Addressing this crisis requires getting to the root causes. But the corporate media continues to describe the current events out of context. Climate researcher Leah Stokes explained on Democracy Now!:
Who is responsible? It’s fossil fuel companies and electric utilities who lied about climate science for decades. . . .
The fact is that L.A. County, more than 80 percent of it is under extreme drought. And we’re looking at the driest 20-year period in 1,200 years.
And the other thing that climate change is doing is it’s leading to more extreme precipitation in some times, and then more extreme dryness. Last year there was an enormous amount of water that fell in Southern California. That led to a lot of new fuel being built up . . all the chaparral, the bushes . . . And then, the next year, which we’re in right now, the October period starts that rainy season. When no rain is falling, all of that new fuel it builds up, it dies. And then, when these massive hurricane-force winds hit during January and you have this period of dryness, that overlap of these extreme winds and that dry landscape, that parched drought landscape, that’s what creates this tinderbox situation. And so, that’s what’s really creating such a dangerous situation for people.
Journalist John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, says the Los Angeles wildfires should be a wake-up call. Vaillant stated:
[The] frankly suicidal loyalty to the status quo of keeping fossil fuels preeminent in our energy system is creating an increasingly unlivable situation . . .
What we’re living in right now is an increasingly shrill dissonance between the fact of climate change, the science of climate change . . . and the governments who . . . [serve] the petroleum industry and the investors who are dependent on keeping them in business.
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