The worst thing LA could do as it recovers from fire disaster

Despite the finger-pointing about who is to blame for the spread of the Los Angeles fires, Jeff Goodell believes there’s no level of preparation that could have fundamentally changed the trajectory of this massive disaster, which was propelled by urban planning decisions made decades ago and more than a century of fossil fuel pollution that has made 2024 the hottest year on record.

LA — and much of the rest of the world — was built for a climate that no longer exists, said Goodell, a journalist and writer who has covered climate change and the environment for the past quarter century. We must reimagine how we build our world and the kinds of urban planning, water supplies, building insulation, and public transportation that are necessary to adapt to a hotter climate.

In a conversation last weekend, Goodell and I also discussed how the Biden administration has presided over the most significant amount of gas and oil production in American history — a fact that the Biden team has been reticent to advertise and a trend that the incoming Trump administration will likely only amplify.

Goodell, who — full disclosure — was a fellow at New America, the research institution where I’m a vice president, also described the emergence of “attribution science,” which increasingly allows scientists to attribute the responsibility for certain extreme weather events to climate pollution. It’s a significant step forward in research that could ultimately enable those harmed most by climate change to hold fossil fuel companies accountable.

Our conversation was edited for clarity.

PETER BERGEN: Are you surprised by what’s unfolding in Los Angeles?

JEFF GOODELL: I wish I could say that I was, but I’m not, partly because I’m a fourth-generation Californian and I grew up seeing wildfires. And I know that fire is deeply a part of the California landscape. I’ve also been writing about climate change for 25 years. I know about the relationship between heat and fire, and as we build a hotter and hotter world, bigger and more intense fires are inevitable.

BERGEN: Southern California is prone to fires, and the Santa Ana winds are a recurring weather event. Are these LA fires different from anything we’ve seen before?

GOODELL: What’s different about these are the fires’ scale, speed and intensity. Another thing that’s very different is that it’s in January, which is not typically fire season in Southern California. And this elongation of the fire season is a hallmark of our changing climate. It used to be that in Southern California, there were five or six months a year of fire danger. And now it’s virtually year-round.

BERGEN: And what were those five or six months typically?

GOODELL: June through the end of October used to be the worst. I was just in New York at a conference with some of the best climate scientists in the world. The conversation was all about the Los Angeles fires and the changes in the hydrologic cycle. There was a lot of rain last spring and that caused a lot of brush and vegetation to grow up because there was so much water. And then you had an extreme dry cycle. So you had this excess vegetation, and then it gets dried out by these hotter summers and longer and longer dry seasons, which make it much more flammable.

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BERGEN: There’s a lot of finger-pointing in LA right now. What do you make of it?

GOODELL: There’s always going to be finger-pointing after an event like this, and there’s obviously lots of things that could have been done better. But I think the blunt truth is that there’s no level of preparation that could have changed the trajectory of this in a fundamental way.

When you have 100 mph Santa Ana winds and you have this kind of dried-out vegetation and this kind of housing packed together in these inaccessible, difficult-to-reach hills, it’s just a recipe for this kind of terrible disaster. So, yes, if we would have thought differently about urban planning and restricted building in Pacific Palisades and 30 years ago required different building materials, and if the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere weren’t so high and the drought cycles and heat cycles weren’t so extreme, that could have been a different scenario.

There will be many lessons learned from this. But the biggest lesson that we need to learn is that we are just plain not prepared for the climate that we have created. Our world is not built for the climate that we live in, and the biggest change is going to require acknowledging that fact.

I’m scared that we’re going to rebuild LA more or less the same way, without using this as an opportunity to rethink how LA is built and reinvest in important public infrastructure like better water supply systems, as well as coming up with a strategy to force a retreat from building in the most risky areas.

This is an opportunity to reimagine the urban landscape and its relationship with nature in Southern California, and if history shows us anything, it’s not going to happen. We have to stop and think, “Okay, we have to do this differently now. We have to use this tragedy as an opportunity to really learn, really think this and rebuild in a way that acknowledges the dangers of the world that we live in right now.”

