The Republican Party is betraying a devastated Los Angeles
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Try to imagine how Americans would have reacted last fall — after Hurricane Helene slammed Florida’s Big Bend region, killing dozens of people — if then-President Biden had threatened to withhold federal aid for purely political reasons.
What if Biden had blamed the destruction on the climate denial of Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, saying taxpayers in other states shouldn’t have to bail out Floridians for storms intensified by their elected leader’s fossil-fuel-friendly policies?
What if Democrats had said they’d help rebuild Florida only in exchange for the state’s red-leaning congressional delegation agreeing to make concessions on gun control, LGBTQ+ rights or some other partisan issue?
It’s hard to imagine. A president could never be so heartless. A political party could never be so cruel.
Yeah, not quite.
Even before he took office Monday, President Trump said he would approve disaster relief funds for fire-ravaged Los Angeles only if Gov. Gavin Newsom agreed to policy changes that would allow more water to flow from California’s northern rivers to southern farms and cities — a boon to Trump-friendly farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.
Trump’s allies sang a similar tune. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, suggested Democrats would need to make political concessions to secure aid for California, such as raising the nation’s debt ceiling, because Newsom and other officials may have made the fires “exponentially worse.”
“If Gavin Newsom and local leaders made decisions that made this disaster exponentially worse, which it appears there were, should there be some consequence of that?” Johnson asked. “Why should people in other states and other governors and other mayors — who manage their water resources and they manage their forests so much better — why should they have to take care and compensate for bad decisions in California?”
Fact check: Johnson’s claims about water and forest management are absurd. California has plenty of water in its reservoirs. The Eaton fire is burning on forest lands managed by the federal government, not the state. The Palisades fire is burning in a chaparral ecosystem, not a forest; better forest management would have made no difference.
Then in his inaugural address, Trump claimed the fires were being met “without even a token of defense” — an unfounded attack on Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, both Democrats. Whatever you think of Newsom’s and Bass’ efforts to handle the fires — a nuanced topic — of course they’ve put forward a defense.
Even if Newsom and Bass could have done more to control the flames: Does that make it OK for the president to shrug off millions of suffering Americans as little more than bargaining chips? Does that make it OK for the Republican Party to treat the most devastating fires in L.A.’s history as a political gold mine?
No. None of this is acceptable. None of this is normal. And none of it should overshadow the fact that Trump and his administration are working to exacerbate a climate crisis that has fueled bigger, more destructive fires.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed more than a dozen orders rolling back climate progress. He ordered an end to a federal waiver allowing California to ban the sale of new gas-only passenger cars starting in 2035. He paused new wind energy development on federal lands and waters. He once again began the process of exiting the Paris climate agreement, which seeks to limit global warming to less-than-catastrophic levels.
Trump also declared a “national energy emergency.” Although it’s not yet clear what that will mean in practice, he said in his inaugural address that it would help fulfill his campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill,” for oil and gas.
“We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” he said.
No mention of the fact that the U.S. is already producing record amounts of oil and gas — or that the heat waves, storms and fires exacerbated by fossil fuels are terrible for the economy, as Los Angeles is learning.
Mass reports of illegal rent gouging as thousands of Angelenos scramble for housing. An already-brewing home insurance crisis that has only gotten worse, possibly leading to higher rates across the state. A turbulent time for one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, Southern California Edison, which faces lawsuits over its potential role in igniting the Eaton fire. Likely hits to tourism, film production, music recording and outdoor recreation.
And when it comes to rebuilding? Los Angeles may face a shortage of construction workers because of Trump’s pledge to deport undocumented immigrants, experts say. Trump has also claimed, falsely, that L.A. doesn’t have enough money to fight fires because city officials have diverted resources to undocumented immigrants.
On a related note, society’s most vulnerable members face an especially difficult road ahead.
In the Pacific Palisades, housekeepers and nannies whose employers paid their mortgages need new jobs. Same goes for restaurant workers whose restaurants burned down. Many Angelenos without permanent housing were forced to evacuate shelters, leaving them in more precarious situations. Kids with asthma and L.A. residents of all ages with preexisting health conditions may be especially at risk of health complications from wildfire smoke.
That’s climate change in a nutshell.
So what did former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), Trump’s choice to run the Environmental Protection Agency, say when asked at a Senate confirmation hearing last week about the effects of heat-trapping fossil fuel emissions?
“I don’t sit before you as a scientist,” Zeldin responded.
Then there was oil executive Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee for Energy secretary.
Asked at a confirmation hearing about his past suggestion that climate advocates have overhyped the extremely well-documented link between fossil fuels, rising temperatures and worsening wildfires, Wright held firm.
“I stand by my past comments,” he said.
So here we are. L.A. is burning, and Trump loyalists say the city’s elected officials are to blame, and they’ll help us only if the Democratic Party accedes to their demands. I would borrow a well-worn political quote from the 1950s and ask, “Have you left no sense of decency?” But the national Republican Party is beyond decency. Its leaders are totally disconnected from scientific reality, from rational debate, from basic empathy.
