at your home, you’ll realize that petroleum and its products are everywhere. And these are really, really flammable.

And in the case of L.A. County right now, the other kind of sort of secret accelerant is humidity. And you’re down close to 0% humidity, which is drier than kindling, drier than a matchstick. And now you have entire communities that are this dry, so the fire has to do very little work to get going. And it’s got these sometimes 50-, 80-mile-an-hour winds fanning — not just fanning the flames, but really turning them into blowtorches, blowing through these communities. It’s devastating energy. Firefighters can’t really fight it. And that’s why you have such a low percentage of containment on these massive fires that have already done colossal damage.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, John, you have the media — and I’m not just talking Fox, I’m talking about all the networks. They’ll talk about the “perfect storm” that’s going on now, the high winds, extremely dry weather, especially since October. But they won’t talk about climate change. The weather centers should be renamed climate change centers. But this hesitance to link it to the rest of the world and to this global heating that’s happening right now and what it would mean for policy as a new president comes in whose main motto is “drill, baby, drill.”

JOHN VAILLANT: Yeah, there’s a real moral cowardice in evidence at the government level, at the media level. There is no doubt about the hand-in-hand connection between our obsession with fossil fuel burning — which goes back, you know, for 200 years now — and the alterations in the climate in terms of the buildup of heat-trapping CO2 and methane. And were those companies and the governments and banks who enabled them to acknowledge this, they would have to change their business model. And this kind of blind — frankly, suicidal — loyalty to the status quo of keeping fossil fuels preeminent in our energy system is creating an increasingly difficult situation and unlivable situation.

And I think, you know, some billionaires were impacted over the past couple of days, billionaires who encourage these policies. And yet their inclination is to blame the mayor, to blame the governor for conditions that predate either of their administrations. And so, we’re really — what we’re living in right now is an increasingly shrill dissonance between the fact of climate change, the science of climate change — which is well understood by NOAA, by NASA, by many brave meteorologists who are on television and on the radio — and the governments who are serving, really, handmaidens to the petroleum industry and to the investors who are dependent on keeping them in business.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Sonali, you know, if you could talk about — you’re one of the few journalists who’s insisted on centering the issue of the climate crisis in your reporting. So, if you could talk about that? And also, your assessment of how the city, Los Angeles, has dealt with these devastating fires? The mayor has come under a lot of criticism. There haven’t been enough firefighters, cuts to the fire department. Sonali?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Yes. Thank you so much. You’re right. The fact that we keep pouring money into enforcing racial capitalism, the fact that we keep pouring money into ensuring that policing is always well funded while fire departments are not, that our resilience, our climate resilience, is not funded, that’s a matter of priorities. It’s something I talk about in my new book, Talking About Abolition. But this is — you know, how we design city budgets is a blueprint for how we want to live. And so, if we’re pouring money into policing and taking money out of firefighting, if we’re pouring money into our tax dollars going to subsidizing oil companies but not enough subsidies to renewable energy, to electric vehicles, to climate adaptability, then we are basically reaping what we sow.

And we have to be connecting these dots, because whenever you hear the sort of media coverage about these disasters, they’re covered as one-offs, as isolated incidents, that “Here’s this devastating fire. You know, we’re praying for you. You’ll survive. Look at the community spirit.” I don’t want to have to just survive. I don’t want to have to rely on community spirit and my neighbors and GoFundMes to figure out where I’m going to be living next. I want my tax dollars to go towards taking care of me, my community, and all of us being together.

So, we need a cultural shift in our country, away from thinking individualistically about the biggest car we can drive and, you know, the ways in which we can protect ourselves without thinking about how we protect our community and how we’re all in this together. So we have to fight for control over our budgets. We have to fight for control over the priorities that we make, pouring them into climate resiliency and adaptation and ending the stranglehold of fossil fuels over our country and our world. We have to change that cultural mindset, and we have to push our politicians to do the right thing. And billionaires cannot — billionaires should not exist.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there right now, but we will certainly continue to cover all these issues. Sonali, it is hard to wish you a happy birthday, but on your landmark birthday, we’re thinking of you. Sonali Kolhatkar, evacuated host of Rising Up with Sonali, and also John Vaillant, the author of Fire Weather. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.