BERGEN: You begin your new book, “The Heat Will Kill You First,” in the Pacific Northwest, which generally has a temperate climate. What happened there?

GOODELL: The book’s opening describes the heat wave that hit in the summer of 2021 in the Pacific Northwest, where you saw a spike in temperatures in places like Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, up to around 121 degrees. A “heat dome” settled over this region for five or six days. And it led to these temperatures, which were virtually unheard of. It was the heat equivalent of snow in the Sahara. And the reason it was important is because It was an example of this new extreme kind of climate that we are creating by continuing to burn fossil fuels and put CO2 in the atmosphere, where we’re seeing these kinds of climate extremes that go beyond what even climate models are able to predict.

A lot of the talk about climate change and global warming is about average temperatures, about things like whether we have passed the threshold of a 1.5 degrees Celsius warming from pre-industrial conditions. But within that general warming is this more extreme weather phenomenon, where we have these sudden heat spikes, dramatic precipitation events, and bigger and more intense hurricanes. So, I wanted to capture these extremes and their unpredictability.

BERGEN: How did you get into reporting on climate change?

GOODELL: It was in 2001, just after George W. Bush had been elected. The New York Times called me up and said that Bush and Dick Cheney were going to release the “Bush-Cheney Energy Plan,” and the editors said, “There’s going to be a big push in fossil fuels, and coal is going to be a big part of that. Why don’t you go down to West Virginia and write about the comeback of the coal industry?”

I had never written about climate or energy. I had no idea that, at that time, half our electricity came from burning coal. But I thought it was an interesting assignment and went down to West Virginia. Going into the coal fields opened my eyes to a lot of things, and one of the things that made me start to think about is, “Okay, what is the consequence of burning all this coal?” And that’s when I started to think about climate change, which then grew into a book called “Big Coal.” And that was my first real dive into climate science.

BERGEN: You have spent a quarter of a century writing about climate change and traveling around the world reporting on it. Whatever their views about the causes of climate change, many people need to see it with their own eyes to acknowledge that climate change is happening. Has that changed the way that your work is received?

GOODELL: There is a much more widespread understanding that something is happening; everybody is noticing it. I live in Austin, Texas. In the summer of 2023, we had 45 days above 100 degrees. If you’re a human being living on planet Earth, you see what’s going on. But a lot of people say, “Well, you know, there’s always been variability, and it was hotter in previous times, and this is just natural variability.” They understand that it’s changing, but what exactly is changing is still up for dispute among many people.

It’s not up for dispute at all among scientists. It hasn’t been up for dispute among scientists for 40 years. But in those 40 years, the fossil fuel industry has ramped up a campaign of misinformation and disinformation and has deliberately clouded the communication around the consequences of burning fossil fuels.

So, our understanding of the risks of climate change in the public sphere is still not an accepted relationship, the way it is among scientists. The straightforward relationship between higher levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere, mostly from burning fossil fuels and these extreme weather events is as solid as the science of gravity.

BERGEN: Something that the Biden administration hasn’t advertised is that more gas and oil were produced during the Biden administration than at any other time in US history. Which is somewhat ironic, given where the rest of the Democratic Party is generally speaking on the question of climate change.

The Biden administration has been pretty permissive in terms of gas and oil production. Trump, is likely going to ratchet that up considerably, right?

GOODELL: Correct. And there’s no question that the Biden administration continued on the path of fossil fuel production with natural gas exports and drilling in a way inconsistent with any kind of serious grappling with the risks of climate change.

I think one of the things this LA fire shows is that it’s essential to talk about reducing fossil fuels, because they are ultimately the main driver of climate change, and that is ultimately the way we’re going to slow down this rise of temperature and increase of extreme weather events.

The environment that LA was built for — a lot of the buildings constructed in the 1920s and 30s and 40s — that climate does not exist any more, and we are not going back to that. We have to reimagine how we build our world. And that means all kinds of things, from how we design buildings, the kind of fireproofing, urban planning, water supplies, building insulation and public transportation.

