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But CNBC produced a singularly important story about the expensive suits manning the engine room of the USS Ratfcker.
More than 140 Republicans in the House and Senate continued to object to the results of the election in which President Joe Biden defeated incumbent President Donald Trump, even after the pro-Trump attack on the Capitol. Trump, who was then the president, urged his supporters at a rally that day to march on Congress as lawmakers were in the process of confirming Biden’s electoral victory.
Data compiled by watchdog group Accountable.US shows a handful of corporations that chose to pause contributions or push back on what took place on Jan. 6 later moved ahead with financing the campaigns of GOP lawmakers who objected to the election results. A study by the Public Affairs Council published last month says more than 80% of corporate PACs did pause their contributions to federal candidates following Jan. 6.
If Omicron passed as quickly as did the attacks of conscience after January 6, we wouldn’t be having half as many problems as we do.
“Major corporations were quick to condemn the insurrection and tout their support for democracy — and almost as quickly, many ditched those purported values by cutting big checks to the very politicians that helped instigate the failed coup attempt,” Accountable.US President Kyle Herrig said in a statement. “The increasing volume of corporate donations to lawmakers who tried to overthrow the will of the people makes clear that these companies were never committed to standing up for democracy in the first place.” Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Motors are among the corporations that said they would pause their campaign contributions to all federal candidates after the attack on the Capitol but later opted to resume their donations, including to lawmakers who objected to the results of the 2020 election.
There’s an important point to be made here: American plutocracy would adapt swiftly and smoothly to American authoritarianism. Corporations would line up to play the role of Krupp or IG Farben in Steve Bannon’s 100-year Reich. Some of them actually would prefer it, just as it was industrialists and bankers who sought to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935. From the Washington Post:
Eventually, MacGuire laid it all out: He was working for a group of mega-rich businessmen with access to $300 million to bankroll a coup. They would plant stories in the press about Roosevelt being overwhelmed and in bad health…A few weeks later, news of a new conservative lobbying group called the American Liberty League broke. Its members included J.P. Morgan Jr., Irénée du Pont and the CEOs of General Motors, Birds Eye and General Foods, among others. Together they held near $40 billion in assets, Denton said — about $778 billion today.
Counting on the essential patriotism of American corporations has been a sucker’s game for a long time.
In this June 2, 2016 file photo, a woman holds hats to get them autographed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
MAGA is still kicking and it's more powerful than ever within the Republican Party
The MAGA movement seemed to have come to the end of the line. They had a good run and the reverberations would be felt for many years to come, but it was over. Their last hurrah, planned for January 6th when the faithful all planned to gather in Washington D.C. for one last Trump rally, promised to be the last of its kind. After what transpired that day we can now only hope that's true. But there is little guarantee of that. The MAGA movement is anything but dead. In fact, it's thriving.
Current polling shows that Trump managed to convince tens of millions of Americans that the election was stolen and his hardcore followers are still as rabidly enthusiastic about Trump himself as they ever were. And a new set of MAGA leaders emerged this year to carry the banner in DC. Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Madison Cawthorn, R-NC, Lauren Boebert, R -Co, Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., Arizona's Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar among others, have stepped up to troll, insult and otherwise cause chaos on behalf of the MAGA Movement in the Congress. Greene distinguished herself very early on when the House voted to strip her of her committee assignments after she "endorsed the executions of Democrats and spread dangerous and bigoted misinformation" — and was proud of having done so. The MAGA faithful immediately began sending her huge sums of money, showing just how profitable being an obnoxious, Trumpist cheerleader in Congress could be.
Later in the summer, she and Gaetz, currently under investigation by the DOJ for possible underage trafficking, took their act on the road with "Peaceful Protests Against Communism" events to entertain the troops. They weren't welcome in certain places, but that just gave them even more MAGA street cred. Boebert made a name for herself by ostentatiously displaying her gun collection during zoom committee hearings and calling Democrats jihadist terrorists on the House floor and at fundraisers. Gosar sent out an animated video showing himself killing fellow Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and got himself censured for doing it. His faithful followers couldn't love him more.
Meanwhile, across the nation, Trump voters dug in their heels and staged ongoing tantrums, threatening public health officials and school administrators who were trying to keep people safe during the pandemic and harassing election officials to say the election was stolen. They refused to get vaccinated, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths, instead putting their faith in the kind of snake oil cures Trump pushed relentlessly when he was president.
They are so dug in that they even booed Trump himself when he begged them to let him have credit for the vaccines. And they are shocked and dismayed that he subsequently said the vaccines actually save lives. (I'll be shocked if he pushes that line again — the backlash from his faithful supporters was fierce.)
The MAGA media even had its own odyssey this year.
According to the Washington Post, Fox News had been contemplating moving away from Trumpism after the election, something which Trump sensed and tweeted about relentlessly. He promoted the small time rivals OAN and Newsmax and it had an effect. Fox lost viewership and quickly learned its lesson. It went back to all MAGA all the time and it's ratings have never been better.
On the social media side, the results have been less stellar.
90 percent of the top-rated Facebook pages are Trumpist but the man himself has been banned from Facebook and Twitter so he is forced to send out what would formerly have been tweets as "statements" directly to his followers via email. There are a number of alternative right-wing sites, like GAB, Parler and Rumble backed by major corporate figures and billionaires but the former president is saving his essence for the new social media company called "Truth Social" he has conned some other rich marks into backing. (It will probably be better than his earlier attempt, which was basically an embarrassing blog that nobody read. )
Has Trump's golden image tarnished a bit among his followers? Maybe just a little. But considering that he continues to this day to insanely insist that he actually won the 2020 election in a landslide and suggests that he could still somehow be reinstated, it's amazing that his hold on the Republican Party is as tight as ever. Now he and his top henchwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and her congressional clique have big plans afoot to pull the rope even tighter.
