The Los Angeles fires are a climate catastrophe. There’s no mistaking it. But if you read the Murdoch papers or scrolled through X over the last week, you’d never know it. This reticence to acknowledge the role of a rapidly changing and destabilising climate – and the nefarious, greed-driven fossil fuel companies that are fuelling this nightmare – is astonishing.
We are becoming numb to words like ‘unprecedented’ and phrases like ‘once-in-a-lifetime’. These words are used so frequently they have lost all meaning.
When I logged into X last Friday, the feed was wall-to-wall with dramatic footage of the fires, but there was little to no acknowledgment of climate change’s role in this disaster.
And most dishearteningly, the most heinous climate minimisation from Elon Musk, who took very little time to downplay the role the climate crisis has played in this disaster, claiming in an X post that climate change is real but not happening as fast as scientists say it is.
Then, he went on to list a host of factually incorrect factors other than climate as fuelling this destruction – Democrat politicians, environmentalists, diversity and inclusion, deregulation, the list goes on.
A story on the front page of news.com with the headline ‘Cause of devastating LA fires revealed’. Not one mention of climate change at all. The words do not appear in any of the rolling coverage, either. This is a deliberate omission.
How much more will we need to lose and witness before it’s no longer up for debate?
The time for denialism and minimising the climate crisis has to end. We cannot entertain or indulge any scepticism any longer. We should ask not if one believes in climate change, but instead how much they understand about it.
How can we watch huge swathes of Los Angeles burn to a cinder – in the middle of winter, no less – and see this as ‘normal’?
Insured losses from the devastating LA fires are estimated to top $US20 billion. Like it has here in Australia, more and more homeowners in the USA will no longer be able to insure their properties. Because the odds of a climate disaster claiming your home are exponentially increasing with every passing day and every tonne of CO2 released into our atmosphere.
At ACF we have stopped using the term ‘natural disasters’. Because much of what we’re grappling with in 2025 is not natural, it’s human-made. It’s the result of burning of coal, oil and gas and an abject failure from political leaders to turn off the fossil fuel tap fuelling the destruction.
Where is the accountability? Where is the public outcry over the culprits? Where is the pitchfork mob out for justice? Never forget that oil and gas CEOs have spent generations conspiring to burn our planet for profit. Not only are they getting away with it, they’re posting record profits while people die as a result of their greed and well-funded disinformation campaigns.
Experts are already calling the LA fires the worst in the state’s history. And this isn’t even California’s official fire season. This catastrophe has occurred in the middle of winter. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that LA’s ‘climate whiplash’ conditions – that is, flipping from prolonged drought to severe flooding and back to drought again – is a major driver in this disaster, and part of a global phenomenon getting worse with climate change.
From Australia’s devastating Black Summer to the wildfires that tore through parts of Europe in 2023 and 2024, what LA is suffering through is a terrible symptom of a global trend. Bushfires are increasing in severity and frequency and fire seasons bleeding into each other. Our planet is literally burning. The eerie similarity between smoke-enveloped downtown LA right now, and Melbourne or Sydney’s CBD five years ago, is striking.
Those of us who have dedicated our careers to educating audiences on climate feel a sense of despondency at how increasingly difficult this task is – in the age of disinformation and winding back of fact checking – and how little progress we’ve made. The level of cognitive dissonance flooding the comments sections in our social media feeds is both baffling and dispiriting.
This doubt, denialism and minimisation goes right to the top. It is shameful that in 2025, some politicians in Australia are debating whether renewables are an effective climate solution (spoiler: they are). Sadly, in the halls of Parliament, the fossil fuel lobby is powerful and influential as ever.
One of the most common pieces of disinformation that makes the rounds in Australia is that ‘what Australia does on climate, doesn’t matter’.
I’m here to tell you it does. Australia’s exported fossil fuel emissions are a major contributor to climate catastrophes everywhere.
Last year, Australia took the shameful title of the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter, after Russia and the United States. But it gets worse when the fuel is burned. Australia exports so much coal that our nation is the second-largest exporter of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions.
As the catastrophe in Los Angeles continues to unfold, the EU’s Earth Observation Program officially declared 2024 as the hottest year on record. Our window of opportunity to prevent complete devastation and societal collapse is perilously close to slamming shut.
I often wonder, do those decision-makers who diminish and deny our climate reality not care about their children? Do they not worry that at some stage, on our current woeful trajectory, we will all lose something precious to the climate crisis? Or even – as so many are motivated by money – consider the whopping cost of climate destruction and who pays?
As this nightmarish event has clearly demonstrated: wealth is not going to spare you. The bitter truth is that climate change doesn’t care whether you believe it or not. It’s here, it’s happening now, and we can choose the mentally easier option of putting on the blinkers, but it comes at a profound price. Ignorance is deadly.
Nothing is more important than decisive action stop burning and exporting fossil fuels and to transition to renewables, built in the right places, as soon as possible.
In the aftermath of this tragedy, there’s no doubt the narrative will turn to whether President-elect Donald Trump is up to the task of handling climate disasters. By examining his track record, we already know the answer to that.
It’s too late for citizens of the United States to undo the installation of a ‘drill baby, drill’ climate denier into the top job, but it’s not too late for us. And with an election approaching, we must heed this warning.
We have a golden chance to use our individual and collective power to elect an even more progressive Parliament on climate action, one that is up to the task of what we’re facing in years to come, so let’s embrace it.