Transition In the Shadow of the Past: Of California Christmas Fires, Climate Summitry, and Jerry Brown's Paradox

As it continues to grow even while the largest firefighting effort in Californias history controls a greater proportion of it, the gargantuan Thomas Fire looks more and more like one of the key metaphors of the era.

Soon to be the largest fire in Californias history, just the latest in a string of fires which represents the new (ab)normal of year-round fires in the Golden State, the Thomas Fire is larger than the island of Maui, larger than London, larger even than the combined cities of New York, Washington and San Francisco all put together.

The Thomas Fire is over half contained now yet it keeps on going. CalFire expects to have it out early in the new year. But in the meantime, the flames will have done still more damage. And this climate change-driven fire comes with a sharply ironic kicker the release of tremendous amounts of climate-changing greenhouse gases. Like the melting of the Arctic which is opening up new petroleum development and making vast stores of methane in the permafrost more available to the atmosphere, it is a gift which will keep giving.

Much if not most or even all of Californias hard-won gains this year from its pioneering climate change program is being burned away by the states new year-round fire season.

We dont yet know what the toll from these holiday season firestorms in Southern California, of which the Thomas Fire is simply the largest, will be. But we do know that the October fires in Northern Californias wine country produced as many greenhouse gas emissions as those produced by every motor vehicle in California this year.

This is the world we now live in, a world in which the gains produced by Americas most innovative state in making the transition to a sustainable future can be overshadowed by the negative impacts of the past.

At least further insult has not been added to grievous injury. The 115-year old Laurel Springs Ranch in the mountains above Santa Barbara, threatened by the Thomas Fire, still stands. As I wrote at the beginning of the week, Laurel Springs, then owned by Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, was the site three decades ago of early strategizing for the first major proposed climate change program in America, 1990s Big Green initiative.

Had Big Green, initially quite popular, not been drowned in a tsunami of special interest advertising, Californias climate change beacon would have been existed 16 crucial years before Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the states program into being at a gala ceremony at the former Treasure Island Navy base in San Francisco Bay.

So theres that, at least so far.

But overall, our situation is rugged. The shadow of the past, of unsustainable or simply bad decisions taken in any number of areas besides climate change the economy, the culture, geopolitics, social relations and the state of knowledge hangs heavy over the present and even more heavily over the future.

Christmas in all its varied guises in human history has been a festive time celebrating our passage halfway out of the dark.

But Californias unseasonal Christmas firestorm is yet another marker indicating that we are not halfway out of the dark even if we are halfway through the traditional cold season of our European heritage, that we are merely plunging forward down a dark passageway toward an unknown future.

Even before the Thomas Fire began, the frequently on-target environmental writer Bill McKibben penned a compendium of alarming recent developments showing that the ill effects of climate change are not just coming in the future, they are pulling up to our front porch.

In Winning Slowly Is the Same As Losing, for the December 1st issue of Rolling Stone , McKibben ran through a raft of bad happenings in this dreadful year. Record hurricanes, some in odd places; a thawing Arctic; much more acidic seawater; melting ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic; a drying and burning Amazon rainforest; the slowing circulation of warm ocean water that keeps Western Europe temperate. And so on, all of it happening after deeply cynical delay by very knowledgeable oil company leaders and some other interests.

But McKibbens winning slowly is the same as losing thesis isnt quite right. Because the Thomas Fire dramatically illustrates that we have already, in a significant way, lost. For the shadow of the past has just reached out to flick away our gains.

Still, there is a big difference between pretty bad and much worse, as we see in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton was problematic. Donald Trump was preposterous. That was evident then and even more evident now, though the Clintons have become so toxic that their standing has actually gone down dramatically even as Trump hits record lows for a first-year president.

After the defeats of Big Green in 1990 and original conservation and renewable energy pioneer Jerry Brown in the 1992 presidential race, virtually no progress was made on the transition to a sustainable future during the Clinton-dominated 1990s. Then came the Bush/Cheney revival of the ancien regime of Big Oil, alleviated somewhat by the re-emergence of the California future agenda under first Gray Davis and then Arnold Schwarzenegger. A subsequent eight years of Barack Obama and the return of Jerry Brown to the California governorship got things back on a relatively good course.