On that score, Biden has certainly been better. In the Inflation Reduction Act, there were a number of measures that helped along the path of climate change adaptation.

It’s also really important to say that the transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy is happening. It is a done deal. The issue is how fast it will happen, and I think the Trump administration will try to slow that transition so that the oil and gas companies have another decade or however long of insane profitability.

I live in Texas. During the summer this year, depending on the day, roughly 70% of the power on our grid came from renewable energy, and that’s mind-blowing. And that’s not because Texans are tree huggers. It’s because renewable energy — wind, solar, and geothermal — are the cheapest ways to generate power now.

So, this transition is going to happen. It’s just a question of how fast it happens.

BERGEN: One of the things I learned from your book was something called “attribution science” when it comes to extreme weather events. What is it?

GOODELL: Attribution science is a really powerful development in the world of climate science, and it has big political, legal and economic implications.

The easiest way to think about it is a kind of forensic science that can look at an extreme weather event, for example, the 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. They took a lot of the data points of this heat wave and put them into a computer model. And then they run that same computer model without the present higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, with a much lower level of CO2 and they run these models thousands of times.

If they can’t replicate the extreme weather event in the models, they can say that this event could not have happened, or was highly unlikely, without the higher levels of CO2, And in the case of the Pacific Northwest heat dome, where some 600 people died, they were able to say this event would not have happened without higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

To be able to make a statement like that is a huge scientific breakthrough.

With attribution science you can begin to say, “Okay, who was responsible for putting the higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere?” And you can look at companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron, and you can say, “Well, they’ve known about these risks for decades, and they’ve continued to sell this product that they’ve known is dangerous.”

And in some cases, Big Oil starts to look a bit like Big Tobacco, and you can just play it out from there in the sense of litigation. This is why some 2,000 climate litigation cases worldwide are looking at these questions of responsibility.

Editor’s note: Since this interview took place, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a rapid analysis that suggests human-caused climate change was responsible for 25% of the LA fires’ fuel, making them larger and more intense than they would have been without fossil fuel pollution in the atmosphere.

BERGEN: Your most recent book is “The Heat Will Kill You First,” which is a very arresting title. How did you come up with it, and why?

GOODELL: Well, I came up with the title in the kind of brainstorming that one does looking for titles, and at first some people at my publishing house worried that it was too scary, that nobody would ever buy the book.

But I said, “No, I really want this to be the title of the book.” I think that a lot of the conversation, the media coverage and everything about climate change has been too far off in the distance. And I wanted this book title to do basically what the LA fires doing, which is focus the reader’s imagination on the here and now. Climate change is not about what might happen to your grandchild in 50 years or about what’s happening to polar bears on ice fields somewhere. It is about your life and the risks to your life now in a very personal and direct way.

People always ask me, “After covering climate change for so long, why aren’t you living in your basement drinking a bottle of bourbon and scrolling on the wall with crayons about the lost future for your children?” And it’s because I actually find this story both tragic, but also incredibly inspiring because I spend a lot of time talking with people every day who are doing amazing things.

They are doctors who are trying to better understand what heat does to the human body; wildland firefighters who are thinking differently about their strategies to deal with fires, architects who are thinking differently about how we’re going to build; scientists who are trying to better understand the consequences of rising greenhouse gas emissions. There’s just this whole range of people who understand that our world is changing really fast, that it’s a very dangerous moment and that there’s a lot that they can do to help.

I really am convinced that the better we understand the sort of scope and scale of what we face, and the better we can begin to reimagine our world and build a better world. I’m not writing about this as an extinction event. I’m not a doomer.

I am a person who really thinks that what Los Angeles is going to look like in 50 years is not at all the way it looks today. And what Miami is going to look like in 50 years is not at all like what Miami looks like today and Phoenix and Austin.

It might be hellishly worse if we’re stupid, and it might be a lot better if we’re smart.

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