
No, the LA inferno is not Mother Nature’s revenge
The coverage of the Los Angeles fire has exposed the medieval streak in climate activism
When the Great Fire swept through London in 1666, the fleeing citizens were convinced God was punishing them. ‘The dreadful judgement’, they called it. London’s been set alight for its ‘deadly sin of gluttony’, they wailed. A plaque put on the smoky ruins of the bakery where the fire started said: ‘Here by permission of Heaven, Hell broke loose…’ Fast forward 350 years and this view of fire as retribution, as the hellish judgement of sinning humanity, still holds. Only now the fire is set not by God, but by Gaia.
Witness the pained discussion of the LA inferno. Even as the city still burns, already the culprit has been found: it was us, hubristic mankind. This ‘tinderbox’ is ‘fuelled by global warming’, says one climate activist. This is ‘the climate crisis in action’, says another, the scorching byproduct of our ‘burning [of] coal, oil and gas’. Bernie Sanders hopes the dystopic vision of LA being consumed by the orange glow of lethal flames will stir our species from its denialism and make us believe that climate change ‘is real, not “a hoax”’. This is an ‘existential crisis’, he cries, which sounds to me like fancy talk for ‘dreadful judgement’.
The fires are terrible. The affluent suburb of Pacific Palisades has been hardest hit. Homes and schools and businesses have been turned to ash. It has leapt to other suburbs too, including Altadena, where entire streets are now blackened ruins. At the time of writing, five people are dead, a thousand structures lie destroyed, and 150,000 Los Angeleans have been forced to flee their homes. The footage feels unreal – ‘like a Hollywood disaster movie with a difference’, says Ross Clark, ‘it really is happening close to Hollywood’.
The Independent reports that some on the lunatic right are welcoming this fiery assault on America’s most liberal, licentious state. They ‘cheer the disaster’, it says, with some sharing fake pics of the Hollywood sign on fire alongside the sick taunt: ‘Everyone say bye bye to Pedowood.’ Such a medieval celebration of fire as a purifying retribution for sin – in this case the sin of paedophilia rather than gluttony – is clearly nuts. No decent person has time for such cruel superstition. And yet the idea that this fire, and fire more broadly, is a kind of punishment has gone scarily mainstream – only it’s seen as a punishment less for interfering with children than for interfering with nature.
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How about pretending and treating those responsible, mainly politicians and environmentalists as if they are Trump supporters? SWAT raids, arrests, terrorize their families. 24/7 ‘breaking headlines’. Perp walks, prosecution, jail, solitary confinement. Maybe too busy destroying incriminating evidence before Jan 20th? So many industrial capacity paper shredders smoking the electrical grid in DC the lights are dimming all over the capital.