Will THIS be a wake-up call?

No. Here's why and what it will be instead

As catastrophic wildfires rip through Los Angeles, lots of people are asking if this will finally be our national wake-up call on climate change.

The answer is no. In fact, no climate change-induced disaster—no matter how severe or spectacular—will serve as a wake-up call. The entire notion of a "wake-up call", which assumes that the problem is a lack of awareness, misunderstands the situation.

The crux of the problem is that the there is no mechanism for making any change that isn't in the immediate interests of the ruling class. And there is no organized political body that can force such a change, nor even a modest compromise. What we get instead are pathetic little gestures like the Inflation Reduction Act, which (in the most charitable possible reading) seeks to accomplish the impossible: resolving the inconvenient climate problem while benefiting the capitalist class.

Such efforts are worse than useless. To the extent that they even try to address climate change, they do so in the most carbon-reductive way possible. They utterly fail to account for the fact that the climate crisis is merely a symptom of overshoot, a system-wide problem whereby the regenerative capacity of our planetary ecosystem is exceeded by our degeneration of it. This fundamental failure means such efforts make the problem worse by promoting still more ecologically degenerative production and consumption—more solar panels, more electric cars, more induction cooktops, etc etc—on the dubious grounds that this will reduce CO2 (not even GHG) emissions. The reality is that this only accelerates us towards an ecological reckoning.

A wildfire in Los Angeles won't change any of that. Capitalists will not wake up to the fact that our global economic system is a doomsday machine, nor will their politicians suddenly act against their patrons' interests. There is not an ecological phenomenon destructive enough to do that.

The only possible wake-up call is a mugging. Such a "call" can only come from within human society, and it will have to be an act of extortion. The only way to accomplish that is to make the status quo impossible to maintain, while offering a viable alternative.

That second part is key because the status quo is already becoming impossible to maintain as a consequence of ecological collapse. But the alternative will not be an egalitarian, ecological society because there is no political force being exerted in that direction. Instead, it will be a fortress for the rich built on the mainmast of a sinking ship. It does not matter that such a response is suicidal; the ruling class are humans operating on the logic of an inhuman system. They will gladly condemn us all in the service of money. They are incapable, as a class, of doing anything else.

So what will their response to this calamity be? It will be to focus even more narrowly on their class interests. Having looted the public realm into near oblivion, they will rely even more on private services, like private firefighters, private security, and private bunkers. They will use the state to funnel even more resources upward to soften their losses, while simultaneously juicing the state security apparatus to prevent anyone from getting dangerous ideas.

They'll replace what they lost—houses, cars, electronics, whatever—by buying replacements, creating localized inflation, which will be particularly acute in the housing market. Working class people who lost their homes and belongings will be sent into the usual bureaucratic spin cycle, as they desperately try to rebuild while getting fucked by insurance companies and preyed on by vulture capitalists.

The wreckage of this calamity will itself be an ecological disaster. The air pollution from the fires alone is unfathomably bad. The toxic fumes choking L.A. from the burning of synthetic homes, cars, and consumer items will have major public health implications. Toxic ash, fire retardant, contaminated soil, and so on will haunt us for generations. The first rain will wash mountains of poison out to sea, where it will begin circling the globe and working its way into the food chain. All of this is the inevitable result of industrialism's toxic material culture.

The ruling class will do nothing about it. If humanity is to even attempt avoiding ecological doom, it will be a result of human beings forcing other human beings to do something they don't want to do. Neither fires nor orcas nor any other natural phenomenon will do that work for us.

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