Trump is president again, and Los Angeles keeps burning
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from science writer and editor Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
Trump has returned to the presidency, and he and his ilk now pursue their destructive and hateful agenda with even more zeal than before. On just the first day, Trump was flanked by all the major tech billionaires during his inauguration; Trump attempts to illegally end birthright citizenship; he is militarizing the US-Mexico border and trying to shut down asylum admissions; he announced the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement (again); he is further expanding oil and gas projects, including in an Alaskan wildlife refuge; and Trump add new restrictions to wind turbines and electric vehicles. And that’s an incomplete list.
Meanwhile, the horrific, climate-fueled Los Angeles fires continue to burn. The devastating Palisades and Eaton fires are now 59% and 89% contained, respectively. The fires displaced some 200,000 Angelenos, as if the northern part of the sprawling city were the site of a civil war. (Sudan’s war has displaced 11 million people, in comparison.) The fires have annihilated whole neighborhoods, having damaged or destroyed more than 12,000 buildings and homes so far, including those of people I know. That’s again, almost like a war zone—equivalent to about 7% of the structures destroyed in the Gaza Strip.
The fires should be a wakeup call: Climate change is here, today, and delay is not an option. We are not prepared, and humanity is not doing enough to stave off worse warming. Some conservative leaders and commentators have tried to point fingers at leadership failures, forest mismanagement, housing problems in vulnerable areas, etc. They’re not entirely wrong, and those all do need to be addressed. But better brush clearance in the woods wouldn’t have saved LA. Over the past few years, climate scientists have predicted more and larger wind-driven fires, and that’s exactly what’s happening, following a hot and dry 2024 with very little rainfall and low soil moisture. Climate change did not cause the fires, but it certainly made them worse than they otherwise would’ve been. I’m a broken record on this, but there’s no substitute for rapidly cutting carbon emissions and moving away from all fossil fuels. I’m also glad to see renewed scrutiny of the home insurance industry (which I may report on as well), by Katharine Gammon in The Guardian and Kate Aronoff in Dissent magazine.
Support your local journalists. Reporters in LA have covered the fires and their impacts well, and it’s encouraging that subscribers have flocked to the LA Times, even when the paper removed its paywall on fire coverage. For writers and journalists in LA, the Authors Guild has a list of resources, and the Committee to Protect Journalists posted guidelines for physical safety while covering wildfires. Here’s also a list of free and discounted resources for victims of the fires, from the LA Times.
Finally, beware the climate contrarians, the new climate denialists. These days I’m seeing many influential commentators like Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith, and some people at the Breakthrough Institute, for example, try to dismiss and downplay climate change’s role in this and other disasters. Hear them out, but treat their claims with skepticism.
In other writing…
The First First Responders, the final feature published by Hakai magazine, written by Adrienne Mason about Indigenous rescuers in British Columbia. I’ll miss the magazine, but I’m glad much of the team has joined bioGraphic. Here’s their first piece there, Who Watches the Watchers? by Larry Pynn, about the ethics of wildlife photography.
Power Failure: On Landscape and Abandonment, an essay by Mya Frazier in Switchyard magazine. I hadn’t heard of the magazine until now, but I’m enjoying what I’ve read so far.
Scent Makes a Place, by Katy Kelleher in Nautilus magazine
On Najwan Darwish, by Alexia Underwood in The Paris Review. Many poets and writers come from the occupied Palestinian territories, despite the calamitous conditions there, and this new book looks like a good one. You can read more of his poetry here.
What I’m reading: Waiting for the Fear, short stories by the Turkish writer Oğuz Atay
Looking back: Three years ago, I wrote this piece in WIRED about the 75th anniversary of the Doomsday Clock.
More about me: I’m a science writer and journalist based in the Bay Area. I was WIRED magazine’s space writer until December 2023, and before that I worked as a freelance writer and an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter and Bluesky. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.