LA fires root cause is fossil fuels says climate expert – Channel 4 News

We spoke to Dr Varun Sivaram, a senior fellow for energy and climate at the Council on Foreign Relations and Dr Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and the author of “Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution’.

They have both lived and worked in the parts of Los Angeles reduced to ash.

We began by asking for their reactions to the devastating fires.

Peter Kalmus: It was devastating. It’s been a crazy, intense week. There’s kind of no words for it, I still am struggling emotionally.

Cathy Newman: You made the decision two years ago to move away from the Los Angeles area. Explain why you came to that decision?

Peter Kalmus: Los Angeles had been getting hotter since I moved there in 2008. More fiery, the droughts have been getting worse, and I just started kind of imagining if my neighbourhood burned, how would I get out? What would I take? And then in 2020, there was a really big fire close to our home, and that was a big wake-up call for us.

Cathy Newman: Dr Varun Sivaram, you also worked in the area in Palisades, which has been up in flames as well. Your response to what you’ve seen in the last few days?

Varun Sivaram: Absolutely, I started my career as a city official in the city of Los Angeles, senior adviser to the mayor, and the first project I ever did was to inaugurate a solar car wash, solar panels on a car wash in the Palisades. It’s now right within the active fire zone. It’s absolutely tragic, and my heart goes out to all my friends and everyone else who’s lost homes and businesses. What Peter said is correct, it is the case that climate change has contributed to many of the conditions that make wildfires much more common. The last four years, three of those last four years, have been the record-breaking wildfire years in recorded history. And this wildfire will be the most expensive in recorded history. But there isn’t very much that we can do about stopping climate change right this second. It’s not in the United States’ control, it’s not the United Kingdom’s control where you are. The number one response right this moment, pragmatically, is to build the adaptation resilience capability, both to withstand future disasters and to make them far less deadly, for example, by ensuring that folks don’t build in the most disaster-prone areas.

Cathy Newman: In terms of removing the brush and keeping things clear so the area is less flammable, that’s part of this sort of pragmatism you describe?

Varun Sivaram: Yeah, there are a lot of things we can do going forward. This disaster was unprecedented, but we sort of also could have seen some of this coming. Owing to climate change, owing to new precipitation patterns, for example, at least in part. We had record rainfall in California for two years and then record dryness or drought that created these bone-dry conditions ,where the previous two wet years created a lot of vegetation. And then we had these hurricane speed Santa Ana winds that contributed to these blazes, 100 mile plus winds that are blowing embers and spreading the fire faster than anybody could get ready for.

Cathy Newman: Peter Kalmus, is it possible to approach this problem of climate change in that pragmatic way that Varun’s just described?

Peter Kalmus: My view is that this is only the barest beginning. The planet is still getting hotter and will keep getting hotter as long as we burn fossil fuels. These kinds of disasters will get much, much worse. So, yes, we have to take measures now, but at some level, eventually all these suggestions will be completely overwhelmed by how hot the planet gets. We’re only at about one and a half degrees now, what is it going to be like when it’s two degrees or two and a half degrees above pre-industrial levels? It’s going to be a nightmare that we can barely imagine right now. So these kinds of little adaptations, we need to do them, but it’s going to be a little bit like trying to stop a huge wildfire like this with a garden hose. At some point, it’s just not going to work at all. So we have to address the root cause, which is fossil fuels, as quickly as we can for our survival. We’re going to have impacts that we can’t even really predict right now. They’re going to be synergistic things hitting at the same time, impacts to our food system, heat waves that kill millions of people in a matter of a few days. And I want to make the point that the fossil fuel industry in the 70s saw this coming with uncanny accuracy. They chose to spread disinformation and block action when they could have chosen to alert world leaders and work with us to transition. That’s the choice I would have made. It’s just the biggest moral failure, I think, in human history.

Varun Sivaram: Peter’s right to be angry. We should all be angry. But I hate to say it, Peter, it’s not going to get us very far. Going forward, here’s how I look at this problem. I completely agree with Peter, by the way, that the disasters will only get worse in scope. The world is going to blow right past our climate goals. We’re on track for more than three degrees of warming, which an expert like Peter will probably tell us is going to lead to some very scary consequences. And so, therefore, I think we don’t need to do garden hose adaptations. We need to do large adaptation interventions. I agree with Peter that the ultimate solution for ensuring that the world is not consumed by these disasters is in fact to reduce fossil fuels globally. Over the next 75 years, the United States, and we can throw in the United Kingdom too, will account for less than 5 per cent of future greenhouse gas emissions. We alone don’t really matter. The emissions are actually falling in the developed world. They’re rising in emerging economies, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and China is by far the world’s largest emitter. Unless we reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, we won’t make any progress. And that’s why I think this should be the number one foreign policy priority of the United States, United Kingdom, and every one of our allies.

Cathy Newman: Let’s land up then at the political row that has erupted as the fires rage. Peter, the Republicans blaming Democrat mismanagement, whether that’s failure to clear the brush, the empty reservoir, the low pressure in the fire hydrants. The Democrats saying ‘this is climate change, it’s a horror and we got to deal with it’. How do we find any political way forward here?

Peter Kalmus: Maybe there could have been somewhat better management. I don’t think it would have made a lot of difference. I think this is a red herring. It’s a distraction by the Republicans, it’s political blame shifting. We have a problem on the planet. The planet is overheating. It’s gotten to an emergency level. We have to start working together. And I think it is really important to get angry because the public right now is quite unfocused. They’re confused. They’re afraid. A lot of people don’t realise that global heating is caused by fossil fuels. A lot of people think recycling will solve this. A lot of people don’t know that the fossil fuel industry has been lying for decades and there’s powerful interests that want to block action. The only way to get those powerful interests to change is if the public pushes for that change. And I think anger is one way to get the public to push coherently.

Cathy Newman: Just final word from both of you. Peter, do you have any hope for the future?

Peter Kalmus: Producing electricity from solar is now by far the cheapest way to produce electricity, and I think we have the solutions. We just have basically this very wealthy class which continues to profit from fossil fuels and is blocking the implementation of these solutions. So, yes, we will not transition away from fossil fuels overnight. But there’s a ton that we could be doing right now to transition that we aren’t doing.

Cathy Newman: Varun, can you have any hope?

Varun Sivaram: If we ultimately decide the global energy transition is just too expensive and hard, the United States and others may take leadership in embarking on geoengineering approaches. These are kind of extreme, but they could enable us to limit the world’s temperature increase through these extreme interventions, such as reflecting radiation from the Earth’s atmosphere. And I think we may have to turn to those as the emergency brake to prevent further catastrophic global warming.

Cathy Newman: Peter, you were shaking your head.

Peter Kalmus: We’ve got to stop beating around the bush. Yes, we may end up geoengineering, but it’s a horrifying thought to me. We could have catastrophic termination shock in that scenario. Why is it so hard to actually look at this directly and say it’s caused by fossil fuels? We have to work together to end fossil fuels.