Derailment doom loops and Trump as the first post-1.5°C president

Another example of how the consequences of climate change impact our ability to tackle its causes

By CAL FIRE_Official - Palisades Fire, Public Domain

No one should be surprised that climate change played a role in the devastating Los Angeles wildfires. What remains to be seen is whether this tragedy will spur action to stem the spiraling climate crisis. The prospects for that do not currently seem good

Decades ago, scientists anticipated that a warmer climate would create weather see-sawing between extremes of wet and dry. Exactly this has happened over the last few years in L.A. county, where record rainfall bloomed vegetation, which then desiccated in last year’s dry conditions, creating a tinder box. The spark inevitably came.

As planet-heating emissions have grown, so has the proportion of humanity suffering its consequences. In L.A., the smoking remains of multi-million dollar beachfront properties demonstrate that no one is truly safe. Elsewhere, worsening climate impacts have played a role in driving inflation, geopolitical tensions, and trade disruption, affecting hundreds of millions of people.

In a world of well-functioning politics, worsening climate impacts today would lead to more demands to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and so limit climate impacts in the future. The political reaction to the unfolding disaster in L.A. show that we do not live in such a world.

Devastation of Hurricane Helene, photo by Bill McMannis

Donald Trump is applying the same playbook he used during hurricanes Milton and Helene (disasters that were made more likely by climate change). In the case of L.A., he has used the president-elect bully pulpit to criticise California governor Gavin Newsom and other local Democrat leaders and make baseless claims about the mismanagement of water resources, including that the protection of a local fish species was prioritised over fire fighting.

Elon Musk has used his huge social media following to amplify this misinformation. In a recent X post, he argued that while climate change is real, its effects are only severe because of misguided regulation, and counter-productive and incompetent government action. So - his argument goes - we need less of both. This is something he promises to do through a new federal government ‘efficiency’ department.

The consequence of these policies is that places would become more vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. Lax regulations have failed to prevent the building of houses from combustible materials that are toxic when burned - creating an air pollution health emergency - while the L.A. fire chief has consistently warned of squeezed budgets hampering operational capacity. It is clear that the climate crisis demands more effective regulation and increased state capacity.

Yet Trump gives every indication he will oversee the opposite. This will mean that when the next climate shock strikes, its consequences are made far worse. Greater suffering and social instability will result, which can be again exploited by Trump, Musk, and their acolytes to justify more counterproductive policies. These will also undermine efforts to halt greenhouse gas emissions, worsening the underlying problem.

by Gage Skidmore

This dynamic risks becoming a doom loop. It is an example of what we call ‘derailment risk’, whereby the increasingly destructive consequences of climate change impede our collective ability to tackle the causes of climate change.

Other examples include the spiraling costs of responding to disasters that are overwhelming the financial resources of governments in low income countries, and how increased resource scarcity can lead to more conflict and so less cooperation to tackle the underlying drivers of climate change.

In the L.A. case, climate change chaos can amplify low political trust, high inequality, and growing polarisation in ways that can be marshaled to further the aims of Trump and the interests he serves.

This is a profoundly dangerous moment. Writ globally, these dynamics risk a situation where the world is ultimately derailed from a path that rapidly phases out fossil fuels, risking the very worst climate outcomes.

This includes the activation of climate tipping points such as the shutdown of the Atlantic ocean currents. There is no hyperbole saying that the consequences of this would be a global catastrophe. No amount of adaptation would be able to keep pace. To avoid such outcomes we must rapidly phase out fossil fuels.

From FMT.

Yet derailment doom loops can be broken. This begins by insisting that the crucial connection between the impacts climate change is having and what is causing climate change is always clear, particularly in the wake of a disaster when confusion, fear, and anger abounds.

This means beating back misinformation about habitat protection and fire regulations, as many are currently doing. Yet there must also be honest discussion about why some places are so vulnerable and exposed to climate risks in the first place. An uncomfortable truth, even for pro-climate action governments, is that they have consistently failed to protect communities from predictable climate impacts. In many instances there have been government failures, but not of the type that Trump and Musk falsely claim.

It also means simplifying and making clear complex interactions, like between worsening extreme weather, destruction of crops, and overall inflation. It is not just the disasters next door that drive derailment risk, but also the impacts of climate change on inflation, geopolitics, and the other ways our societies are being made generally unstable in a warming world. These cascading consequences must be at the heart of the climate conversation and our sense making, in a way they aren’t currently.

One way to do that is to promote bottom up action that helps communities become better prepared for spiraling climate impacts. It is now abundantly clear that greater efforts are needed to adapt societies to escalating climate change. What is less understood is that this adaptation is needed to support efforts to reduce emissions and tackle climate change at source.

By Dhana Kencana

This is because Musk, Trump, and others are partly able to disrupt climate action because places are very badly prepared to handle growing climate extremes. The consequences of this lack of resilience are fertile ground for climate denial and delay politics, which focuses on symptoms and scapegoats, not causes.

Increasing resilience should be grounded in values of care and community. While the destruction of Hollywood A listers' mansions has led much of the reporting, the most important stories coming from L.A. have been the countless acts of help given by strangers to those affected. Only collective action can deliver rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, while protecting people and places from the climate change that is already here. Divisive, climate denial rhetoric is corrosive to such efforts.

Beyond specific issues such as fire management and building codes, perhaps the greatest lesson to take from L.A. wildfires is that the strongest defenses against derailment doom loops comes from countering cruelty with virtuous circles of compassion.

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