The fault is not in our suppliers but ourselves
And rarely have stories named the ultimate authors of this disaster: ExxonMobil, Chevron and other fossil fuel companies that have made gargantuan amounts of money even as they knowingly lied about their products dangerously overheating the planet.
Other claims about how much climate change is responsible for the LA fires - as opposed to idiot forest management policies perhaps - can be argued about and no doubt will be for a long time. The insistence that the media must propagandise for the author’s preferred explanation is of course vile.
But let us stick with this one major claim here. Big Oil is responsible because the fossil fuel companies sold the oil (and gas, coal etc) which causes climate change. It’s just not true.
Who are the beneficiaries of industrial civilisation? That’s us, us consumers out here. We live higher on the hog than any other group of humans ever. Yes, there are externalities to that and we should do something about them. But who are the beneficiaries? Us.
The profits made by the fossil fuel companies exist, sure they do. But the vast majority - by the Nordhaus calculation, 97% - of the profit made from the use of fossil fuels flows to us as consumers. We’ve had a couple of centuries of cooked food, toasty homes and cheap and efficient transport. We’re the beneficiaries, we’re the people who have been making the profit.
If we’re the people who have benefitted, if we’re the people who created the demand for the products, then we’re the people responsible for those externalities.
It’s us, not them.
No, this is more important than a mere allocation of blame - or even the creation of some target for righteous confiscation. Given that we are the users of fossil fuels then it’s going to have to be us changing our behaviour to not use fossil fuels. At the cost of whatever benefit fossil fuels provide to us. It’s not just that there’s no them, no other, that caused all of this it’s also that there’s no them, no other, who can carry the cost of it not happening.
Which brings us right back to all of those correct economic questions about climate change. The most important of which is how much cost are we willing to bear, right now, to benefit those humans in potentio in the future? The general answer there seems to be not as much as some people think we all should.
Tim Worstall