This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.
Gloating, politically-motivated schadenfreude should never be a response to human tragedy. But that doesn’t mean at times of tragedy that hard truths should be silenced. Indeed, the hardest of times often call for the hardest of truths.
So it must simply be stated: the fires that have devastated Los Angeles are exactly what America voted for in the presidential election. America elected an evident threat to the environment in Donald Trump.
Trump pulled the US out of the Paris climate accords during his first term. Ahead of his reelection he referred to the climate crisis as “one of the great scams of all time”. Most significantly of all, while on the campaign trail, Trump promised Americans that he planned to reverse climate policies and “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels.
Evidently, millions of Americans oppose this policy of self-harm. But America is a democracy. It made its collective choice. It voted for a man who shuns scientific truth, and the nation is today seeing what the consequences of such policies mean.
The actor James Woods, a major MAGA supporter, celebrated Trump’s reelection calling it “a blazing morning of hope”. Yesterday, he broke down in tears on CNN after his LA home burned to the ground.
“One day you’re swimming in the pool,” he said, “and the next day it’s all gone.” Nevertheless, as a true cultist, Woods refused to accept that climate change caused the fires. Instead, he blamed “liberal idiots”.
It’s unclear if a pyrrhic attempt to ‘own the libs’ one more time is any recompense for a home that’s a smouldering ruin.
MAGA supporters are busy trying to blame anything other than climate change for the fires, because… well… that’s what they do.
Trump, in one of his signature rambling rants, blamed California governor Gavin Newsom – or Newscum as the President-Elect refers to him – claiming the state diverted water to protect “worthless fish”.
Newsom responded: “People are literally fleeing, people have lost their lives, kids lost their schools, families completely torn asunder, churches burned down – this guy wanted to politicise it… I have a lot of thoughts about what I want to say, and I won’t.”
Elon Musk busied himself tweeting: “Wild theory: maybe, just maybe, the root cause wasn’t climate change”. He also claimed “they” – ‘they’ being the LA fire department – “prioritised DEI over saving lives”. DEI is ‘diversity, equality and inclusion’.
LA’s first female and LGBT fire chief is under sustained attack from MAGA supporters. Musk was curiously quiet, however, on reports that the world’s richest citizens had used up their share of carbon for 2025 in just ten days. Or that 2024 became the first year to pass the 1.5 degree global warming limit.
Certainly, there are issues to do with failures in preparedness by Californian authorities, particularly around the amount of water available to put out fires. But that’s not what caused the devastation.
LA had filled water tanks ahead of the fires but some were quickly exhausted. Water tanks are designed to put out localised fires, not widespread blazes.
However, Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in California, said the nature of the fires made it almost impossible to make sure there was enough water.
“If everything catches fire at once, there’s not going to be enough water for everybody,” he said.
All this is diversionary chatter, though, by the MAGA media ecosystem. It has perfected the art of throwing enough mad nonsense into the news cycle that the issues it doesn’t want discussed remain obscured under clouds of blather.
Read more from Neil:
- It’s starting to feel like humanity is one giant suicide cult
- Why climate change should be the only story that matters
- How climate change speeds up evolution in terrifying ways
Call it rank cynicism, but it was hard not to see Trump’s bellicose craziness around Greenland, Panama and Canada as coming conveniently ahead of him facing sentencing in New York for falsifying business records in relation to the hush-money case involving adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Let’s be rather unfashionable. Instead of falling for Trump’s distracting nonsense, let’s check the facts. In 2023 the US government issued a statement headed ‘Study finds climate change to blame for record-breaking California wildfires’.
The federal government's National Integrated Drought Information Service said “it was found that nearly all the observed increase in burned areas over the past half-century is due to human-caused climate change”.
Strong winds and lack of rain have driven the recent fires. California has experienced a decades-long drought – estimated to be the worst in an astonishing 1200 years – that ended just two years ago with rapid swings between dry and wet conditions. That climate “whiplash” – between drought and then rain – creates a landscape ripe for fire.
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After decades of drought, California experienced heavy rain in 2022 and 2023 creating lots of vegetation. Conditions returned to being very dry in the autumn and winter of 2024 – meaning all that vegetation became highly combustible.
The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says: “Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States.”
How, when the facts in this case are soberly judged, can it be denied that America has indeed voted for such tragedies to keep happening? Americans have elected a man whose policies will simply lead to more LAs.
Clearly, none of this is of help to those who lost their lives in the California disaster. But surely, their deaths demand honesty when it comes to what caused this terrible devastation.
