THE WIND AND floods of Hurricane Katrina — now, amazingly, 20 years in the rearview mirror — were an early wake-up call about climate change. Precisely what scientists had been predicting was underway — super-strong storms overwhelming the coasts. But Katrina taught another lesson too: Those most in danger in this new world were going to be poor and quite likely would be people of color. The Lower Ninth Ward became a symbol of all those things, and to wander those streets in the weeks afterward was to see the future.
But we didn’t see it clearly enough, not enough to really change what we were doing. Indeed, we’ve just inaugurated a president who campaigned on his conviction that it’s all a hoax. Drill, baby, drill.
Just as he was transitioning into power, we had the fires of Los Angeles. These, again, were just what climate scientists said would happen: Record dryness (essentially no rain since May); record warmth; record windspeeds. It was a conflagration as predictable as it was horrific. But this time it came with one new feature: A great many of the victims were rich. Not all of them — the middle-class community of Altadena burned (including the home of my earliest memories as a boy). But in Pacific Palisades, street after street of multimillion-dollar homes — the very definition of California as idyll — were swept with fire despite the airy breezes off the blue ocean.
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