On Tuesday, Jan 7, Chevron, ExxonMobile, BP and Royal Dutch Shell set fire to the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. But they weren’t alone. And an online army of gaslighters helped cover their tracks—blaming all the conservative’s favorite villains — lest the shock of the disaster translate into coherent action that could avert the catastrophic future we’re headed for.
“Who is responsible? It’s fossil fuel companies and electric utilities, who lied about climate science for decades,” UC Santa Barbara climate scientist Leah Stokes said on Democracy Now six days later, as the fires continued to burn.
Of course there are other factors. And it always takes an initial spark. But midwinter fires in LA?
“The consequences of our petroleum dependency are clear,” said Coalition for Clean Air President Joe Lyou. “We should never be having to worry about fires in Southern California in January.”
For generations oil company scientists and top management have known that their products would heat the Earth’s atmosphere, causing untold damage. Their climate models—from as far back as the 1970s—even said so. A 2023 study, published in Science, found that “in private and academic circles since the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil predicted global warming correctly and skillfully.” So when Donald Trump calls climate change “a hoax” apparently ExxonMobile scientists are in on it.
Despite this privately-held knowledge, they publicly lied about it, in order to make sure they could recklessly continue putting everyone on the planet at risk. On Jan 7, that risk took the form of burning Pacific Palisades to the ground destroying over 5,000 structures, and devastating much of Altadena in the Eaton fire, destroying even more: over 7,000 structures. Their costs—more than $30 billion—were a staggering 10% of worldwide costs last year, $320 billion, according to reinsurance giant Munich Re. (Other smaller fires also erupted, and were more quickly contained.)
And yet, these massive costs pale in comparison to what’s not counted now—and to what lies ahead. Accuweather’s much larger loss estimate of $250 billion to $275 billion includes “many factors including long-run health impacts as well as short-term losses in the value of public companies exposed to the disaster,” it told the New York Times. Indirect deaths could run into the thousands, according to a report from Yale Climate Connections. There were over 18,000 indirect wildfire deaths in 2018, the year of the Camp Fire, which killed 88 people directly.
But fossil fuels have even greater health and mortality costs. Dr. George Thurston, who published the first study of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution and human mortality in the 1980s, told Random Lengths that a good study from 2021 lead by Karn Vohra “estimates that as many as 10.2 million deaths/yr. may be caused globally by fossil fuel combustion air pollution” with “between 305,000 and 355,000 deaths per year in the US.”
He went on to say, “Using the EPA economic valuation of a life (about $10 million per life lost), that would come to about a dollar valuation of some $3 trillion dollars per year!”
That’s 10 times the world-wide climate change property losses identified by Munich Re! “Our reliance on fossil fuels for energy is an ongoing health pandemic of its own, year after year, in every country in the world,” he said.
And the future is even worse. Two studies published last year and this tell of massive financial costs that our political leaders of all stripes are simply ignoring.
A study published in Nature last April, “The economic commitment of climate change,” reported that “the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next
26 years independent of future emission choices”—meaning those income losses are already baked in—and that “These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices.” In short, the costs we face dwarf how much is required to limit them in the long run. And the authors also note that their estimates are conservative—costs could be much higher.
Just this month, a report from risk management experts at the British Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, “Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature,” looked at the longer time frame and warned of much worse: the global economy could face a staggering 50% loss in gross domestic product (GDP) between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change, and there could be four billion deaths as well. The report warns that:
Climate change impacts are materializing at lower temperatures than estimated.
Unmitigated climate change and nature-driven risks have been hugely underestimated
The severity and frequency of extreme events are unprecedented and beyond model projections.
In short, the Palisades and Eaton fires—horrific as they may be—are only a small taste of what is to come if we do not dramatically change our course. “Our current market-led approach to mitigating climate and nature risks is not delivering.”
But at least they’re on a scale we can grasp, with a potential to shock us into action. Which is the last thing the fossil fuel industry and its allies want us to do. Which helps to explain the intensity of the other firestorm—the firestorm of lies, which attempts to shift blame onto Democrats, their allies, policies and values, as the most anti-environmental president in history returns to office.
Climate Gaslighting
As fast as the fires spread, virulent disinformation spread even faster, blaming all the conservative’s favorite villains: government itself, Democratic politicians, diversity programs, wealthy Jews, globalist totalitarian conspiracies—you name it, they were promoting it. It’s become a rightwing ritual of late: whenever there’s a climate-related disaster—as happened most recently with Hurricane Helene—there’s explosion of wildly distracting disinformation, which can best be understood as an example of gaslighting.