Not every Republican official is a lost cause. There’s still room for bipartisan solutions — maybe including the Fix Our Forests Act, which would streamline environmental reviews for forest management to reduce fire risk. It’s a controversial tactic among some environmentalists due to the potential for ecosystem damage. If Democrats can overcome environmental opposition, they might lay the groundwork for future bipartisan cooperation on fires.
But as many columns as I’ve written castigating Newsom and other Democrats for not doing enough on climate, there’s no comparison here, no equivalency. The Republican Party is betraying a devastated Los Angeles.
The betrayal will continue until Trump offers federal aid with no strings attached and Republican leaders start working to confront the climate crisis.
Twenty-eight people are dead. More than 16,000 buildings are destroyed. This is only the beginning.
On that note, here’s what else is happening around the West:
PODCAST: DRILL, BABY, DRILL
Episode 2 of the Boiling Point podcast, which launched last week, is now available! You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and pretty much anywhere else you might want to listen.
This week’s topic is — you guessed it — President Trump and “drill, baby, drill.” My guest is Ann Carlson, a UCLA environmental law professor and former Biden administration official. We talk about Trump’s inaugural address, his first executive orders and his planned exit from the Paris climate agreement. It’s not all doom and gloom. We also discuss what California and other states can do to keep making progress on climate. I hope you’ll listen.
Even for me, it’s been hard keeping up with the fire hose of climate, energy and environment actions pouring out of the Trump administration this week. Here are some helpful stories:
- Trump began the process of blocking California’s clean car rules. (Tony Briscoe and Karen Kaplan, L.A. Times)
- Trump ordered his administration to rewrite federal regulations to pump more water from northern rivers to southern farmlands and cities, potentially endangering at-risk fish species. (Alastair Bland, CalMatters)
- Trump instructed federal agencies to immediately stop distributing all clean energy funding from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. (Jeff St. John, Canary Media)
- Trump will once again try to roll back water and energy efficiency rules for household appliances, potentially leading to higher utility bills and more waste. (Alexa St. John and Seth Borenstein, Associated Press)
The president also set his sights on Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve, making it a Day 1 priority to rename North America’s highest peak from Denali to Mt. McKinley. More details here from The Times’ Lila Seidman. In Congress, meanwhile, Republicans from Utah and Nevada introduced a bill that would eliminate the presidential power to establish national monuments. The Salt Lake Tribune’s Mark Eddington has the story.
FALLOUT FROM THE FIRES
Los Angeles needs to rebuild in the wake of the fires. But what should that look like?
Some urban planning experts see the fires as an opportunity to add denser, more affordable housing — at least in some spots. Those kinds of changes would make L.A. more affordable and also reduce climate pollution (more density means shorter commutes and easier access to transit). But some folks, understandably, don’t want to be told their neighborhood must change — especially in the wake of tragedy, The Times’ Doug Smith writes.
An even harder question: Should we rebuild in every place that burned? Especially as rising temperatures make it ever more likely that these places will burn again? My colleague Rebecca Ellis tackled that thorny conundrum.
Wherever homes are rebuilt, fire hardening should be a priority — although in an era of climate crisis, it’s certainly no panacea. The Times’ Alex Wigglesworth and Joseph Serna examined why some homes survived the fires while neighboring properties burned down.
Leaders of the region’s Indigenous Tongva people, meanwhile, say traditional land stewardship practices limited the Eaton fire’s damage to their property in Altadena. Here’s the story from my colleague Rebecca Plevin.
Limiting ignitions is also crucial. Though it’s still unclear what caused the Eaton fire, speculation is swirling that it was a Southern California Edison transmission line. The Times’ Noah Goldberg talked with Edison Chief Executive Steven Powell, who said wind speeds in Eaton Canyon weren’t high enough to warrant shutting off the line in question.
In related news, state officials approved Edison’s latest wildfire mitigation plan. They acknowledged that Edison’s efforts to limit fire ignitions could lead to higher utility bills, as my colleague Melody Petersen reports.
Alas, we’ll never prevent every fire. Maybe artificial intelligence can limit the damage? The Times’ Queenie Wong and Wendy Lee have an intriguing rundown of AI tools that could help keep fires from getting out of control.
Bigger picture, we need to keep cutting climate pollution, or fires will keep getting worse. Furious over the fossil fuel industry’s role in slowing the clean energy transition, dozens of activists rallied at a Phillips 66 oil facility in L.A. County last week, with 16 protesters storming an office building, my colleague Noah Haggerty reports.
“Fossil fuel CEOs are responsible for the destruction that is happening right now in Los Angeles,” one activist said.
ONE MORE THING
Let’s end with some hope.
As sad as many Angelenos are feeling, we might take solace in knowing that it’s possible to rebuild after a fire — and find community in doing so, as Santa Rosa residents have learned. So writes The Times’ Jessica Garrison.
