You're Not Going to Find Someone to Blame

The fires in LA are a bill come due after decades of misdeeds and mismanagement.

Apu Gomez/ Getty

You are probably, on some level, mad right now. If you live in or have lived in or have loved ones who live in Los Angeles, I’m sure you are furious. You are furious and sad and scared. I know I am.

What might make this feel slightly better is if that anger could be directed somewhere. I would love to have someone to blame. The problem is that we are never going to get one, not really. We don’t yet know what started the fires: a mistake, an act of God, who knows. Even if they were arson, then what — we blame one arsonist? For burning down half of a city? I’m sorry, but that’s too easy. There is no arsonist on Earth who should be capable of burning down half a city. There is no spark that should be allowed to take this much. The conditions that created the fires in LA are bigger and grander that one thing or one person and the end result is that at the end of all this, if we’re honest, there will be no one entity to blame.

You can blame LA Mayor Karen Bass, if you want. It doesn’t seem clear that she cut the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget in a demonstrable way, it doesn’t seem clear that she forced the LAFD to change its hiring practices, it’s probably more clear that she, like most mayors, has prioritized absurd police budgets above public works programs that could mitigate some of the unmitigated disaster. She certainly bears some blame, but do you see the problem here? There is just too much.

Karen Bass did not write the regulations decades ago that allowed natural gas companies to strip and mine and car companies to pollute and exhaust and for all of us to use far, far more carbon than our small human bodies need. Karen Bass didn’t break ground on the first urban settlements there in 1921, that was a group of random Methodists. The natural gas companies didn’t tell Los Angeles’s rich and famous to live there, among the insanely combustible chaparral, though they certainly financed some of the elaborate wood and glass structures that have now been reduced to ash. It has barely rained anywhere in LA in eight months. When the fires started on Tuesday morning, the area was in the middle of a Santa Ana windstorm with gusts projected to reach 90 miles per hour. The oil companies are to blame and the city is to blame, but you can point all the fingers you want at those people and still, still, we won’t fix the problem.

Climate change is a developmental disease that builds slowly over time. It is not an acute problem, which is why it is never, ever addressed. When an acute symptom, like these horrible fires, occurs, we look for someone to blame. Sometimes we find that person or entity and force them to pay. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company, whose faulty system started the Camp Fire in 2018, declared bankruptcy and was forced to pay restitution for the deaths of 84 people after the fire wiped out several cities in Northern California. PG&E also still has a market cap of $36.33 billion backed by millions of customers who still rely on it for their electricity. There are hundreds of people out there right now who are probably furious at PG&E for failing to maintain the power line that eventually killed their loved ones who nevertheless still depend on the company to run their microwaves. You are not mad at the power company. You are not mad at the oil company. You are not mad at Karen Bass, or the Democrats, or even the Republicans, really (although I’m not going to stop you on that last point.) You are mad at capitalism. You are mad at the society that we have built over many, many, many years that has grown so large and built everything on such a scale that it can only fail catastrophically. This is a horrible thing to write because unlike many of the other acute problems and pains that we cover, even systemic ones, there is no easy fix. There is nothing that you or anyone can do right now to stop the next fire from coming. We ran up that bill so long ago that it is only possible to pay it off in blood.

It helps me to think about this horrible event — I am from California, I have lost things I loved in fires — in these terms because if nothing else I find some comfort in clarity. I don’t blame anyone for grasping for an easy scapegoat like a slashed budget. But what we have seen time and time again is that when the monstrous head of climate change rears its head, the public is extremely good at focusing on one solution, one person to blame, one thing to make the situation feel right again, while the underlying fuel load sits there and waits for its next chance to explode. If we do that, I think, then the future starts to look like the one Patrick over at Defector described yesterday, where a “rich guy who rails against property taxes and environmental protections then asks for private firefighters and [gets] them while those deemed economically unviable burn.”

That’s where we’re heading, right now. Changing this course is not a matter of just electing better leaders or regulating the oil companies so it gets slightly cooler and rains on Sunset Boulevard again. It’s a matter of re-evaluating every single facet of the society we have created, from where and how we build homes and how we manage fire to how we produce energy. It requires electing leaders who will do these things and approach them holistically and aggressively. I don’t know if this is possible, but it certainly isn’t if we delude ourselves into thinking there is an easy fix for what happened this week. We’re going to burn again, of that I am certain. But we can start fixing things before then. Someday, perhaps we can experience a major disaster and know that it will be the last one. That’s not today, nor is it tomorrow, nor will it ever come to pass if we keep our heads in the sand and attack scapegoats instead of structures.