But as I wrote at the time of the Paris Climate Accords signing in 2015, it still wasnt big enough or fast enough.

Fortunately, there are extremely positive and promising developments in renewable energy, conservation, and storage tech such that progress can be accelerated. However, the question now is this: How much bigger and faster do we have to go? And how much is politically feasible in a dumbed-down, easily distracted culture?

Thats what Jerry Brown has to think about as he contemplates the final year of his record-setting but at last term-limited governorship amidst his new global leadership role on the ultimate crosscut issue of climate change.

We are in between two antithetical poles of decisions, the most obvious and the easiest.

The most obvious step to prevent what is already underway, the destruction of human habitability on the planet, is to just stop. Hit the pause button on our runaway technological adolescence and halt the heedless terraforming of the planet.

But I suspect that does not poll well, even though many people would be surprised to learn how little of the stuff that consumes their lives they actually need or makes a difference.

The easiest thing to do is to note that in the long run, we are all dead. So let the bonfire of the vanities begin!

The short name for this option is the Trump administration.

Since one is probably unfeasible and the other is certainly unconscionable, the question becomes one of the how best to avert the very worst developments which includes the drowning of most island nations and many cities, an acceleration of disease, famine and resource wars, and potentially rapid and dramatic changes in the weather by accelerating appropriate technologies and altering the culture.

With Browns UN-aligned Global Climate Action Summit on the horizon next September in San Francisco, French President Emmanuel Macrons One Planet Summit on December 12th pointed up the limits of global climate summitry.

Coming just a month after the UN summit in Bonn, Macrons gathering seemed to struggle for a reason in being. At first it seemed slated to be a summit to advance a binding new UN Charter on the Environment. There was even a preliminary conference on that a few months ago with Schwarzenegger participating. But in the event, Macrons summit focused only on financial commitments to implement the 2015 Paris Accords. And though they sounded good in isolation, these announcements seemed mostly rehashed and in any event, very insufficient.

Brown is now in a paradoxical position.

He would make a very powerful candidate for president against Trump or whomever the Republicans run in 2020. But at 82, he would seem a little too old for many, even though he has the energy and acuity of someone decades younger, not to mention the experience and fastpaced combat skills needed for the present chaotic environment.

He would also make an ideal U.S. senator for one blazing term in these tumultuous times, but, in another historical irony, Dianne Feinstein, who is significantly older and not quite so speedy has decided to go for another term after 24 straight years in the Senate.

Of course, the task of pushing the sustainable future agenda already is transnational and perhaps too demanding for any office-holder, and Brown as I discussed a month ago has many organizational, affiliational, financial and intellectual resources already in place to create a de facto climate ministry. Unless he chooses to just retire to his remote off-the-grid ranch in Northern California, that is ...

Sorry not to end on a note of holiday cheer, but things are not presently going all that well, even on the most irreducible basics of what must be achieved for the transition to a truly advanced and sustainable human civilization.

But things could definitely be worse.

My first conversations about climate change with a major figure, not incidentally, came not with Jerry Brown or Tom Hayden but, as a very young reservist, with a four-star Navy admiral named Noel Gayler back in the 1970s. An old friend of my original faculty advisor, dean of naval historians Ned Potter, the first three-time winner of the Navy Cross served as director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and as CINCPAC (commander of all U.S. forces in Pacific Command, which covers half the world).

The admiral wanted to do away with nuclear weapons and warned about global warming, something which I had already read about but which was hardly bandied about. He felt that controlling both situations was essential but would of course be very difficult. Very difficult, that is, but not impossible.

More on those original insights from an extremely high-level military and intelligence leader who foresaw a decades-long process on humanitys existential questions, and on prospects for the transition as we move into what will hopefully be a happier new year.

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