Welcome to Trump's America where wildfires rage and oil flows

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 2025, let it be known there is no causation between fires in Southern California and the fight between irrigation in the Central Valley versus protecting fish in the northern delta. Hydrants have run dry in Los Angeles — the region has adequate water in storage at the moment but the local pipes and infrastructure weren’t built to fight apocalyptic urban wildfires.

The Los Angeles fires are meteorologically interesting but the underlying cause is not at all mysterious. Wildfires are part of the ecology of Southern California but they have been getting more and more ferocious as pollution from burning fossil fuels heats the globe. 

And the LA fires “are “emblematic of a new era of complex, compound climate disaster,” says meteorologist Eric Holthaus. “Conditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do.”

The furious Santa Ana winds driving the fires have reached hurricane strength at times, setting regional wind speed records. A phenomenon caused by the interconnectedness of oceans, cryosphere and atmosphere: melting Arctic ice changing the behaviour of the jet stream. 

Ecosystems are also inextricably linked into the compound disaster: very dry land following very wet. Two winters of heavy rainfall in 2022 and 2023 felt like a relief after a decades-long drought. Trees, grass and shrubs sprouted. Then, the land dried again. Southern California just had its hottest summer on record followed by its driest ever rainy season — only two per cent of normal precipitation, so far. All that flourishing flora turned to tinder. The fauna (including about 180,000 fellow humans) had to flee.

The year is barely underway and the paradoxes are already bleak. Climate fires exploded in LA just after Trump’s certification as winner of the US presidential election and the same day he confirmed his two-pronged approach to energy: more fossil fuels, no more renewables. “We are going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built,” he said, reaffirming his three word energy policy: “drill, baby, drill.” For good measure, Trump blithely asserted that “windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”

It was the same news conference in which Trump told reporters he wouldn’t rule out military action to take Greenland and the Panama Canal. Canada, he mused, might be annexed using “economic force.” It’s not the whales’ sanity we need to worry about.

But up in Trump’s 51st state, similar sentiments about energy and climate are rumbling through politics. In his sit-down with Jordan Peterson, Pierre Poilievre promised to extract and use more oil and gas. Like Trump’s promise to “drill, baby, drill,” this will take some doing since Canadian oil and gas production, like America’s, has already surged to record highs.

Poilievre went on to pitch Canada as a hub for AI server farms: “We could be powering these data centres with Canadian natural gas generators.” As for anyone concerned about the climate pollution involved? In Poilievre’s view they’re the crazy ones: “environmental loons that hate our energy.” 

Now that Justin Trudeau has announced he will resign, kicking off a leadership race, any plausible candidate will have to cancel the carbon tax and “hug the broad consensus,” says Scott Reid, a former Liberal communications director in the Prime Minister’s Office. “When it comes to climate change, we desperately want to do something about it as long as it’s not something that interferes in any way with anyone, anywhere. That is the broad public consensus now… That’s table stakes… Anyone would have to have rocks in their heads to say otherwise.”

The world’s scientists are most certainly saying otherwise. The top experts coordinated the release of their annual data this week. It was the hottest year on record. The hottest since at least 1880 and probably hotter than any period in the last 100,000 years. In 2024, our planet spiked past the internationally agreed guardrail of 1.5 C for the first time, driving extreme climate impacts and causing “misery to millions of people,” summarized Samantha Burgess of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The 10 hottest years on record were all in the past decade and the most recent two years were markedly hotter, for reasons scientists cannot fully explain.

“There’s now an extremely high likelihood that we will overshoot the long-term average of 1.5 C in the Paris agreement limit,” Burgess said. “These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapour levels in 2024, meant unprecedented heatwaves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people.”

Displayed over time, the recent temperature spikes are unmistakable:

“This record needs to be a reality check,” said Dr Friederike Otto. “A year of extreme weather showed just how dangerous life is at 1.5 C. The Valencia floods, US hurricanes, the Philippines typhoons and Amazon drought are just four disasters last year that were worsened by climate change. There are many, many more.”

Our planet and our politics are on wildly different trajectories as 2025 gets off to a bleak and blazing start. And yet, “the world doesn’t need to come up with a magical solution to stop things from getting worse,” says Otto. “We know exactly what we need to do to transition away from fossil fuels, halt deforestation and make societies more resilient.”

Perhaps we should end by returning to Octavia Butler, since we so clearly should have paid more attention to her all those decades ago. In response to questions about her Parable books, Butler wrote A Few Rules for Predicting the Future. In one beautiful passage, she recounts a question from a student: 

"So do you really believe that in the future we're going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?" 

"... I didn't make up the problems," I pointed out. 'All I did was look around at the problems we're neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.'

"Okay," the young man challenged. "So what's the answer?"

"There isn't one," I told him.

"No answer? You mean we're just doomed?" He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.

"No," I said. "I mean there's no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There's no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be."