Will greed fuel fires of the future?

The words 'hellish' and 'hellscape' have been repeatedly deployed lately as shorthand for the fate of vast localities in America's second largest city.

- MAHIR ALI

This is not the first time that large parts of Los Angeles have gone up in flames, but the scale and intensity of the inferno is seen as unprecedented.

The blame game has blazed forth even before the flames have been tamed.

The governor of California and the mayor of LA have attracted much of the Republican flak, with diversity initiatives and clean-energy endeavors absurdly being derided as part of the problem.

Anyone daring to count climate change among the causes of the catastrophe gets slammed down as an ideological opportunist.

Never mind that 2024 was the planet's hottest year on record, or that the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit has been breached, let alone the broad consensus among climate scientists that global heating is exacerbating the frequency and ferocity of storms, floods and fires, alongside droughts—and the famine that follows in some parts.

This month's southern Californian inferno is believed to have been fueled by uncommonly dry weather patterns and the unusual velocity of the hot Santa Ana winds that transported embers from fires in one locality to potential tinderboxes in nearby areas.

Decreased funding for firefighters and hydrants that ran dry obviously were part of an inadequate response, but it's convenient for some to ignore the likelihood than any other state might have fared even worse in similar circumstances.