As I write this, the weather at SeaTac International Airport near Seattle, Washington is cold, cloudy and sporadically rainy. That’s quite different from 1,000 miles south in Los Angeles, which is battling an unprecedented series of fires during a time of year that used to be the rainy season.
I grew up in L.A. and vividly recall the torrential downpours that occurred beginning in November. One year it rained so much around Thanksgiving Day that we postponed a trip north to the Bay Area. The brakes on our 1957 Ford didn’t do so well after getting wet.
Another year right before Christmas, it rained so hard for so many days that the street in front of our house turned into a veritable river. As a kid I thought that was great good fun, but I would imagine that this was problematic for all of the adults who had to go to work. Back then all of the cars in our neighborhood had fashionably low ground clearance so didn’t drive through much water.
Of course, L.A. can still get lots of rain in the winter. That’s what happened over 2022-23, when major flooding resulted from what the scientists call “intense atmospheric river storms” (Purohit, 2024).
Alas, that respite from an extended drought was short lived. Records show that the soil moisture in a goodly portion of southern California is currently in the bottom 2 percent of historical records (Pan, 2025).
Musk agrees that L.A. fires are part of a ‘globalist plot’
What do L.A. fires have to do with cars? Because Tesla head Elon Musk is spreading conspiracy theories that downplay the importance of climate change. This is quite a shift for him. Musk was arguably the first auto industry executive to champion a strong response to climate change. For example, the banner image is Musk during the 2017 launch of the Tesla Model 3. The graph behind him shows the dramatic growth in greenhouse gases.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by Musk’s turn. Tycoons have a tendency to shift rightward as they age. Consider William Randolph Hearst, who in his early years was a leftist Democrat who later became quite conservative — and used his media empire to espouse his views (Wikipedia, 2025).
What makes Musk unusual for a U.S. auto industry leader is that he has become so overtly political. Top-level executives such as Robert McNamara and Charles E. Wilson may have held cabinet-level positions with the federal government, but they did not take nearly as public of a role as Musk has in recent months.
For a while Lee Iacocca weighed in on the great issues of the day and flirted with running for office, but he ultimately did not throw his hat into the ring. Henry Ford may be the auto executive who most closely matched Musk’s trajectory, but even he dabbled in politics and mass media in relatively parenthetical ways.
It remains to be seen what impact Musk ends up having as a political figure, but I suspect that he has lost his standing as a “reliable narrator” by those outside of his immediate political sphere. For example, Musk agreed with Alex Jones when he recently argued that the fires of L.A. are “part of a larger globalist plot” to destroy the United States (Verma et al., 2025). Yeah, that Alex Jones.
What scientists say about climate change and L.A. fires
I am glad to see at least some news reports acknowledge the role of climate change in the L.A. fires ( e.g., McGrath, 2025; Glasser and Jacobo, 2025; Kluger, 2025). The Yale School of the Environment summed up the scientific explanation: “As the planet heats up, rainfall is growing more erratic over much of the globe, leading to wide swings between wet and dry conditions. So-called ‘weather whiplash’ is ramping up the risk of wildfire in California, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA” (Yale Environment 360, 2025).
This is not new information. Four years ago Al Shaw and Elizabeth Weil (2020) painted an alarming picture of the future: “As California continues battling its worst wildfire season on record, new research shows that fall fire weather days — days with high temperatures, low humidity and high wind speeds — will double in parts of the state by the end of the century and will increase 40% by 2065. On these days all it takes is a spark from a downed power line, or a hammer hitting a metal stake. A small fire can grow into an inferno at startling speed.”
In other words, things are going to get worse.
I can write all this from the comfortable distance of Seattle, but the problem with climate change is that there is no “away.” For example, projections suggest that this region could suffer from rising sea levels that inundate low-lying coastal areas; hotter, drier summers that increase the chances of wildfires; and more frequent and severe flooding (Climate Impacts Group, 2025).
Whether we like it or not, we’re all in this together.
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Climate Impacts Group; 2025. “Future scenarios for climate change in Puget Sound.” Encyclopedia of the Puget Sound. Accessed Jan. 10.
- Glasser, Matthew and Julia Jacobo; 2025. “This is how climate change contributed to the California wildfires.” ABC News. Posted Jan. 8.
- Kluger, Jeffrey; 2025. “L.A. Fires Show the Reality of Living in a World with 1.5°C of Warming.” Time. Posted Jan. 10.
- McGrath, Matt; 2025. “Climate ‘whiplash’ linked to raging LA fires.” BBC. Posted Jan. 9.
- Pan, Ming; 2025. “Maps show how dry Southern California is, as L.A. wildfires burn.” CBS News. Posted Jan. 10.
- Purohit, Sanju; 2024. “Rainfall in California: Special Reference to 2023 Rains That Caused Floods.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Posted Sept 30: pp. 97-109.
- Shaw, Al and Elizabeth Weil; 2020. “New Maps Show How Climate Change is Making California’s ‘Fire Weather’ Worse.” ProPublica. Posted Oct. 14.