Initially, oil companies denied there was any problem, and denialism became a defining characteristic of opposition to climate action. In time—taking a page from tobacco companies—they shifted focus to fostering doubt, as detailed by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes in their 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt. But increasingly since the Tea Party era, opposition has blossomed into outright gaslighting, which Oxford Dictionaries defines as “the action of manipulating someone by psychological means into accepting a false depiction of reality or doubting their own sanity.”
While denialism simply insists on a false reality, gaslighting goes much further by forcing it on others and undermining their capacity to resist. And it invariably revolves around absolving abusive wrong-doers and shifting blame onto their victims. It’s important to understand the gaslighting itself—and just what it’s trying to conceal. All too often, accusations that gaslighters make are simply confessions about themselves.
Climate gaslighting takes multiple forms that have been called out in recent years. Oreskes highlighted the fossil fuel industry’s long-running strategy of placing blame on consumers in a Scientific American article last June. Researcher Vijay Kolinjivadi focused on “’climate solutions’ that protect, if not boost, profits of big corporations [that] are deployed and presented as the only way to combat climate change” writing for Al Jazeera English in 2022. And Communications scholar Farah Latif published research in 2020 about Congressional Republicans gaslighting their commitment to finding climate solutions.
These and other forms of chronic climate gaslighting go on all the time. But when an extreme climate event happens, threatening to potentially mobilize public opinion to break through the haze of chronic gaslighting, that’s when a more freewheeling anything-goes style of climate gaslighting kicks in, drawing on whatever pre-packaged boogeyman narrative comes to hand.
We saw it in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene—which clearly showed that “climate sanctuaries” like Asheville, North Carolina were a myth, that there’s no escaping the ravages of climate change. Faced squarely, it could have cost Trump the election. But the physical reality was overwhelmed with an avalanche of distracting lies about the Biden Administration response, primarily drawing on updated versions of 1980s rightwing anti-government myths and tropes focused on demonizing FEMA.
We’re seeing it again with the LA wildfires, which vividly remind us of the deadliness of Trump’s anti-clean-energy policies, which he began rolling out on day, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords and reopening oil drilling while canceling off-shore wind projects, as well as rolling back support for electric vehicles. Conservatives blamed everything from diversity initiatives to global plots to destroy America, along with a jumble of misleading claims that contained some elements of truth—amidst a torrent of lies—but wildly misrepresented their significance.
Water pressure was a problem, for example, but not because of Democrats doing nefarious things. Rather it it was because municipal water systems simply aren’t built for fighting huge wildfires. They’re built for firefighting at residential and commercial buildings. A handful of hydrants can maintain water pressure indefinitely, but a whole network cannot. Thus, the failure reflected how unprepared we are as a society for dealing with the increased threats of climate change, which conservatives are doing everything possible to deny or conceal. It was an indictment of conservative policies of denial and delay, not of liberals.
Trump’s number one backer, Elon Musk, was a prime promoter of this gaslighting disinformation onslaught, posting a seemingly endless stream of false messages. A particularly telling example was a post by Alex Jones, promoting his livestream: “Los Angeles Fires Are Part Of A Larger Globalist Plot To Wage Economic Warfare & Deindustrialize The United States Before Triggering Total Collapse,” to which Musk responded, “True.” What makes this so telling is that it’s virtual mirror image of reality: Global warming is the real threat, with oil companies and petro-states like Saudi Arabia waging war against those trying to save the planet—in part via Biden’s green energy re-industrialization of the United States, the vast majority of which is taking place in red and purple states.
But most tellingly of all, Saudi Arabia—a partner in Musk’s Twitter takeover—is making plans for the mother of all post-apocalyptic gated communities. As a petro-state, they are under no illusions about the disastrous future that lies ahead. On Bluesky, European security consultant Andy Scollick noted. “From a security perspective, this is how the future looks:
* Gated (GC) communities
* In survival-favorable locations.
* Defended by private military companies.”
* Using lethal and non-lethal weapons
* To secure GC inhabitants and infrastructure / resources (food, water, energy)
* From climate displaced people
And he pointed to Saudi Arabia’s NOEM project as a prime example, “a self-sustaining defensible gated community for some 9 million people to survive in comfort, even luxury, from mid-century on when climate change impacts will make much of the Middle East uninhabitable.” That’s the neo-feudal future that fossil fuel companies and their allies have in mind: a deeply impoverished, conflict-ridden world. That future is what all the wildfire gaslighting is trying to hide, because that is what we’re headed for, unless we radically change course.