Trump has made it clear that he plans to participate in GOP primaries against incumbents he considers his enemies. The list of them is long. From Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wy., to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Trump is pledging to take out any Republican who crossed him in the past and/or refuses to say the election was stolen. Just this week, he informed Alaska Governor Steve Dunleavy that he would only endorse him if he agreed not to back incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski for re-election. The litmus test couldn't be more clear: Trump then, Trump now, Trump forever.
Greene and fellow MAGA Caucus member Madison Cawthorn, R-NC., are ready to rumble too, endorsing candidates who are interested in helping them build power in the GOP. According to the Washington Post, they are working against any Republican incumbents who are deemed disloyal to the former president. Even more importantly, the candidates this group is backing say they are uninterested in fighting Democrats -- they want to come to Congress to shame Republicans. One candidate told the Post that he wants to "force Republicans into tough votes, starting with articles of impeachment against President Biden and a full congressional inquiry into the 2020 presidential election, which he says was stolen from Trump."
They seem like a terrific bunch. And I doubt that any new GOP House speaker, whether it's Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Ohio congressman Jim Jordan or Donald Trump himself will be able to control them. This group will make the House Freedom Caucus look like mild-mannered institutionalists by comparison.
MAGA is still kicking and it's more powerful than ever within the Republican Party. In fact, in 2022 it may be gathering enough power that it doesn't actually need Trump himself. I suspect Trump may know that, too. Those boos he got last week must have him kicking himself for failing to slap the Trump name on the movement the way he's slapped his name on everything else he's ever done. Without that brand is it really his?
An aerial view of one of the Boulder County neighborhoods that burned to the ground on Thursday. (photo: Hart Van Denburg/AP)
By the standards of the megafires and gigafires of the last few years, the Marshall Fire was quite small — 6,000 acres, all told, once it was finally, poetically, brought to an end by snowfall on New Year’s Eve. But following the driest and second-warmest fall in 150 years, the devastation was harrowing out of proportion to its scale, since, unlike most wildfire, it was not in wildland or forest but was — as the climate scientist Daniel Swain, who lives in Boulder, put it — an “urban firestorm.”
That may sound like hyperbole, but on Friday the governor echoed the language: “It wasn’t a wildfire in the forest, it was a suburban and urban fire. The Costco we all shop at, the Target we buy our kids’ clothes at — all damaged.” In fact, though the fire did not begin there, it quickly jumped to a strip of big-box stores and their parking lots — to most Americans perhaps the very picture of an inflammable Anthropocene.* But as Swain told me on Friday when we spoke by phone, “Fire finds a way.” The way, typically, is wind; during the Marshall Fire, it carried flames and embers at hurricane-force speed for eight straight hours, consuming “football-field lengths of land in seconds.”
I wanted to start with what feels different about this fire. For a lot of Americans, the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, in 2018 may be the most horrifying recent memory — 18,000 structures burned, 85 deaths. But while Paradise was a relatively dense community, it was in what’s called the “wildland-urban interface” — essentially, houses in the woods. What we saw Thursday was so different — subdivisions, tract homes, fire just tearing through suburban environments we’ve been taught to think of as safe in every way.
There are lots of people calling this a Colorado forest fire. It was absolutely not a forest fire, by any stretch of the imagination. It arguably started as a wildfire, mainly as a brush and grass fire, with some woodland near the point of origin. But it was a wildfire that became an urban conflagration pretty quickly — just a matter of hours into the event. And that sets it apart in a lot of ways from some of the Western megafires we’ve been talking about in recent years, that burned hundred of thousands of acres, and sometimes burn hundreds or even thousands of homes, but they do so over a longer period of time.
And almost incidentally.
Whereas this was really burning through that urban environment.
The final footprint of this fire is probably gonna be about 6,000 acres, which is not small. It’s a large fire, but in the context of the kinds of fires we’ve been talking about in the wide-open spaces of the West, 6,000 acres is tiny. That’s a blip on the radar, if it occurred in a remote area these days. But this did not occur in a remote area.
On Washington Ave near Pikes Peak Ct. - this is what one community looks like as the sun starts coming up. @DenverChannel pic.twitter.com/XIRlu08HZP
— Veronica Acosta (@VeronicacostaTV) December 31, 2021
The videos of the aftermath — I feel like I’m driving down a generic suburban street, except each of the houses is gone or burned all the way down to its bones.
This is all literally very close to home. We had gone to run errands at Costco, the one that was evacuated. And between where we live in south Boulder and the shopping center in Superior is Marshall Road. It’s actually very pretty. It has a mix of sparse homes and a pretty brushy and partly wooded area. It’s a gorgeous road to drive or bike along. But one of the things I’ve always thought ever since we moved here, as somebody who studies wildfires and climate change, every time we’re on that road, I thought, man, this aligns perfectly with these down-slope winds. If there’s ever a fire in this canyon, when the winds come up, it’s just going to blow through the canyon and beyond. And that’s unfortunately exactly what happened Thursday. We missed it by about five or ten minutes. We came through that canyon. We actually saw power lines down. The utility crew looked like they were already on scene. I thought, I hope they got a handle on that, because at that point, the winds are starting to blow at 70, 80 miles an hour and escalating. I thought, I hope that gets dealt with awfully fast, or there’s going to be a big problem. And then about 15 minutes later, we could see the smoke.
