Three takeaways from the Los Angeles wildfires
The fires raging across the suburbs of Los Angeles have caught the attention of the world media in a way that all the other wild weather around the globe haven’t – unfortunately celebrities being displaced will hit headlines in the way ordinary people dying or having their homes go up in smoke never will. But here my immediate three reactions:
- If you think the costs of Net Zero will be high, the costs of ‘Not Zero’ will make them look like chicken feed. I heard someone say recently “There are no climate change deniers in the insurance industry” and estimations of the economic cost of this conflagration alone are huge (eg in the Economist above). Unfortunately the complex connection between investing in low carbon energy and avoiding the costs of disasters make a compelling cost-benefit analysis impossible at anything other than a global scale.
- The time for radical adaptation is nigh (check out Rupert Read on last week’s podcast). Los Angeles homes are typically of a highly flammable design and the flames have simply leapt from house to house. The areas that are being rebuilt must be designed and built to resist fire, with similar measures retrofitted to other vulnerable areas, because this ain’t going to stop anytime soon.
- The more the evidence mounts up, the higher the tide of misinformation. While Canada and Mexico are helping out beleaguered LA, the President-elect and his cronies are sat on their backsides “flooding the zone with s**t” (© Steve Bannon), pushing rumour, innuendo and outright falsehoods to deflect from the climate change link and make political points. Rational decision making and communication becomes ever more difficult with such a toxic backdrop.