"Six years ago, give or take a couple months, we brought my newborn son home from the hospital amid actual falling ash from the Woolsey fire in Malibu. There is no way you can ignore the implications of something like that: This is the world that you are being born into, you can surely feel it in your tiny lungs.

I permitted myself a sliver of hope anyway, one that is getting harder by the day to retain. For instance, the climate journalist Brian Kahn pointed out that researchers have found that the growth rate of the fastest wildfires—like Woolsey, and like Palisades—is now 250% faster than they were twenty years ago. They are so much more common. As the meteorologist and climate writer Eric Holthaus put it in the Guardian, “the Los Angeles wildfires are climate disasters compounded.”

The firefighters run out of water in the Palisades, the hydrants are dry. We get word: LAUSD is shutting down the schools. For us, that’s it—we are fortunate to have family down towards San Diego, so after dinner we pack up the car and go.

I am stewing not only in my little ossified rage over the climate crisis, at the usual suspects, who have in my mind blended into a nebulous amalgam of dull-eyed evil; the oil executives and fossil fuel companies and opportunistic politicians etc that I can summon and angrily dispense with as though checking a box on a form. I am also thinking about the utter fragility of those tools that have helped us to adapt in at least some small ways to this new era—tools like Twitter that can be broken in a matter of months if the wrong billionaire buys them.

I’m thinking of how little progress we’ve made in addressing the root causes of the climate crisis, of course, and how adept our elites have become at kicking the can down the road."

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-fires-are-everywhere