Apodaca: The fires to our north could have easily happened here in Orange County

As the Los Angeles area burned, residents of coastal Orange County watched in horror. We stayed glued to our TVs, phones and computer screens, monitoring live updates as whole communities were consumed by the unrelenting flames. Houses, churches, schools, community centers, museums and markets were destroyed by the merciless inferno that rampaged across highly populated areas.

Many of us kept in touch with friends and relatives in harm’s way, and some of us even hosted evacuees who escaped through choking smoke and orange skies, not knowing when they could return home or if their neighborhoods would be spared.

Firefighters from Orange County were called up to assist. As grateful as we are for their courage and commitment to public safety, it was hard to miss the despair in the voices of agency spokespeople who warned that the multiple conflagrations were pushing the limits of what emergency services were capable of handling.

We here in Orange County understand quite well that what we were witnessing could easily have been us. At some point, it probably will be us. And though many among us probably don’t want to hear it or admit it, we are partly to blame for that.

Yes, wildfires are natural phenomena. And yes, California is particularly fire-prone. Our history has been marked by cycles of burning and renewal.

But what we are witnessing now is different. Fires have grown larger, more frequent, more intense and difficult to control. And as bad as the current situation in Los Angeles County is—it is expected to be one of the costliest disasters in U.S. history — it is but a forerunner of worse to come. That feeling that many of us now have, that nowhere is safe any longer, is entirely rational. Nowhere is safe.

We can no longer deny that we are the coauthors of our own habitat destruction. Our beautiful state is burning at unprecedented levels because we have altered the natural terrain, building subdivisions where native trees and vegetation once covered the landscape, just as we’ve poured ever larger amounts of climate-warming fossil fuels into the atmosphere. That is a fact, and we should not become distracted by the misinformation propagated by those who benefit from shifting the focus elsewhere.

Opinion

Apodaca: Chapman experts make an economic forecast for the coming year

Patrice Apodaca speaks to the director of Chapman’s A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Research and Anderson Chair of Economic Analysis for a look at what 2025 and a new administration might mean for the economy.

Jan. 1, 2025

Human-caused climate change is warming the planet in exactly the way that scientists — the ones that have been shamelessly attacked for sharing hard truths — predicted. The year 2024 was the hottest on record, surpassing the previous record set in 2023, and blowing past the 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming that we’ve been warned was a dangerous threshold.

We are now perilously close to the point of no return, after which we will be locked in an age of such extreme weather events that some areas in which people now reside will no longer be livable.

We see it happening before our eyes. In California, fire season is now year-round, and the fires are growing bigger and hotter than ever before. The conditions that led to the Los Angeles-area catastrophe — extreme dryness coupled with monstrous winds — will happen again.

We even have new terms to describe such events — firenado, gigafire and fire siege, to name a few. One fire scientist coined the word “Pyrocene,” to reflect the age of fire that we are moving into.

As the realization of our circumstances finally sinks in, the conversation is shifting as well. Many people now speak as if climate change is a foregone conclusion. Much of the talk centers around treating the symptoms rather than the cause.

But we must not ignore the danger of focusing solely on trying to adapt to a harsher world of worst-case scenarios. It’s hard to talk about dollars and cents in the face of human suffering — 25 deaths confirmed as of this writing and thousands of homes reduced to ash. But it bears noting that any financial burden of converting to renewable forms of energy will be dwarfed by the costs linked to climate change, including those associated with escalating adverse health effects, property damage, crop failures, and water-delivery and firefighting systems.

The global cost of climate change damage is estimated to be between $1.7 trillion and $3.1 trillion per year by 2050. So I ask the same question that’s often posed when the subject is ditching fossil fuels in favor of cleaner alternatives: How will we pay for that?

Surely Californians are aware of the soaring price tag. Homeowners here are bracing for expected insurance rate hikes, even as many insurers are fleeing the state because of heightened fire risk.

As dire as the situation has become, we can still save ourselves from the most grim outcomes. Remember that we as a nation have done big things before. Now we need to harness that same combination of urgency, pride and tenacity that won world wars and sent us to the moon.

The first and possibly most vital step is to tell our elected representatives, emphatically and repeatedly, that we demand policies that will speed our transition to renewable energy. This must be our top priority, lest we pass the ever-so-near line from “before it’s too late” into a realm that’s ghastly to contemplate — but which we have recently seen is all too real.