The L.A. Fires Show the Need for Climate Realism

Varun Sivaram is senior fellow for Energy and Climate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he will launch a new “Climate Realism Initiative” this spring. The goal is to apply a pragmatic approach to understanding the national security and economic implications of climate change for U.S. interests.

The wildfires raging through Southern California neighborhoods from the Pacific Palisades to Pasadena are horrifying and tragic. I feel profound sadness for my friends who have lost homes and businesses. My own connection to the Palisades neighborhood began twelve years ago almost to the day, when in my first act as a Los Angeles public official, I joined the Department of Water and Power to inaugurate a solar installation at the Palisades Pit Stop car wash subsidized by the city. That car wash now appears to be within the active fire zone.

Although these wildfires have intensely local effects, they are attributable, at least to a small degree, to global climate change caused by the greenhouse gas emissions of major economies around the world. 

The California wildfires offer a concrete example for how to apply an approach I call “climate realism” to understanding the threat of climate change to U.S. interests and adopting a pragmatic stance in response. Here are five ways to contextualize the unfolding tragedy through the lens of climate realism.

Perilous levels of climate change this century are inevitable. Climate realism starts by acknowledging the hard reality that the world is virtually certain to miss climate targets such as limiting global warming above preindustrial levels to 2⁰C (3.6⁰F) by century-end or achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions close to midcentury. The United States should prepare for the most likely outcome, which currently includes average warming in excess of 3⁰C (5.4⁰F) by century-end. U.S. wildfire intensity will continue to rise as a result of climate change—alongside other impacts from droughts to heat waves to intense hurricanes.

Already today, Los Angeles is roughly 3⁰C warmer than preindustrial levels—double the global average warming—increasing the risk of hot and dry conditions conducive to wildfires. By midcentury, climate change could make California wildfires more than 7 percent more intense, and by the year 2100, that figure could multiply dramatically. Although some studies forecast Santa Ana winds reducing in intensity during some parts of the year, the net effect of climate change on Southern California wildfires owing to winter wind speeds and hotter and drier conditions is still unclear.

For more on the potential causes of these wildfires and an explanation of how better fuel management can play an important role in mitigating risk, I recommend Patrick Brown’s excellent post on X.

Adaptation to climate change is the best immediate policy option. The most tractable and obvious way to reduce California wildfire risk in the future is not to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which are a tiny and dwindling component of future global emissions this century. There are pragmatic actions that the federal, state, and local governments can take to reduce wildfire carnage to human life and property. Here are three examples:

• More stringent building codes and regulations. As climate change exacerbates the intensity of natural disasters from wildfires to storms, more stringent infrastructure regulations in at-risk locations can limit the economic fallout and damage. The proliferation of man-made structures in Southern California’s traditional wildland areas has moved the urban interface into riskier areas. Structures should either be built to much higher standards or not built at all in locations that are at a higher risk to climate disasters.
• Less distorted insurance incentives. Well-intentioned insurance regulators seek to limit cost increases of property insurance but end up distorting the incentives for economic development in risky areas. The result is a tragic cycle of disasters, costly government and taxpayer bailouts, and rebuilt infrastructure in the same risky areas. National, state, and local regulators should transition to insurance regulations that expose property owners to the full actuarial cost—including reinsurance costs—of living in coastal areas at risk of flooding and hurricanes or areas with proven wildfire risk. The near term repercussions of doing so (e.g., expensive and limited insurance causing the depopulation of risky areas) pale in comparison to the long-term security and fiscal benefits of encouraging economic development in areas less prone to climate-exacerbated disasters.
• Fuel reduction. California should more decisively reduce the build-up of dangerous brush through mechanical brush removal and prescribed burns. There are tortuous environmental review processes, such as the National Environmental Policy Act, that prevent or slow this. Congress and the California state government should swiftly reform these processes and invest much more heavily in fuel reduction to further limit the costs of future wildfires.

Climate change poses far greater and more certain security risks than top-tier foreign policy issues. The U.S. foreign policy establishment obsesses over conflicts in the Middle East, opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and deterring China from invading Taiwan. With the possible exception of a Taiwan invasion or a nuclear attack on the homeland, nearly everything else that U.S. foreign policy professionals focus on—from terrorism prevention to regional conflict management to supply chain diversification—matters far less to U.S. interests than the certain harms that global climate change will inflict on the United States.

The Palisades Fire—with preliminary damages in excess of $50 billion—is likely to be the most expensive fire in history, but it will certainly be superseded in cost by future disasters that are even more attributable to climate change. 

A provocative way to think about climate’s impacts on the United States is to conceptualize these astronomical damages as missiles launched by foreign countries against the United States. It is reasonable to consider the next hurricane with higher intensity attributable to climate change as a missile launched by China’s or India’s continued burning of coal that wipes out tens of billions of dollars of U.S. infrastructure and causes loss of American life.

The California wildfires demonstrate that the United States, which will only account for less than 10 percent of future climate-warming emissions over the next century, will suffer immense economic damage at the hands of foreign greenhouse gas emissions. Stopping those emissions represents a more valuable national security goal than nearly every priority the U.S. military, intelligence services, and diplomatic missions currently focus on.

The United States will need to budget for increasingly deadly climate effects. As the costs of climate change spiral, the ability of the United States to protect its citizens, rebuild infrastructure (ideally in less disaster-prone areas), and invest in adaptation and resilience measures will depend on the U.S. government’s fiscal space in decades to come.

The combined annual costs of disaster recovery and infrastructure hardening already measure in the tens of billions of dollars today and could near a trillion dollars in the coming decades. Therefore, one of the most worrying aspects of U.S. fiscal profligacy and the soaring U.S. deficit and debt service costs is the loss of future fiscal space to adapt to and recover from climate impacts.

Failing to put our fiscal house in order at the federal, state, and local levels today does not only leave an unfair tax burden to future generations, it also endangers U.S. society in a world facing the brutal impacts of warming in excess of 3⁰C by century-end.

There is still hope for U.S. leadership in averting the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Although 3⁰C or more warming is currently the most likely outcome this century, averting even more cataclysmic climate change should remain an important U.S. priority. Failing to do so risks the continued existence of major American cities and society as we know it in the twenty-second century.

To be sure, the United States cannot make much of a difference to global climate change by reducing its own emissions. But the United States may be able to meaningfully bend the global emissions curve by developing innovative decarbonization technologies that the rest of the world can use; sharing policy learnings for how to affordably reduce emissions; and harnessing its full military, diplomatic, and economic might of U.S. foreign policy to coerce and incentivize other countries.

If efforts to achieve net-zero emissions fail, the United States may make more progress through unilateral or mini-lateral efforts in geoengineering, such as reflecting solar radiation or increasing ocean carbon dioxide sequestration. 

The Southern California wildfires are a tragic reminder both that intensifying climate change will bring more misery to communities across the United States and that the United States cannot easily alter the trajectory of global climate change. Nevertheless, by pragmatically focusing on adaptation and by elevating the reduction of global climate-warming emissions as a top-tier U.S. foreign policy and national security priority, the United States may be able to avert the most apocalyptic outcomes. Although the Climate realism doctrine envisions the United States acting to advance its own self-interest—as all countries do in the brutal and anarchic arena of international relations—its success stands to benefit every country around the world.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.