But actually the initial context is in that sparsely developed wildland-urban interface (WUI) that you mentioned, where there’s isolated or scattered homes. That is where the fire started. But with 90-to-100-mph wind gusts, within a half hour, it moved into a very different regime.
I think the next thing it hit was the shopping center, where there is a Costco and a Target and a bunch of other cookie-cutter suburban kind of stores. Superior is not one of those towns in the woodlands, in the WUI. It’s a sprawly suburb with a lot of tract homes. Shopping plazas with grotesque, large parking lots. The fire burned a lot of the structures in this context, which was kind shocking.
One of the more sobering videos taken by BPD Patrol off S. Marshall Rd. in Superior on Thursday afternoon during the height of the fire. First responders from all over the Denver Metro area rushed to help with evacs and traffic control. @broomfield #MarshallFire pic.twitter.com/8EYQc4OrG1
— Broomfield Police (@BroomfieldPD) December 31, 2021
Yeah. How was that possible? I think of like a Costco in a parking lot as being about as nonflammable an environment as you can imagine. The parking lot is a huge expanse of concrete. The store itself is not exactly made out of wood. How does a fire actually power through that space rather than getting stopped by it?
You know, everybody in every physical science discipline has a similar quote within their field. In hydrology, it’s “water finds a way,” right? In Jurassic Park, it’s “life finds a way.” In the fire community, it’s “fire finds a way.” And really all you need is wind.
I don’t know if you saw the video from the Costco. I think it was taken like 10 minutes after we left. It looks like the apocalypse. And what you see in the video is everybody’s confused because it was windy when they came in, but it was also sunny. And then they go outside, and it’s pitch black except for the red glow.
#boulderfire this at Costco #480 pic.twitter.com/TOsTXeAWyo
— Thoff82 (@Thoff821) December 30, 2021
And there is this sea of ash and embers, literally a sea flying around. And there’s other videos of just the landscaping in the parking lot: the brown grass, the trees they planted in the medians, they’re all just igniting from this ember storm.
#boulderfire #costco #Superior #evacuating pic.twitter.com/YVUklNnyw2
— Hunt (@Hunthk11) December 30, 2021
And these big-box stores — they’re structures, they’re bad for a whole lot of other reasons, but you would think that the cinder-block frame would be fairly fire resistant. And it probably is, but under constant assault — they call it an ember attack. If you have a 90-mph sea of embers just constantly hitting the building, eventually it’s gonna find the gaps. It’s gonna find the air vents. It’s gonna find the gap between ceiling and the roof. And it finds its way in and those embers get a hold. And then the fire’s inside the building.
There’s a lot of flammable stuff in there.
A lot of the homes that burn in these kinds of fires don’t burn from the outside in, they actually burn from the inside out, because embers have blown inside and started a house fire that then burns from the inside house.
This fire — the first structures it hit you’d expect to be maximally resistant. But not only did those places burn, but then the fire kept going. It hopscotches from the median trees to the big-box stores, to the multistory hotel under construction to the Tesla dealership, and then it jumped the six-lane freeway, and then it landed on more homes and more homes.
And then at that point it effectively became an urban conflagration. It wasn’t really a wildfire at all anymore. It was burning, mainly, structures.
Before and after satellite photos from @Maxar of a neighborhood in Colorado completely destroyed by the #marshallfire yesterday #COwx pic.twitter.com/L17RL2yJSM
— David Newkirk (@dnewk76) December 31, 2021
Homes, mostly.
The vegetation in between them was kind of just acting as a wick. But it wasn’t really the main thing that was burning. That was what happened in Coffey Park, in Santa Rosa.
That was in 2017.
That was definitely a wildfire. Initially, the ones that moved into the city limits, it was just burning house to house. And then there, too, it burned big-box stores.
Or thinking back to the Oakland Hills fire in the 1990s — that was only like a 2,500-acre fire, but it was massively devastating because it burned mainly through neighborhoods. There were some pockets of parkland, but it burned thousands of structures and killed dozens of people. I don’t think this is quite on that magnitude in terms of structures, at least. And I don’t think we know anything about casualties yet. But in other ways it was kind of similar.
On Twitter you called this fire in Colorado an “urban firestorm.”
This was something that we didn’t really have to think about for most of the 20th century, in relatively wealthy nations, with well-developed modern firefighting. Really the only major 20th-century urban fires in hose settings that occurred were the intentional ones during World War II, the fire bombings of Dresden and Japan. We just didn’t really have to think about that much, especially happening accidentally, in the latter half of the 20th century.
But now we’re seeing it again in the early part of the 21st century. And it’s due to a constellation of factors. Part of it is how that wildland-urban interface has greatly expanded, in some cases pretty recklessly — not only has it expanded, but it’s expanded in ways that make a lot of these structures in these neighborhoods quite vulnerable. It’s also because of climate.
Right, of course. All 20 of the largest wildfires in recorded Colorado history have taken place in the last 20 years.
But the fact that a fire can essentially become self-sustaining outside the wildland, in an urban environment — it’s a reemergence of an old problem. In centuries past, whole cities would burn down due to urban fires. You know, the Great Chicago Fire …
London.
There’s actually a lot of cities in history — in some cases, they burned more than once.
