So now we know how the second Trump era begins: with Los Angeles on fire.
Apocalyptic, tragic and almost impossibly emblematic. The world at large is spiralling past the guardrail of 1.5 degrees while politics retreats from tackling the problem. Ten thousand homes and buildings burned, neighbours dead and neighbourhoods reduced to ash while the incoming president deflects, derides and promises more drilling for fossil fuels.
The tragedians of Ancient Greece might have balked at such an extravagant plot. After certifying the votes for Trump’s second term, multiple fires erupt around America’s second largest city, liberal bastions engulfed with fire, bulldozers clearing cars abandoned to evacuation gridlock, prisoners paid little more than $1 an hour to hose down homes. Even if they weren’t among the tens of thousands fleeing the fires, the studio heads and Hollywood script writers wouldn’t greenlight something so over-the-top.
“The City of Los Angeles is a raging inferno less than three years after a bunch of elite pundits and film critics insisted Don’t Look Up was too heavy-handed and too unsubtle about the climate crisis,” wrote David Sirota, co-writer of the Netflix flick.
Far more prescient, in fact eerily so: Octavia Butler. Her novel, Parable of the Sower, was published in 1993 and depicts wildfires destroying desiccated parts of LA in 2025. The location was the fictional “Robledo,” widely understood to be Butler’s hometown of Altadena, site of the Eaton fire this week. More prophetic still: the fire breaks out shortly after the inauguration of a far-right president who campaigned under the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.”
Here in the world Butler foretold, Donald Trump, the (non-fictional) incoming climate denier-in-chief wasted no time blaming liberals, environmental protections and endangered species for the conflagrations. There’s not enough water and California Governor Gavin Newsom is to blame, Trump thundered, because the governor “wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it … water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California.”
To the extent facts matter at all in........