‘Everything is Burned Down’ – The New York Times

The fire that destroyed Pacific Palisades this week started a few hundred yards from Sheila Morovati’s home.

At around 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning, ferocious winds began whipping smoke through across her patio. Minutes later, walls of flames were marching toward her swimming pool. Within an hour, firefighters were in her backyard, extinguishing falling embers.

Morovati, an environmental activist and author, has lived in the Los Angeles enclave of Pacific Palisades for 18 years. By Wednesday, her neighborhood was gone.

“The school my kids went to burned down,” she said. “Our library burned down. Our supermarket burned down. Our local Starbucks burned down. Every little business that you could ever enjoy in the Palisades are all gone. Everything is burned down. We don’t have anything anymore in our community.”

Officials still don’t know what started the fire. And it’s too early for climate scientists to have produced the kind of attribution studies that link specific weather events to global warming.

But the conditions that exacerbated this conflagration — soaring temperatures, severe drought, dry vegetation — are all symptoms of an overheating planet.

As humans continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, temperatures around the world are rising, extreme wildfires are getting more frequent and more intense, and fires are spreading faster, too.

And urban firestorms are becoming more common. Last year, it was Chile. In 2023, it was Maui. Before that, it was Boulder, Colo. And before that, Paradise, Calif.

Now Los Angeles is burning. The fires are spreading, and the winds are still gusting. We don’t know where will be next.

Unprepared

The Santa Ana winds, which blow West after high pressure builds up over the American desert, are an age-old meteorological phenomenon. But other more recent developments have made catastrophes like this more likely.

Homes are increasingly getting built in areas with high wildfire risk.

A stressed water system led firefighters in Pacific Palisades to confront fire hydrants running dry this week.

And as climate disasters multiply, insurers have already been pulling back from risk-prone areas like Southern California. The current fires could make it even harder for state officials to convince insurance companies to keep operating in the region, my colleague Christopher Flavelle reports.

There are ways to make urban firestorms less likely. Clearing brush, using nonflammable building materials, and siting buildings away from dense vegetation can all help.

But when the winds are this strong, whipping flames from building to building and sending embers flying miles away, there is only so much that can be done to prepare.

Looking ahead

Morovati’s home appears to have been spared for now. Firefighters reached her house within an hour of the blaze starting. Her security cameras are still transmitting a feed, and she can still see fireman on her property now and then.

If her home survives, it will be one of the few nearby homes in Pacific Palisades left standing.

For now, she is staying with her family at a hotel in Santa Monica, watching the news, and watching with exasperation as some online commenters question whether the fires have any connection to our warming planet.

“There’s never been this many fires,” she said. “We’ve had over 100-mile per hour winds. And it’s the driest it’s ever been through January. It’s this complete concoction of all of these climate issues coming together to create the most horrendous fire we’ve ever even experienced. So yeah, this has to do with climate change.”

Read more of coverage on the fires in Los Angeles:

• Follow live coverage here. Read the latest forecast.

• Local residents are overwhelmed by the spread of the fires: Wind-whipped wildfire blew through communities of every socioeconomic status and stripe, Shawn Hubler reports.

• A dangerously dry Southern California was ‘ready to burn’: Santa Ana winds are notorious for spreading wildfire flames, and they most often occur in colder months, Amy Graff reports. By January, though, their impacts are often less dramatic, as the landscape is typically less flammable after rains in the fall and early winter. But this year, the rains have not come, leaving most of Southern California extremely dry.

U.S. emissions stayed flat last year as power demand surged

America’s efforts to cut its climate change pollution stalled in 2024, with greenhouse gas emissions dropping just a fraction, 0.2 percent, compared with the year before, according to estimates published Thursday by the Rhodium Group, a research firm.

Despite continued rapid growth in solar and wind power, emissions levels stayed relatively flat last year because demand for electricity surged nationwide, which led to a spike in the amount of natural gas burned by power plants.

The fact that emissions didn’t decline much means the United States is even farther off-track from hitting President Biden’s goal of slashing greenhouse gases 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Scientists say all major economies would have to cut their emissions deeply this decade to keep global warming at relatively low levels. — Brad Plumer

Read the full article.

THE CLIMATE FIX

What New York’s congestion pricing program could accomplish

The problem: Some 28 percent of human-driven greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And the vast majority of transportation’s emissions come from cars and trucks.

The fix: New York City this week implemented a new congestion pricing program intended to raise money for transportation infrastructure and nudge area residents to lower-emissions options.

As of Jan. 5, most drivers have to pay $9 a day during popular travel times to enter a large chunk of the city, an area dubbed a “congestion relief zone.” Officials hope the program drums up billions for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to update city subways and buses.

Research has shown that implementing these congestion fees is one of the best policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions from driving, said Marlon Boarnet, director of the University of Southern California’s Metrans Transportation Research Consortium.

What the program could do: Officials expect the number of cars entering the zone could ultimately fall by at least 13 percent, and pollution in some neighborhoods should fall as a result.

Experts say New York’s program is similar to London’s congestion-pricing program, which went into effect in 2003. After implementing its program, London saw the number of vehicles and delays quickly fall, while traffic re-emerged later on despite rising program fees.

In the first six months after London expanded what it calls its Ultra Low Emission Zone, two key measures of pollution dropped significantly, research found.

The obstacles: The congestion pricing program has already faced numerous obstacles, including from Gov. Kathy Hochul herself, who several months ago halted its implementation weeks before it was supposed to start. When she revived the plan just before the election, Hochul cut the fees for most drivers from $15 to $9, though they’ll rise over time.

Various entities have sued to stop the program and lost, like the state of New Jersey, whose emergency request to ax the plan was denied days before the program went into effect. More than half of registered voters in the state oppose the plan, according to a Siena College poll released last month.

What’s next: President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to permanently stop New York City’s program. But given it’s already in effect, his options to stop it are limited.

Other legal challenges to the program remain up in the air, like a lawsuit from the United Federation of Teachers. The union has raised concerns that the congestion pricing program burdens lower-income and working-class New Yorkers. — Allison Prang