But the reemergence of this phenomenon suggests two things. One, it suggests that the risks of the physical hazard of fire is increasing, which we know it is, for a range of reasons, including climate change and the historic policies of fire suppression and the lack of prescribed fire. But it’s also because we’ve sort of lost a lot of the knowledge and behavioral lessons of how to deal with fire in urban areas.
But some of these conditions make those lessons harder, don’t they? When wind is 80 or 90 or 100 mph, there’s not much firefighting you can do — which is something I think most Americans still don’t appreciate about these fires.
I mean, the winds were so strong Thursday that some of the flames that I was seeing were actually self-extinguishing for brief periods, because it was like blowing out a candle. Of course the net effect was extremely rapid spread, but during the most extreme gusts, when it was literally 90 miles an hour, the fire would lay down, you couldn’t see flames, it was just smoldering. And then there’d be a low in between gusts and it would flare up and then jump. And then the next gust would then bring those burning embers and throw them, you know, hundreds of yards in advance. I think that’s not uncommon in these really high wind conditions — the highly nonlinear spread. The spread isn’t continuous flames from horizon to horizon; the spread is these ember storms. And that’s why a lot of these homes catch. They might be pretty resilient to a grass fire just burning up to the edge of the brick wall. But if you have this sea or shower of embers coming down from above or blowing horizontally …
A lot of people have been yelling at me on Twitter. Why didn’t they put water on it? Which I think is just an incredible mismatch of scale. I think that there are a lot of people who don’t live in the West who still think that wildfires are, like, the size of someone’s backyard or something.
I just don't know how you stop a fire when the wind is like this. Again this video has not been sped up in any way. @CBSDenver #MarshallFire pic.twitter.com/QlV1GA0gWj
— Ryan Greene 📷 (@RyanCBS4) December 30, 2021
And even this one — as you said earlier, it’s considerably smaller than some of the legendary recent fires, but by any human standard it’s still enormous.
Yeah. I mean, it’s still miles on a side, over the course of a couple hours. But even a really small fire — imagine trying to put out a campfire-size fire if the winds are 90 miles an hour and there’s flammable stuff around, I mean, that’s not an easy task. If the winds are 90 miles an hour, the fire can be a mile away in minutes.
We’ve returned to the Louisville neighborhood where we spent the afternoon watching firefighters try to hold the Marshall Fire at McCaslin Blvd. This is looking south over Harper Lake where homes are burning from one end of the neighborhood to the other. pic.twitter.com/ScpOe77HAP
— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) December 31, 2021
If you really want to stop a fire, you have to sort of address the underlying conditions rather than chasing the flames once they start.
There’s some language I’ve seen other folks using that I actually really thought was good and appropriate in this context, which is that events like this are climate enabled and weather driven. The climate-change signal is very strong, but it’s mainly in the preconditions. And if you try and do a climate-attribution study on Thursday’s weather, I don’t think you’re really going to find anything, but that would be also missing the point, because that’s not really where the climate signal would be coming from anyways.
People really like to simplify fire — wildfire in particular. They make sweeping claims about why it happened, what the risk factors were, what the context was. And I think that’s really problematic because there really is a lot of complexity baked into these things, as you well know.
There’s the geographic and ecological context — this fire was initially brush and grass fire, not a forest fire. And then there was this big urban component to it as well. But then there’s the weather and climate context. The weather context is pretty obvious. The winds were insane Thursday. I was going outside to do some photographic documentation and analysis, and I was wearing ballistics glasses like you’d wear in the metal shop in case something comes loose, because there were pebbles flying through the air at 90 miles per hour.
From our photog @dave_wille near the Flatirons. These fires continue to take out entire neighborhoods. @CBSDenver #MarshallFire pic.twitter.com/UMViz2reI6
— Ryan Greene 📷 (@RyanCBS4) December 31, 2021
This is before the fire and the smoke, just to deal with the wind?
And during the fire, there was debris flying through the air at 80 or 90 miles an hour. Just to give a sense of how extreme the winds were.
I mean, there’s quite a bit of wind damage just, just from the winds themselves. And there’s lots of trees down and windows broken. We have chunks of the neighbor’s roof in our yard. The winds themselves were quite extreme. And, you know, the Front Range — Boulder, Fort Collins, these cities that sit right on the foothills, they are in that down-slope wind corridor. So it’s not like this is a place where you wouldn’t expect to see extreme down-slope wind. This is precisely where you’d expect to see those kinds of extreme winds. It’s also the time of year when you would tend to expect to see them — they’re most often strongest in winter. I think these were some of the most extreme such winds in the past decade or so, but they weren’t unprecedented.
But what was unprecedented were the antecedent conditions leading up to the winds. So the winds themselves, yes. But usually they don’t occur when conditions are as incredibly tinder-dry as they are right now. I mean, the autumn and the early winter this year did not feel like autumn or early winter. There were a lot of days in the 60s and 70s in Boulder, overnight lows above freezing. And keep in mind Boulder’s over 5,000 feet in elevation.
Right.
