Hell on Earth? This is Not a Drill.
2024 was the hottest year on record, Southern California is burning, and Trump and his fossil fuel allies are set on fanning the flames.
Firefighters with US Forest Service Taskforce 1600 respond to a blaze during the Palisades Fire. Credit: USDA Forest Service, photo by Taskforce 1600 SHF Capt 343 Victor Guillen, via Flickr
Danielle Levanas grew up in Pacific Palisades, California. Her parents moved there in 1983, when she was a year old. Her mother, who passed away in January 2020, had renovated the family house with Danielle’s father. That house is now gone, destroyed by the massive wildfires ravaging the greater Los Angeles area.
“Losing that house in some ways feels like losing my mom all over again,” Levanas said. Her father was at work when the flames came through and fortunately was safe, but the family home and everything it contained was not. “There would be nothing left to salvage, and we have started to mourn,” she said. The destruction extends to the entire community and much of the larger surrounding area. “My elementary and middle school, our rec center, library, the community theater, the banks, the post office where we voted, our favorite restaurants, they have all been taken out,” Levanas said.
Overall, these fires have claimed thousands of homes and buildings and have resulted in over two dozen fatalities. The Palisades fire, which broke out on January 7, is currently at 27% containment, according to Cal Fire.
This heartbreaking and horrifying disaster is the manifestation of the climate emergency. As the planet rapidly heats up from greenhouse gases emitted primarily from burning fossil fuels, humans are increasingly suffering through more intense and devastating extreme weather events, from lethal heat waves and severe droughts to monstrous wildfires, catastrophic flooding and destructive superstorms. Nowhere is safe. That is our inescapable reality. And scientists tell us that these climate-fueled disasters will continue to get worse so long as our society perpetually produces and consumes fossil fuels.
“We know exactly what we need to do to stop things from getting worse: stop burning fossil fuels. The top resolution for 2025 must be transitioning away from fossil fuels, which will make the world a safer and more stable place,” Dr. Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London and head of the World Weather Attribution initiative, said in a recent statement.
According to World Weather Attribution’s first annual report, released last month, human-caused climate change in 2024 added on average 41 extra days of dangerous heat and amplified extreme weather around the globe that killed at least 3,700 people and displaced millions, resulting in “unrelenting suffering.”
“The floods in Spain, hurricanes in the US, drought in the Amazon, and floods across Africa are just a few examples,” Otto said.
Multiple climate science monitoring organizations have confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record. It was also the first full year of average global temperatures exceeding 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, indicating that the world is on the verge of breaking the Paris Agreement promise of striving to keep warming from surpassing 1.5°C. (Experts say that threshold would need to be exceeded over multiple years to constitute a breach of the Agreement). The ten warmest years on record have all been the last ten years (2015 through 2024).
The warming trend is irrefutable. Every increment of additional warming magnifies the risks, with profound consequences for humanity and the Earth’s physical systems, scientists say. “Every fraction of a degree rise in global temperature increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, commits the world to greater rises in sea level and increases the risk of crossing potential planet-altering tipping points such as breakdown of the Amazon rainforest biome or ice sheet collapse in Greenland or the Antarctic,” Rowan Sutton, director of the Met Office Hadley Centre, said in a statement.
“Scientists are now putting numbers on what most of us already knew was a hell of a year, literally,” Greenpeace International’s Ian Duff said in a press release responding to the climate science assessments for 2024. “From ongoing wildfires in California, to earlier disasters in India, Romania, Italy, Brazil and South Africa, homes were flooded, crops failed, and billions of people suffered from heat stress and breathed in toxic air.”
In the US, there were 27 billion-dollar extreme weather and climate disasters in 2024, according to NOAA. That ranks as the second-highest number of billion-dollar climate disasters in one year (there were 28 in 2023). “Over the last 10 years (2015–24), 190 separate billion-dollar disasters have killed at least 6,300 people and cost approximately $1.4 trillion in damage,” NOAA reports. The total costs for the 27 costliest disasters just last year are estimated to be nearly $183 billion, and that cost may still rise.
