Read Joelle Gergis – LA fires are our Black Summer: a call to climate action, The Saturday Paper, 18-24 January 2025

For many Australians, the footage of ferocious wildfires engulfing the suburbs of Los Angeles has been deeply triggering. With the devastation of the Black Summer of 2019–2020 not far behind us, images of glowing-red bushland, neighbourhoods incinerated beyond recognition and the horror of distressed people is enough to make your heart race.

The fires in California follow the region’s hottest summer on record and a severe drought that saw just four millimetres of rainfall since October. Exceptionally hot and dry conditions turned forests and grasslands into fuel, priming the landscape to burn. So when Santa Ana winds gusting up to 161 kilometres an hour roared off the southern California deserts, the suburbs of LA ignited and burnt all the way to the Pacific coast. During winter. It’s a textbook example of what we can expect as fossil fuel-induced warming continues to ravage our planet. So far at least 25 people have been killed, and the event is on track to become the most expensive wildfires in American history, with damages expected to exceed US$135 billion (A$219 billion).

As the United States wildfire crisis began to unfold, news broke of the Earth’s warmest year on record. New analysis based on temperature datasets generated by key scientific agencies around the world showed that 2024 was approximately 1.55 degrees above pre-industrial levels recorded since 1850. Significantly, 2024 is the first year the global temperature has exceeded the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5 degrees – it’s an unmistakable sign of the deep trouble we are in. Global greenhouse gas concentrations reached record highs last year, with no clear decline in sight. In fact, methane – a powerful heat-trapping gas that is about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the near term – has risen sharply, worrying scientists because of its instrumental role in triggering periods of abrupt climate change. Many countries, including Australia, are currently promoting methane, or natural gas, as a “transition fuel” with no scientifically credible plan to transition away from it before 2050.The weather events considered an extreme outlier in today’s climate will pale in comparison with what the future will bring … One day we will look back at 2024 as one of the coldest years this century.

Humanity’s relentless burning of fossil fuels will continue to drive up temperatures until we reach net zero emissions. In the meantime, things are going to get ugly. According to the latest analysis conducted by Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the top 10 warmest years have all occurred since 2015. Ocean temperatures reached record highs in 2024, driven by an El Niño event that peaked in December 2023. Because warm water evaporates more easily, elevated ocean temperatures led to a record-breaking amount of water in the atmosphere last year. A more humid atmosphere influenced torrential rainfall conditions around the world, including those that inundated eastern Spain in October, breaking national rainfall records and killing 232 people in a wealthy European country.

Of course, Europe wasn’t the only part of the world to experience devastating rains in 2024 – catastrophic flooding affected South-East Asia, East Africa and southern Brazil, claiming hundreds of lives – but Western media was more interested in covering the heartache of white, affluent communities rather than that of dark-skinned, poor people. As we’ve seen in recent coverage of the Californian fires, journalists have an inane fixation on reporting news of the burnt mansions of Hollywood celebrities such as Billy Crystal and Mel Gibson, instead of explaining how fossil fuel-driven climate change is destabilising our world. About 150,000 people in LA have been ordered to evacuate, but no mention is made of the 20.3 million people internally displaced because of weather disasters in 2023 (the latest figure available in global studies). I’m pretty sure most of those people didn’t have the luxury of paying private firefighters to save their homes.

As a climate scientist, it’s very hard not to feel cynical when people say that perhaps an event like the LA wildfires will be the moment when the world finally wakes up to the reality of the climate emergency. While the symbolism of the fires is stark – the destruction caused by late-stage capitalism crashing through the heartland of liberal America – the reality is that the climate change-denier Donald Trump is headed back to the White House in a matter of days. Amid an unprecedented confluence of global disasters, the incoming US president is expected to pull the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter out of the Paris Agreement and advance his pro-fossil fuel policy of “drill, baby, drill” as a matter of national pride.