So that was extraordinary. And the summer before it was also really hot. So the lead-up to this was record warmth — and I’m not talking about a couple days before, I mean like the whole half year before. A lot of cumulative extreme warmth, and then also cumulative extreme dryness. This is one of the top-five driest such six-month periods on record, which notably followed a really wet period last spring, and so there was a tremendously snowy and wet spring, which led to a ton of grass and brush growth. And then we had record high temperatures and record dry conditions that dried everything out. And then we didn’t get any of that autumn precipitation. Normally Boulder would see at least a couple feet of snow by this point in the season. As of Thursday, we’d had about an inch cumulatively for the season. Essentially nothing. And, obviously, had there been snow on the ground, this wouldn’t have happened. And even if there hadn’t been snow on the ground, but there had been more precipitation and lower temperatures in recent months, there might have still been a fire, given these extreme winds, but it very plausibly would’ve had a very different outcome. It would have behaved differently.
And that’s sort of the key — that’s the crux of the wildfire-climate connection. It’s not like climate change is causing things to spontaneously ignite, but what it is doing is changing the character of wildfires. It’s expanding the window of what’s possible. It’s expanding wildfire season. It’s increasing the upper end of how intense fires can become — how hot they burn, how fast they move. And the faster moving and more intense they are, the more dangerous they are to us humans, the more, the more, you know, the more destructive they tend to be in terms of structures and homes lost. So it’s not that it would’ve been impossible for there to be a fire during an extreme wind event in December in this part of the world, because the winter here is the drier season — it’s not like California where the winter’s the wet season. But on the other hand, the record warmth and dryness leading up to this period definitely played a role in how dry things were. And we’ve kind of been seeing this time and time again.
From our photog @dave_wille near the Flatirons. These fires continue to take out entire neighborhoods. @CBSDenver #MarshallFire pic.twitter.com/UMViz2reI6
— Ryan Greene 📷 (@RyanCBS4) December 31, 2021
What about the winds? You hear people talking about climate intensifying wind patterns, but there doesn’t seem to be much research yet to back that up.
There isn’t a lot of evidence of it yet. But there also hasn’t been a lot of study of it yet. So it’s more of an absence of evidence versus evidence of absence situation.
But even if we assume for a moment that the winds themselves don’t change at all with climate change, these antecedent conditions changing really matters a lot. Even if the winds don’t change but the fire season and the magnitude of the vegetation dryness increases, that matters a lot because of the sequencing.
That’s something I think that’s becoming increasingly clear in a bunch of different climate extremist perspective: it’s not just the incremental increases of this or that aspect. It’s that the natural events that we’re used to experiencing are somewhat dependent on some particular sequence of events. You know, the spring arrives and things warm up, it gets wetter and when the summer arrives, it gets hotter. The winter arrives, the snow comes, it gets colder. But baked into those seasonal transitions are specific types of weather that don’t actually occur all year round. So in California, for example, you get these strong offshore down-slope winds, mainly in autumn or early winter. You don’t get them in summer, the hottest time of year. That’s why autumn is peak fire season in California. It’s not because it’s the hottest season, it’s because the winds are most prevalent. And if you extend fire season by drying things out and warming things up later into the autumn, then you get the same season winds …
But instead of them coming during “fall” conditions, they’re effectively coming during “summer” conditions.
Because now you have summerlike dryness conditions all the way into autumn where you didn’t before. And that gives you a multiplicative increase in risk, just from that seasonal shift — more than you’d expect just from the increase in vegetation and dryness alone.
You’ve talked about these climate shifts, but there’s also the human contribution, the way we choose to live in areas which we know have at least some risk. Sometimes when we see a really devastating wildfire in the California forest burning through some homes, it can be tempting to think, Well, we just shouldn’t build there. But when the homes themselves are the fuel, and the fire isn’t burning primarily through forest, it raises a different set of questions.
I think that for a lot of those reasons, a lot of people here are shocked. I mean, people who have lived here for a long time, they’ve seen extreme winds, they’ve seen fires, but they’ve never seen the confluence of the extreme winds in a fire that just burns right into the highly populated suburbs and destroys a thousand homes. And I think that there’s a certain level of disbelief that some of the places that burned did in fact. I mean, I don’t think anybody would have been shocked had a fire burned hundreds of homes in the foothills above Boulder. I mean, everyone would’ve been horrified, but no one would’ve been shocked. Everyone knows it’s obviously at very high fire risk, those houses nestled in the woods. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to any of the people who live there.
But I think this probably did come genuinely as a surprise to a lot of the people who lived in the places that burned Thursday, in the sense that they were not living in that wildland landscape and yet these whole neighborhoods burned anyway.
The other twist is that Boulder is such a global hub for atmospheric science. And since Boulder is now so expensive, a lot of the scientists can’t live in it, so they live in the towns and cities immediately surrounding it. There were probably a lot of atmospheric- and earth-science people who were directly affected by this fire, much more than would’ve been the case had this occurred almost anywhere else in the world. So there’s going to be a lot of, I think, introspection. This has already kind of happened with scientists in California, but the expertise is more geographically dispersed there.
It’s interesting to hear you make the contrast with California. This is gross regional stereotyping, but the culture of California seems in certain ways to acknowledge and even celebrate the brutality of the landscape of the state. Whereas the cartoon of Colorado is Patagonia vests and hiking and everyone feeling they live in harmony with nature.
I don’t know if I necessarily agree that Coloradans live more in harmony with nature.
I don’t mean in reality, exactly, but in the mythology of the state.
Maybe there’s some of that in the mythology. But I think that’s more of a mountain Colorado mythology. Boulder’s kind of weird because it kind of straddles that line — it’s right up against the foothills, but it’s technically on the plains. And most of the people in Colorado live on the plains. The Denver Metro area is technically on the western fringe of the plains. And so there’s an interesting cultural divide with the mountain people and the plains people. Because out on the plains, as far as you can see in the eastern Denver suburbs, it’s suburban sprawl and hydraulic fracturing wells.