Now, just two weeks in to 2025, the US is seeing what could very well be its costliest climate-related disaster yet. Initial estimates of the damages from the southern California wildfires are more than $250 billion. For people that have lost loved ones or lost their homes, the loss is incalculable.
These fires are clearly linked to climate change – which again, stems primarily from burning fossil fuels. “Climate change is making these fires much more dangerous than they would be if the climate were not warming,” Kaitlyn Trudeau, senior research associate for climate science at Climate Central, said during a press briefing earlier this week. The warming dries out the landscape and vegetation and makes exceptionally warm and windy conditions more likely, which help fuel the fires once they start.
Climate Crimes
These fires are not merely a tragic occurrence, but should be viewed as a crime, climate accountability advocates and some survivors of the fires say. And they are pointing the finger squarely at the fossil fuel industry.
Allen Meyers grew up in Paradise, California, a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas that was nearly wiped off the map by the 2018 Camp Fire. Unusually dry and windy conditions helped fan the flames. “It was those conditions that we can draw and point a line to the fossil fuel industry. The fingerprints of their neglect are all over our disaster, and disasters around the world,” Meyers said.
Climate attribution science backs up these claims. “Over half of the increase in fire-prone conditions over the last century or so can be attributed to the emissions traced to just 88 fossil fuel companies and cement manufacturers around the world,” Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at Climate Central, said during a January 16 press briefing, referencing a 2023 peer-reviewed study she co-authored examining wildfire activity in the western US and southwestern Canada.
While wildfires are expected in those regions, the blazes that have occurred in recent years have been on an entirely different scale. Canada experienced its worst wildfires on record in 2023, burning an area roughly equivalent in size to that of England and sending haze and smoke to the northeastern US. Parts of the northeast like New York City and New Jersey saw fires of their own just a few months ago as drought gripped this region and fire weather conditions set in. Devasting fires have of course hit other parts of the world too, like Australia with the unprecedented 2019-2020 bush fires.
The world is, periodically but also increasingly, on fire. This is not a drill. It’s an emergency. A climate emergency.
“The disasters we are seeing today are not natural. They are crimes,” Levanas said during the January 16 press briefing hosted by Public Citizen, which is advocating for holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for the climate crisis.
Yet instead of charting a course to pivot away from these fuels that are the overwhelming driver of climate destruction, governments around the world, and especially here in the US, continue to subsidize and support them.
Governments plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels through 2030 than is consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, and 69% more than would be consistent with halting warming at 2°C, according to the 2023 Production Gap report from the Stockholm Environment Institute, the UN Environment Program, and several other partners. “Governments are literally doubling down on fossil fuel production; that spells double trouble for people and planet,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a press release accompanying that report.
The US is already the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, and is poised to double down even more on hydrocarbon energy production under the incoming Trump administration. President-elect Trump is pushing a “drill baby drill” energy dominance agenda and is filling energy and environmental positions in his cabinet with people who have ties to the fossil fuel industry. Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum for example has ties (including a land leasing deal) to drilling firm Continental Resources and its CEO Harold Hamm, while Chris Wright, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, is the founder and CEO of fracking company Liberty Energy. And EPA administrator nominee Lee Zeldin supports boosting fossil fuel extraction and has taken over $410,000 in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry during the course of his political career. Trump himself has received millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests during his campaign, and the industry will be expecting a return on its investment. The American Petroleum Institute has published its wish list of policies and actions for the incoming administration, from axing standards on vehicle emissions to expediting LNG export approvals and maximizing oil and gas production on federal lands and waters.
That is the exact opposite direction the US should be taking if we are at all serious about addressing the climate threat, climate scientists tell us. But the people in power who ignore or dismiss the science and the warnings are effectively condemning present and future generations to increasingly dire climate consequences, disruptive shocks, and suffering.
“These catastrophes are going to keep happening, more and more often,” Meyers said. “We can’t wait for more lives to be lost. We need to hold Big Oil accountable and demand bold action on climate.”