‘California’s burning due to its stupidest residents’

In all the horrors of the California wildfires, one woman spoke sense.

Sooty and exhausted outside a home that was burning, she said words to the effect of: “Fires here, floods there, hurricanes somewhere else. This is how it is going to be. We’re going to have to pick which disaster we want to live with, and deal with it.”

The combined resignation and resilience in her words were not echoed by Kim Kardashian, who blamed the incompetent Mayor of Los Angeles, or Mel Gibson, who pointed his stubby little finger at the Democratic governor for not clearing the undergrowth.

Cream of the crop was the usually-brilliant Jamie Lee Curtis, who flew to New York to inform Jimmy Fallon and a million other people “it’s just a catastrophe in southern California”. Although to be fair to her, she did donate $1m to fire relief efforts.

It’s just that none of them decided to stop flying. None of them used their platforms to say “why do we keep building houses out of wood?” And not a one asked “hey, I wonder if that new president we’re getting should ‘drill baby drill’ like he said.” All we got was celebrity hot air, blasted on to a problem already raging out of control.

If one ordinary California resident, who is not rich and famous and probably flies or says stupid things no more than most normal people do, can figure out what’s going on with the biggest set of wildfires since the Chicxulub meteor impact of 66 million years ago, then you’d think the Curtis-Kardashian-Gibson combined IQ of maybe 100 or so should be able to draw the dots.

Instead Kardashian was fined for splurging 232,000 gallons of water on her lawn to keep it looking green. Curtis fled a climate disaster on the most polluting form of modern transport short of a space rocket. Gibson returned to the smoking shell of his home in the same fashion, then decided it it was The Left’s fault.

The three little pigs figured it out quicker than this. These people are thick, but they’re STILL not the most stupid people in California.

There’s the local government building control officers, who outlawed building with bricks a century ago because of the earthquake risks, and haven’t outlawed building with wood because of the growing fire hazards.

There’s the US forestry industry, which has an abundance of trees, multi-million dollar logging businesses, and zero interest in people building houses out of a material that isn’t cheap as chips and doesn’t burn like an actual twig.

Then you’ve the housing industry, which keeps ramming in new homes about half an inch away from the neighbour, on small plots of land to provide a massive service economy required to service mansions and millionaires. And which will be charging a fortune to rebuild them, with knock-on costs for insurance, local taxes, and wages.

All of which, of course, arrives eventually at the top of the California pyramid – the studio bigwigs, the tech billionaires, the moguls, the bankers with a winter bolthole, and yes the stars they enable. There’s a reason all that was left of so many homes was the chimney. Despite the fact everyone knew better, the rest of it was the fireplace.

Here and there are stories of the ‘miracle houses’ that survived almost unscathed, each of which didn’t burn because they were made of fire retardant materials. Solid roofs, no vents into which the Santa Ana winds could whisk glowing embers, no juniper or eucalyptus trees, no wood shingles or decking, concrete fire breaks and, most important of all, an owner with the money and foresight to do something sensible.

California has suffered a drought for the best part of a decade. The fire hydrants have run dry before. Yet many of the world’s richest people saw no reason to stop watering their lawns, fly less, or Zoom more.

The state has been subject to wildfires since the Ice Age, yet the need for cheap servants demanded cheap housing, with fire regulations not fit for purpose because in Los Angeles people only matter if they’re pretty, or pretty rich.

And climate change has been on school curricula for decades; it’s been manifest for years; and still nobody in LA thought to have fire marshal volunteers in every neighbourhood, or a stash of pumps so homeowners could use water from the swimming pools. Instead, residents who tried to fight the fires did so with no training, no help, and in one video were using buckets to fill wheelie bins so they could push the water down the road to be bailed out once more.

But it’s all right if you’re wealthy, because you have more than one house, you can rebuild without insurance, and you can afford the $2,000-a-head private firefighting force which has been protecting the homes of the more selfish locals.

In America cash is king, and if you’ve got the cash you’re the king. And in poorer neighbourhoods, photographers have walked street after street, with homes on fire, and not a fire truck to be seen.

Today, some blame arson, or undocumented migrants, or the authorities, or the Left or the Right, depending on their personal prejudices and where they sit on the Mel Gibson Spectrum of how stupid they’re able to be in public before someone steps in to stop them.

The fires are natural, humans made them worse, and then the victims managed, by dint of great intellectual effort, to multiply the impact. Everyone lost memories and people, some will never be able to rebuild, and some of the missing will take years to be declared dead because all that’s left of them is teeth. It hurts everyone eventually, but the drivers of disaster are always those who shout loudest.

If, after this, the likes of Kardashian can still spray water and shrug off the fine rather than be jailed, if Gibson can still blame politics without anyone asking what his house was built of, if Curtis can still fly across a continent to promote a film and decry the catastrophe of a disaster to which Hollywood’s century of unnecessary aviation has in no small part contributed, then there is no hope for them. They’re doomed to being the first of many little piggies whose houses will burn, over and over again.

It is the unnamed woman who saw the next century in those flames who has the wisdom to do better, next time. In a country with nothing but space, to put some room between you and the neighbours, to order jail time for wasting water, for setting up volunteer fire crews in every street and building homes fit for human habitation in a land which will burn whatever it can.

Climate change could have been averted, once. It’s too late now. This is the world we’re in, and we must choose which disaster to deal with. And it’s clear that, whatever climate we pick, stupid people are the biggest threat we face.