- Verma, Pranshu and Will Oremus and Trisha Thadani; 2025. “As Los Angeles burns, Elon Musk stokes partisan outrage.” Washington Post. Posted Jan. 10.
- Wikipedia; 2025. “William Randolph Hearst.” Page last edited Jan. 1.
- Yale Environment 360; 2025. “Did Climate Change Help Fuel the Los Angeles Wildfires?” Yale School of the Environment. Posted Jan. 10.
GW stopped by to say the following: “The Maui fire was caused by downed power lines. As with the last big California fire. It will be shown that this Pacific Palisades fire was also caused by man.
All were fueled by seasonal high winds. Mans encroachment into the environment is causing the fires. Take a look at Finland’s management of its Forrest and take note they have not had any similar fires despite their purported effects of global climate change.
Please stick to articles about the automotive industry Vs personal opinions substantiated by government funded climate studies.”
Then he sent in a second comment: “No need to post my previous comment. I’m going to delete your website. Good bye.”
For the record, I don’t write about climate change because I think that will make this website more popular — I do so because I think that is what responsible automobile journalists and historians should do. You can’t fight disinformation with silence.
Self-serving slime like Musk & Alex Jones are more dangerous than the wildfires they are trying to downplay. Steve, I hope you continue to emphasize climate change and the auto industry’s response, or lack of, to it.
Thank you for your support, CJ. One of the most tragic aspects of the American automotive media is how journalists and historians who have a reasonable grasp of the science behind climate change have all-too-frequently been hesitant to speak up on this issue. My guess is that they may feel intimidated by those who spread disinformation, such as that climate change is a hoax. This is understandable to an extent, but there is a point where journalistic ethics really should be the priority.
From Australia, where fires like these are all too common. I won’t comment on the US situation directly other then to say we look on with horror. And I fear for all those folk trying to escape the fire; I hope their EVs have enough charge to get them out of danger.
I think there is a tendency in certain section of the community and media to play the ‘Climate Change’ card to absolve them from looking any further to get to the root of the problem. In my country it’s used as a ‘get out of jail card’ by certain politicans, conveniently ignoring the facts of a lack of effective forest management, lack of firefighting resources, blundering administration, etc. Fortunately we have reporters prepared to push beyond the (all too often) political smokescreen.
We used to have local folk who kept on top of all these things. People with experience who knew what had to be done to minimize the risk. Now all too often decisions are made by city-bound bureaucrats whose main priority seems to be to appease the Greens.
Peter, I don’t know what things are like in Australia, but here in the U.S. climate change denialism is still quite strong — and it is particularly likely to show up in the automotive media. That’s why I weigh in on this topic the way that I do.
Large-scale catastrophes such as the L.A. fires are almost inevitably complex. They simply don’t lend themselves to simple blame games, particularly if the focus is on personalities (or even political movements) rather than larger systems. What makes climate change such a difficult issue is that it can overwhelm existing systems in multiple ways simultaneously.
At least in my book, that doesn’t absolve our leaders from being held accountable when they screw up, but if our goal is to actually meet the moment rather than to score cheap political points, then we need to pay attention to the bigger picture.
For example, it sounds like L.A.’s water system wasn’t designed to deal with fires of such a large scale, particularly in the depths of winter. But even if it was, the fierceness of the winds and the unusually dry vegetation was going to be more challenging to contain a fire than it would be ordinarily.
This is a car blog so I’ll avoid getting more into the weeds on fire fighting, but the key takeaway I would offer is that we no longer live in a stable climate. Because of this, the basic assumptions we have about our infrastructure may no longer hold. And as the years go by and climate change becomes more intense, that could shift further.
Here in the Pacific Northwest we saw indications of that with the heat dome that hit us a few years ago. Temperatures stayed consistently higher than what roads, bridges and even electric wires on mass transit were designed for in our normally quite temperate climate. So that raises the question: Do we gamble that a similar heat dome won’t happen again or do upgrade our infrastructure?
The scientific data suggests that the safer bet is to upgrade our infrastructure, but this tends to be resisted by those who reject the science.
Thanks for your reply.
Whether you believe in climate change or not, it only makes sense to take care of the environment. Only an idiot would foul their own surroundings.
To me, this should transcend politics and personalities. There is a job to do: let’s pull together! Unfortunately, those in power often seem to be the worst of hypocrites. As the fires demonstrate all too clearly, talk is not enough.
The climate is always changing incrementally as the axis of the earth meanders, which incrementally changes the angle at which the sun’s rays hit the earth. To assume the earth stays static is foolish and wrong. That said, the decision for three-million people to settle into a desert surrounded by mountains with very little water to sustain it and in a major earthquake and wildfire zone seems idiotic, but that is the human way !
UPDATE: P.B.S. this past spring aired a documentary, “Weathered- Inside the LA Firestorm” is out of filmmaker Trip Jennings and Balance Media, and should be available via P.B.S. “Passport” (which usually requires a membership to your local P.B.S.-affiliate station. What most people do not know is the scourge of 80-m.p.h. Santa Ana winds which fanned the fires for days in the Pacific Palisades. Why people would want to rebuild there, I don’t know, but then I live in an area that has experienced six tornadoes in 23-years.