This map shows the perimeter of the Marshall Fire, which burned approximately 6,000 acres. https://t.co/FeohW2KY9g
— The Denver Post (@denverpost) December 31, 2021
And it’s interesting that this happened right at the boundary, this fire literally started precisely at that geographic and cultural boundary, right at the base of the foothills and spread into this other world. This was a small fire that spanned a pretty wide and pretty unusual cross section of geography — physical and cultural and otherwise. But it’s also so recent. It’s still less than 24 hours ago that this started, so I think a lot of us haven’t processed it yet.
How’re you feeling?
I mean, I’m doing all right. We’re physically okay. It’s just kind of … another thing. It’s been a long list of disasters in 2021. And a lot of them have been distant. This one was not distant. And one thing we’ve been reflecting on is, had this exact fire footprint occurred maybe half a mile or a mile farther north — and there’s no reason it couldn’t have — it probably would have taken out a good portion of south Boulder, where we live. It’s just a matter of luck for us that this occurred where it did.
But I think a lot of people underestimate risk. I’m someone who’s always partly, because of my job, hyperfocused on risk. But we’ve been on that road so many times; it’s a pretty road, it’s a gorgeous landscape. So it’s obvious why people like to live there. But what are the risks that entails? And people say, “Oh, well, don’t live in a fire zone.” Okay, well, what about the flood zones? You know, what about tornado alley? What about sea-level rise? What about, you know, in New York City, people dying in their basement apartments because of the flash floods in the summer.
So when people say, “Where do we go?” And I get this question all the time now: “Where should we go? What’s the safest place?” they ask. And I have absolutely no idea how to answer that question other than I definitely wouldn’t live along the coast anymore for obvious reasons. Other than that, I don’t really know how to answer that question. And even the immediate coast issue is not easy if you already live there.
It’s a question that frustrates me because people expect there to be an answer.
They expect there has to be a way to eliminate risk, that there has to be an exit from climate risk.
They expect me, a climate scientist, to say, “Go to Nebraska or move to Canada.” I don’t know what they expect, maybe it’s New Zealand. But there is no good answer to that question.
The obvious line is that climate change is a global problem. But a more specific bit is that we keep getting surprised. I mean, I honestly don’t think any climate scientist would have honestly predicted that in 2021, the glacial valleys of British Columbia would see Death Valley–like temperatures. I mean, I’m still completely blown away by the fact that it was 120 degrees in British Columbia this summer. That’s just one example.
And I’ve heard people give British Columbia as the answer to the “where do we go” question. And those people probably weren’t thinking about fires, which have always been a problem there. But this year was an eye-opener nevertheless. It wasn’t just the heat dome, but the fires that followed, and then the mudslides and floods that followed that. Now they’re dealing with record low temperatures.
And I don’t think there’s anything special about British Columbia. That was the shocking event this year, but who knows what it’ll be next year. And this fire in Colorado is shocking given the context. There were plenty of fires in California this summer that did shocking things. The flooding in different parts of the world — New York and Western Europe and China and other places. It was also shocking. And there’s been lots of things that were so far outside of the historical envelope that they really gave people pause. And the point isn’t that these are risk hot spots, necessarily, it’s that this just happens to be where we observe these kinds of really extreme extremes recently. But, you know, next year it will probably be a different set of cities and regions where we see them. And in the decades to come, it’ll be other places.
It’s not about finding an escape from risk but choosing what kind of risk you’re comfortable with.
And that’s sort of how I try to answer the question. What worries you the most? I mean, if you have the luxury and the flexibility to actually choose where you’re going to live on this basis anyway, then that already presupposes certain things about what your status in global society is. That in itself helps you make that decision in certain ways. But some people are really freaked out by earthquakes because you just don’t know they’re coming. If you’re lucky and you have the smartphone app, maybe you’ll get ten seconds of warning. But if you’re in L.A. for the big one, you’re not gonna have an earthquake watch when you get a couple days to prepare, it’s just pretty much just gonna happen. You’re gonna have to deal with the consequences.
You’re never going to be in a place where there’s a hurricane that sneaks up on you and suddenly hits land. Fortunately, those sorts of things don’t happen.
You can see the storm coming.
Maybe if you don’t have the resources to do anything about it or leave, it doesn’t matter that you have great warning, but if you have those resources, a hurricane is never gonna take you by surprise. I think fires have sort of transcended that, though. It used to be the case that everyone could sort of assume you had time to figure out what you were going to do — that you could leave if you needed to leave. And I think we’ve seen some recent examples where that’s not always the case. Even the things people thought were out-runnable or predictable, or would come with meaningful warning — that’s not always the case.
As we talked about the last time we spoke, the smoke is a real issue there too. You can have a house that you know is pretty safe from fire risk, but that doesn’t mean that you’re insulated from toxic smoke.
That’s a really good point. The co-occurrence of really bad ozone days and extreme particulates days — which is mostly from smoke because most of the other sources have decreased — is actually increasing in the West pretty dramatically in the last couple of decades. And that’s pretty concerning from a public-health perspective. You can’t escape it, no matter where you live; it’s just everywhere. It even made it to the East Coast this year.