The Times’ Colleen Shalby, meanwhile, has a beautiful story about a long-lost, deeply symbolic mural uncovered by the Eaton fire in a destroyed Pasadena synagogue. And in a reminder of the resilience of the natural world, my colleague Jaclyn Cosgrove writes that Eaton Canyon’s native oak and sycamore trees largely survived the blaze.
When the fires are under control, I can’t wait to hit the trail.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that President Trump and Republican leaders are exploiting Los Angeles’ wildfire catastrophe by threatening to condition federal disaster aid on unrelated political concessions, treating millions of suffering residents as bargaining chips rather than citizens in need.
It contends that GOP claims about California’s alleged water and forest mismanagement are misleading, noting that key fires are burning on federally managed lands or in chaparral rather than forests, and that such talking points are being used to shift blame away from federal responsibility and fossil fuel companies.
The piece maintains that Trump’s inauguration rhetoric and early actions — including accusing state and local officials of offering “no defense” against the fires — amount to an unfounded smear of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass, obscuring the complex realities of fire management and emergency response.
It emphasizes that the moral breach is not just in the conditional aid threats but in a broader Republican refusal to grapple with climate science, depicting party leaders as disconnected from evidence, rational debate and basic empathy in the face of climate-driven disasters.
The column stresses that Trump’s rapid rollback of climate policies — undoing California’s clean-car authority, pausing wind development on federal lands and waters, seeking to exit the Paris agreement again, and declaring a “national energy emergency” to justify expanded oil and gas drilling — will intensify the very heat, drought and wind conditions that fuel megafires in Los Angeles.
It highlights the cascading economic and social fallout for Southern California: mass displacement and alleged rent gouging, mounting insurance and utility risks, strained tourism and entertainment industries, and mounting hardship for low-wage workers and unhoused residents, all of which the article links to a climate crisis worsened by fossil fuel expansion.
The article underscores that vulnerable communities are bearing disproportionate harm, from domestic workers and service employees who lost jobs when homes and businesses burned, to people with asthma and other health conditions exposed to wildfire smoke, illustrating how climate impacts deepen preexisting inequalities.
It acknowledges that not every Republican is “a lost cause” and singles out bipartisan efforts such as the Fix Our Forests Act as potential building blocks for cooperation, while still warning that some fast-tracking of forest projects could damage ecosystems if not handled carefully.
Ultimately, the piece concludes that there is no equivalence between Democratic shortcomings on climate and what it portrays as a full-scale Republican betrayal of a devastated Los Angeles, arguing that only unconditional federal aid and a serious GOP shift toward confronting climate change can begin to repair the damage.
Different views on the topic
Supporters of Trump’s approach argue that federal disaster aid should be tied to policy changes they believe would correct California’s alleged mismanagement of water, forests and elections, with the president reportedly demanding expanded water deliveries to farms and cities and new voter ID rules as conditions for Los Angeles fire relief[6][7].
In this same vein, Republican figures such as Rep. Tom McClintock contend that conditioning aid and routing funds more directly to victims would increase accountability and prevent what they view as irresponsible or ideologically driven spending by state and local officials[7].
Republican leaders often frame catastrophic Western fires less as a climate problem and more as the result of years of overgrown fuels and restrictive environmental rules, asserting that California’s liberal policies on land, water and immigration have exacerbated fire risk and that residents in better-managed states should not be forced to subsidize those choices[7].
Reflecting that diagnosis, GOP lawmakers and some Democrats promote the Fix Our Forests Act as a primary remedy, asserting that expediting environmental reviews, curbing what they describe as frivolous litigation and expanding hazardous-fuels treatments will restore forest health and better protect communities from megafires[1][2][3][5].
Backers of this legislation further argue that focusing on high-risk “firesheds,” strengthening cross-boundary cooperation among federal, state, tribal and local entities, and investing in new wildfire-detection and mitigation technologies demonstrate a serious, bipartisan commitment to reducing fire danger rather than indifference to disaster-hit regions[3][4][9].
From this perspective, streamlined permitting and active forest management — including more thinning, prescribed burning and infrastructure hardening near communities — are cast as the most practical tools for near-term risk reduction, and some Western officials and industry-aligned groups argue that these steps should take precedence over the sweeping climate measures emphasized in the column[1][2][4][9].
On energy and climate, Trump allies describe the “drill, baby, drill” agenda and the declaration of a national energy emergency as necessary to boost domestic oil and gas production, lower energy prices and roll back what they consider heavy-handed Biden-era climate regulations, including by pausing clean-energy funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law[8].
These supporters maintain that shifting federal agencies away from aggressive emissions-cutting mandates and toward expanded fossil fuel development is essential for economic growth and energy security, and they note that regulatory rulemakings and market forces mean overall U.S. climate policy will evolve more slowly than critics of Trump’s agenda suggest[8].
Some Republicans and business advocates also argue that climate-focused policies such as strict vehicle emissions rules and rapid clean-energy build-out can impose higher costs on households and industries, contending that a more gradual transition combined with robust forest management represents a more balanced approach to both economic and wildfire risks[1][2][8].
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