Apparently alarmists don’t want to play the blame game on California’s fires. Oh, they’re happy to when it’s climate change, and the obtuseness of MAGA types. But when it’s a conspicuous, potentially seismic failure of progressives to do their jobs while pursuing exotic concerns, um uh move right along. Thus in mid-January in CalMatters Dan Walters, under the headline “As LA fires rage, Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass are targets in the blame game”, intoned “The horribly destructive wildfires sweeping through Los Angeles County neighborhoods have become fodder for irresponsible, fact-free finger pointing, mostly aimed at Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom.” And in the New York Times David Wallace-Wells wrote that “In the end, President Trump’s ominous visit to California’s new ghost towns was an anticlimax” involving a “rambling news conference that followed just two more beats in the familiar pattern of post-disaster normalization – partisan finger-pointing, wonks crunching the insurance numbers, the immediate arguments about how to rebuild.” Gee. Partisan finger-pointing on climate. Can’t have that, can we?

No indeed. Something called NewsData went with “Southern California Wildfire Blame Game Rages Along With the Flames”. The San Francisco Chronicle headlined a piece “L.A. Fires ignite blame game over California leadership”. NBC chose “Conservatives blame California wildfires on a small fish, DEI and more”. Fox reported that “Jay Leno praises LA first responders for focusing on the fires, not playing the ‘blame game’”. The Telegraph headlined a story “Inside the Los Angeles wildfires blame game”.

Now much as we admire the originality of the herd of independent scribes, where are any of them, even as a disaster is raging with bodies unrecovered and fact-free finger pointing, to ask alarmists not to play this alleged “blame game” and attack not just carbon dioxide but “deniers”? Just try to find a headline.

So we say on finger-pointing oh yes we can. As we note in our latest “Fact Check” video on the fires, one of the strangest things about the feeble response of California fire authorities, especially the glaring lack of preparation, is that they were almost entirely people who kept insisting that climate change makes wildfires more likely including in California. Surely a lesson there somewhere?

Not everything that is being said is entirely wrong. For instance in the New York Times David Wallace-Wells wrote that:

“‘Everything we burn, we breathe,’ I wrote a few years ago, in a long essay on the catastrophic health effects of air pollution, mostly the industrial kind, which causes perhaps 10 million deaths a year. Wildfire smoke can be even worse for you, especially because it can briefly smother whole communities with blankets of toxic particulate matter. But the return of the urban firestorm augurs not just a new age for fire but also a new one for air. It’s one thing to worry about breathing in smoke, however thick, produced when the wood of wildland forest burns through. It’s another to consider that you are inhaling an aerosolized city.”

And he has a point about breathing smoke. It’s a good reason to have effective firefighting, one might even say. And also, dare we add, to be hesitant to tell poor people in foreign countries not to build modern power plants lest they release the dreaded CO2, and instead continue breathing in particulates from wood and dung fires.

It’s also the case that because our modern lifestyle is so dependent on plastics, from trinkets and electronics to furniture and construction, it’s a really good idea not to have your city burn down. Well, OK, it was obviously a really good idea already and it’s just one more thing that breathing in your incinerated possessions is now even worse.

Especially if you’re into, oh, say, lithium-ion batteries. As we already noted, if California didn’t have enough problems with fire already, there’s this massive fire at “one of the world’s largest battery storage plants”, in the northern part of the state, and it is “sending up flames of toxic smoke”. ABC tried to make it six of this, half-a-dozen of the other, with “The batteries are important for storing electricity from such renewable energy sources as solar energy, but if they go up in flames the blazes can be extremely difficult to put out.” Especially if you’re the equity-obsessed firefighters of deep blue California; as one resident complained, “It doesn’t appear that the fire department had the appropriate fire retardants to minimize this fire and have to resort to actually letting it burn, exposing all of the residents, including Watsonville in Santa Cruz County, and this is extremely disturbing”. So just maybe fight fires as your day job and climate change in your spare time not the other way around?

Or not, since Canary Media assures us that “Safety standards and industry practices have improved considerably since construction of the Moss Landing battery plant that recently burned up in California.” Which we’d find a lot more convincing if they’d warned us ahead of time that they were a problem. And if we had not, in our misspent youth, occasionally dunked sodium or lithium in water (do not imitate our follies) and seen the dramatic results, standards or no standards.

It gets worse. Parker Gallant observes that:

“While [President Donald] Trump, the Mayor and California Governor, Gavin Newsom have all pushed the concept to allow all of those who lost their homes to ‘start building’ immediately it appears highly unlikely they will be able to do so. The principal reason that won’t happen is that much of the debris left is toxic and we should wonder, why?”

And if we do, we won’t like the answer especially if we are green-energy-transition enthusiasts:

“What is starting to emerge from the plan to clean up the debris, as soon as possible, is the fact it consists of burned-out batteries from both EV (electric vehicles) and the storage batteries for the mandated building codes associated with the requirement to have solar panels on homes built, starting in 2020!”

There are many real environmental issues that need attention, a word here including effort, thought and money. And climate change has sucked most of it up. And there are many real governance issues that need attention, from politicians full of their noble intentions and emitting almost as many virtue signals as tonnes of CO2 as they jet about hectoring us. But again, climate change has sucked most of it up, so they’re neither leading nor supervising subordinates. And then when someone tries to hold them accountable, they resort to tired cliches about political games, finger-pointing and a “blame game”. Their own favourite activity when they think they can pin bad weather on the people they despise.

P.S. We give one thumb up to Jessica Grose in the New York Times lamenting that among many other buildings, schools in Pacific Palisades burned down. As she observed, “today’s high schoolers have already had to go through so much education disruption during some of their pivotal developmental years because of Covid-era school closings. Many of them missed out on fifth-grade graduations and sixth-grade dances”. And if we’re going to have a post-mortem, a real one, on panicky COVID lockdowns and the costs the experts brushed off at the time, so much the better. Finally challenging authority even if “experts say” might even become a habit when the results of not doing so are increasingly painfully clear.