I think about the story from the Dust Bowl — it’s told in the Timothy Egan book The Worst Hard Time. There was a guy who was the head of the soil-conservation service at the time. There was this massive soil erosion because of agricultural practices, and the Dust Bowl was expanding and it was going to get to the point where it was just gonna turn the central part of the country into a permanent desert. And the soil scientist realized this. And I don’t know whether this was really the catalyst for what followed, but it did actually happen. He traveled to D.C. and he was giving congressional testimony on how bad things were and what needed to be done to fix it from a land-management policy perspective. And as he was about to enter the chamber, the sky got really dark outside. He realized it was a dust storm that had made it all the way to Washington from the Great Plains, the Dust Bowl region. And he dramatically opened the shutters and said, “Look outside, this is what it’s come to, it’s come for you here.”
Part of me was thinking this past summer, when the sky got red across New York and D.C., that it was sort of a similar moment. But I’m not sure that there was any equivalent character. And there certainly is not an equivalent Congress.
West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin is being targeted by a "dark money" group. (photo: Getty)
Manchin is at odds with most Senate Democrats when it comes to changing the filibuster rules.
One Nation, an advocacy group that is not required to disclose its donors, released the radio, television and digital ads Wednesday. The campaign, which is scheduled to run for 12 days and was first shared with NBC News, uses clips of Manchin vowing he will not get rid of the filibuster.
"Call Senator Manchin. Tell him to keep his promise. Tell him to protect the Senate filibuster," a narrator says in the 30-second ad.
The ad also invokes Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., saying they "could jam through their socialist agenda" if Democrats eliminate the filibuster.
"West Virginians know Senator Manchin as a man of his word who will stand up to Chuck Schumer and the D.C. liberals who want to dictate West Virginia's election laws and take away our freedom," said One Nation President Steven Law, who was once McConnell's chief of staff.
The ad puts new pressure on Manchin in a ruby red state that former President Donald Trump won by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020. Schumer said Monday that the Senate will debate and consider changing the chamber's rules to pass long-stalled voting rights legislation.
Manchin, along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., has resisted changing the rules to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, a compromise bill backed by all 50 Democratic-voting senators.
Manchin reiterated his concerns about changing the Senate rules this week, telling reporters that "it's very, very difficult" and that it would be a "heavy lift" for Democrats. But he didn't shut the door on making changes, either. Manchin has been talking with other senators to consider changes to the 60-vote threshold to pass most legislation.
One Nation was the most prolific spender in the 2020 election cycle, according to the money-in-politics group Open Secrets, spending more than $125 million on ads and campaign contributions.
McConnell has been a fierce opponent of altering the legislative filibuster at a time when Democrats hold a razor-thing majority. He told reporters Tuesday that Schumer is "hellbent on trying to break the Senate."
Pramila Jayapal speaks to members of the media outside the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the Democratic coalition believes the “urgent work to restore American democracy” must involve expanding the Supreme Court.
The bill, dubbed the Judiciary Act of 2021, would expand the Supreme Court from nine seats to 13. Proponents believe the legislation would restore balance to the court, which currently has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Jayapal said the sitting bench was “filled by a partisan, right-wing effort to entrench a radical, anti-democratic faction and erode human rights that have been won over decades.”
Conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were all elevated to the bench by former President Trump.
“In recent years, this court has gutted the Voting Rights Act and public sector unions, entrenched unconstitutional abortion bans, and failed to overturn the blatantly discriminatory Muslim Ban,” Jayapal said in a statement, referring to Trump's travel ban on several Muslim majority countries.
“As a co-equal governing body, Congress cannot sit by while this attack on the constitution continues unchecked. I am proud that our Caucus is joining the fight to expand the court and restore balance to the bench,” she added.
House Democrats introduced the Judiciary Act of 2021 in April. The composition of the Supreme Court has been a prime focus of Democrats for years, particularly after Senate Republicans blocked then-President Obama from filling the seat held by the late Justice Antonin Scalia because it was an election year.
Frustrations deepened in 2020 when Republicans raced to nominate a successor to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. Republicans at the time argued that they could fill the seat despite it being an election year because the White House and Senate were controlled by the same party.
The effort to expand the court, however, started to lose steam over the summer after a presidential commission tasked with reviewing the proposal held its first public hearing. Remarks from the panel of experts showed the lack of academic agreement when it comes to whether to and how to reform the bench.
In October, the bipartisan commission said there are “considerable” risks to growing the number of justices who sit on the Supreme Court, including potentially undermining the legitimacy of the court.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) voiced her support for expanding the Supreme Court last month, writing in an op-ed that she is in favor of increasing the number of justices by at least four.
“I don’t come to this conclusion lightly or because I disagree with a particular decision; I come to this conclusion because I believe the current court threatens the democratic foundations of our nation,” Warren wrote.
Demand Justice, a progressive group pushing for an expansion of the Supreme Court, hailed the caucus’s endorsement, calling the effort “the only way to restore balance to the Supreme Court.”
“The Congressional Progressive Caucus has been on the cutting edge of fighting for the bold action needed to protect democracy and create an economy that works for everyone, and with this endorsement, the CPC is giving a major boost to the only reform bold enough to rebalance a Supreme Court that currently threatens any progress on issues progressives care about,” Brian Fallon, the executive director of the group, said in a statement.
NEWS: The Congressional Progressive Caucus is endorsing the Judiciary Act to #ExpandTheCourt! @USProgressives are a major force in Congress, and this is a big step forward for the movement to restore balance to the Court.
— Demand Justice #ExpandTheCourt (@WeDemandJustice) January 5, 2022
French president Emmanuel Macron during departures at the end of an EU Summit in Brussels, last month. (photo: Stephanie Lecocq/AP)
"The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off," Macron told Le Parisien. "And so, we're going to continue doing so until the end. That's the strategy."