A resurgence of global oil and gas production is the last thing our overheating planet needs. The ongoing derailment of United Nations climate summits by fossil fuel interests shows that our political and business leaders are still not serious about “climate action” – an insipid phrase that hides all manner of evils. According to the latest UN figures, world governments still plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than is consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. Global coal production is expected to continue until then, with oil and gas extending to at least 2050. Until our political and business leaders have the courage to put a price on carbon and remove the fossil fuel subsidies that are blocking the renewable energy transition, worsening weather extremes will continue to reconfigure life on our planet. The weather events considered an extreme outlier in today’s climate will pale in comparison with what the future will bring. As industrial pollution continues to warm our planet, one day we will look back at 2024 as one of the coldest years this century.

Recently I attended a seminar by scientists from the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO on the release of their 2024 State of the Climate report. One finding that hit me hard was that 2019, Australia’s hottest and driest year on record, which culminated in the horrendous Black Summer fires, will become an average year before 2040. The reality of this is hard to comprehend. Over the coming decade, Australia’s climate is going to become increasingly extreme, leading to catastrophic conditions that will repeatedly upend our lives. The years of carefree summers will be behind us.

Australia’s next federal election is a fateful fork in the road. While nearly 40 per cent of Australia’s electricity is now powered by renewables, our government runs the risk of undoing all of this good work by continuing to support fossil fuel production. Some people argue that because Australia’s domestic emissions are responsible for only about 1 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions, what we do doesn’t make a difference. But if you consider all of the countries that also contribute less than 2 per cent of emissions, pretty quickly it adds up to more than 40 per cent of total international emissions. If we adopt this morally bankrupt logic, we will collectively fail to stabilise the Earth’s climate. And because Australia is the world’s third-largest exporter of fossil fuels, the majority of emissions from our fossil fuels occur when they are burnt overseas. It is our ethical responsibility to show true leadership and stop the production of fossil fuels at their source, as they pollute the Earth’s atmosphere no matter where they are burnt.

Who we elect to navigate Australia’s clean energy transition will determine the future prosperity of our country. Today’s leaders have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rise to the greatest moral challenge humanity will ever face. Without a stable climate, we can forget about a thriving society, environment or economy. Now more than ever we need our political, business and community leaders to step up and respond with the urgency required of the escalating crisis. We must have the courage to do what we know is right. More than that, we need to do it while we still have time to make a difference. Each of us has a role to play in building the critical mass that is needed to shift the status quo. It is a dark era to be sure, but we must align our energy, talents and resources with our values and do everything we can within our spheres of influence.

As Australia’s federal election draws closer, voters have a clear choice between political leaders who are trying to keep the country on track to decarbonising our economy and those who want to lead us down a nuclear power dead end. The Coalition’s insidious effort to demonise the rollout of renewable energy is an act of intergenerational vandalism. Australia is the sunniest continent on the planet, and yet only 18 per cent of our electricity is generated by solar power: we are squandering an enormous economic advantage other countries can only dream of.

Last year, thanks to New South Wales’s home battery incentive, our home became one of the four million Australian households to install rooftop solar. I have been blown away by how powerfully solar panels can generate electricity, even on rainy days. After a spell of cloudy and wet weather, ours can generate enough electricity to recharge a battery that powers our home overnight and can still export excess to the grid during the day. So much for lights going off when the sun isn’t shining. My only wish is that the surplus electricity we are generating could be diverted into a community battery.

Since we installed our new solar system, we haven’t needed to buy any fossil fuel-generated electricity, so are effectively living off-grid in the suburbs. When I’m feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world, I’ve taken to staring out the window to admire our solar array. It is a physical reminder that the future is here, and that we can all be a part of it. The solutions already exist, we just need a new generation of leaders to foster the political, social and economic environment required to incentivise the clean energy transition for every Australian. As the climate crisis deepens, we all have a choice to make about which side of history we want to be on. We can slip back into denial and be periodically shocked by the latest tragedy, such as the Californian wildfires, or we can be part of the regenerative effort our world so desperately needs. What happens next is up to all of us.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 18, 2025 as “Beyond the LA wildfires”.