While not exact, the translation of the slang phrase was widely picked up by French media publishing in English.
Macron also called unvaccinated people "irresponsible" and said such people "are no longer citizens."
Macron's impolite and arguably impolitic comment caused the French parliament to halt debate on legislation to require a vaccine pass to do pretty much anything, such as using public transportation or visiting a cinema or café. The mandate was meant to go into effect Jan. 15.
"No health emergency justifies such words," said Bruno Retailleau, head of the right-wing Les Républicains in the Senate, according to France24. "Emmanuel Macron says he has learned to love the French, but it seems he especially likes to despise them. We can encourage vaccination without insulting anyone or pushing them to radicalization."
The party's chairman, Christian Jacob, also expressed outrage. "I'm in favor of the vaccine pass but I cannot back a text whose objective is to 'piss off' the French."
Macron's comments come just four months before national elections. He is expected to seek a second five-year term in what would likely be a close-fought reelection bid.
Reuters speculates that "Macron may have calculated that enough people are now vaccinated — and upset with those who have not been vaccinated — for his comments to go down well with voters."
With more than three-quarters of France vaccinated, the nation has one of the highest rates in the European Union. However, it also has had its share of protests against government efforts to mandate vaccines and social distancing measures.
Senior Navy officials briefed the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, Moanalua Valley Community Association and Pearl City Neighborhood Board No. 21 during a 2015 visit to one of the fuel tanks at the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility near Pearl Harbor. (photo: U.S. Navy)
The Hawaiian governor issued an emergency order to de-fuel the Red Hill Facility. The US Navy has enlisted top lawyers to make sure its 600m liters of petroleum stay perched above our water supply
Frankenstein’s monster is the US Navy’s Red Hill Fuel Storage Facility: a massive underground “farm” of 18-million liter fuel tanks and pipes just 100 feet above metropolitan O’ahu. Its construction began before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Since then, it has leaked over 180,000 gallons of petroleum into the groundwater aquifer that provides drinking water for over 400,000 residents and visitors from Hālawa to Hawaiʻi Kai.
Despite its longstanding threat to water systems, this decrepit facility has been in use until operations were “paused” in late November, after hundreds of military families reported rashes, headaches, nausea, vomiting – symptoms of petroleum poisoning.
The Navy denied these facts for days. “We have no immediate indication that the water is unsafe to drink,” their representatives said, even after the Navy had quietly shut down its own drinking water well. Pearl Harbor’s commander even told our community – of sick families, pregnant women and nursing moms – that “my staff and I are drinking the water on base.” Hawai‘i’s Health Department finally stepped in, advising Navy water system users not to drink their tap water.
Navy officials still refuse to acknowledge that this is a crisis. It views the Governor’s emergency order to de-fuel the Red Hill Facility as a mere “request,” and has enlisted top Navy lawyers to make sure its 600m liters of petroleum stay perched above our water supply.
A military spouse in our legal proceedings this week sobbed as she described the family dog rejecting its water dish for days. Another mother teared up as she remembered her infant child vomiting constantly after the Navy advised that her water was safe (it wasn’t); their own beloved and once-healthy dog had to be put down, after thousands of dollars could not diagnose its sudden debilitating illness.
The Navy’s Assistant Secretary, in his subsequent remote testimony from the nation’s capital, even had the gall to complain that he had missed that night’s weekly American football game.
The injustice of the Red Hill tragedy reflects the impunity of the US military – not only in its endless wars in the Middle East, but right here in Hawai’i. A fraction of the US’s $768bn defense budget could help boost our ailing and inequitable healthcare system, provide free college for all, or make the investments needed to halve our carbon emissions and help keep entire countries from heartbreaking devastation. Yet every year our politicians pour ever more taxpayer dollars into the planet’s most expensive, and deadly, machine.
Not even Hawai‘i’s federal delegation has been to stand up to this mighty power. Their long-due request to the US federal government has been milquetoast: we need more studies, and we need to fix some pipes. Only Representative Kai Kahele, the only Hawai‘i delegate with military experience, has acknowledged that the facility must be defueled.
The US commander-in-chief, President Joe Biden, has yet to even acknowledge the situation.
Frankenstein’s monster is not just the facility: it is the larger US military machine. America’s elected leaders are unable and unwilling to rein in this monster that consumes ever more of the country’s resources as it poisons our atmosphere and now, our island’s water. These leaders dare to call themselves representatives of the people while allegedly lying under oath, letting military families be poisoned, and sacrificing entire islands of US citizens.
While America’s Frankenstein may consume its creator, the people of Hawai‘i will resist it. We think about the ones we love, our children and grandchildren, and what we would do to protect them from harm. Our weapons are not guns and ships but words, signs, songs, and aloha ʻāina, love for our home, for each other. Native Hawaiians, whose ancestors have always understood the importance of wai, of water, who have fought and died and won against the US Navy before, are now leading the fight to fix a mess they had no hand in making.
“History will remember the people that stood up,” Dr Kamanamaikalani Beamer recently told a crowd of several hundred at the steps of Hawai‘i’s capitol, by the statue of Hawai‘i’s last queen, herself unlawfully deposed by the US Navy. “We will regain control and authority over our resources to do what is pono (just) because we must preserve them for the generations to come. There are more battles on this issue. We’re not making suggestions to the military. We are making demands.”
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