Get your oversized shearling coats ready, boys. Dystopia is here. If you happened to be in the Bay Area last week, you got to witness something special: a rare, meteorological phenomena that mirrored accurately the state of our world. More smoke than San Francisco has seen in any of our lifetimes rose up from the west coast’s now ubiquitous wildfires, pooled over the city, and blocked out part of the visible light spectrum — namely, the cool blues and cheery, lush greens that remind us all life is worth living. This affected a disturbing orange glow throughout the city reminiscent of just about every dystopian, desert hellscape in cinema. Bladerunner was, however, the meme of the day.

Wildfires have been raging through California since August, but while most of us have at least paid lip service to the disaster’s tragic nature, few have expressed any kind of anger. This is because, as with many facets of our crumbling state, the average Californian has internalized a sense of helplessness about the fires. There’s nothing we can do, right? Megafires — like systemic housing failures, rampant drug use, normalized public defecation, and pro-crime district attorneys — are just a fact of life. Right? But with the skies of San Francisco altered in so dramatic a way, the disasters evoked new, disturbing sentiment. It was a shocking moment, and not only for west coasters. The entire country took notice, and wondered: What the hell is going on in California? Then… shouldn’t we be doing something about this? It was fight or flight, that ancient instinct finally waking our sclerotic, apathetic generation to the potentially life-or-death question at hand. Fire. In times of crisis, people look to their leadership for direction, and in California that means Gavin Newsom. Now, does Gavin Newsom have a strategy to manage the fires? No. But does he have a PR strategy to absolve himself of all responsibility for running the state? Of course he does.

The megafires are global warming’s fault, and Gavin’s just one guy. In one little old state! He couldn’t possibly change the climate, and it wouldn’t be fair to blame him for it. Oh well, nothing to do while the world burns. Make sure to vote this November. Bye!

Newsom was beating this drum long before San Francisco lost its sky. Indeed, he posted this tweet a few days before our meteorological light show from Hell (though he’s been following up non-stop since). His argument is roughly this: the fires are getting worse because the planet is getting warmer, the planet is getting warmer because of carbon emissions, and since only unilateral, top-down federal action can curb carbon emissions there is nothing we can do at the state level to prevent these fires. This is all, don’t you see, Donald Trump’s fault. But with the single exception of atmospheric carbon’s link to global warming, none of this is true. If entirely ascribing an increase of temperature to, so far, six of the worst fires in California history, our thinking must be California is at the moment the driest it’s ever been. But it’s not. While the planet certainly seems to be warming, and 2020 is a dry year, the state is not anathema to droughts. Quite the opposite, droughts are a significant aspect of California’s ecology. In fact, they’re a major part of recent history. We just suffered the longest drought on record, from 2011 to 2016. There were endemic wildfires then, there were endemic wildfires a hundred years ago, and we have geological records of endemic wildfire dating back to prehistoric times, when literally millions of acres of California land burned every year. But more recently, where have been the megafires? In a tinder box, it only takes a spark. Why are things so much worse today?

Let’s pretend for a moment 2020 really is the driest year in California’s history (again, it is plainly not even close). Let’s pretend as well the state’s dryness results entirely from warmer weather, and the warmer weather results from an increase of carbon in the atmosphere. Even given these incomplete and inaccurate premises, why is Newsom focused simply on chiding the federal government for failure to curb carbon emissions? A plan to curb or even cease U.S. emissions entirely would not reverse climate change, it would only — best case — slow it down, and given what’s happening in India and China it would not slow it down much. Without addressing international carbon emissions we’re really not addressing carbon emissions at all. But in the context of our standing megafire crisis, given Newsom’s premises, questions pertaining to Chinese emissions are as beside the point as Trump leaving the Paris Agreement. Even were we to somehow convince the Chinese Communist Party to stop blackening the Eastern Hemisphere — which by the way it really seems to love, so good luck — our planet would not cool. Without focusing on a reduction of carbon already in our atmosphere, which almost no one in government is doing, the megafire ecosystem, per Newsom’s own logic, will be permanent. The warmth will persist. The dryness will persist. Until there’s nothing left to burn, the megafires will therefore persist. If this is what our governor actually believes, shouldn’t he have some kind of plan to manage the fires regardless of our federal policy on carbon? At this point, if ending the crisis is not even on the table, isn’t the origin of the crisis somewhat irrelevant? Managing the fires is the only thing that could possibly, in this scenario, matter. Or, if truly incapable of managing the situation, shouldn’t Newsom be planning some kind of mass evacuation? If disaster is imminent, but predictable, what could possibly be the excuse for so spectacular an abdication of responsibility?

Last week, I rejected the Gavin Newsom “not my fault” tour on Twitter, and for it I was accused of not believing in global warming. But now that we’ve parsed Newsom’s nonsense baby logic, let’s talk about the real world. A global rise in average temperature, undoubtedly a wildfire factor, is not our biggest problem. We know what’s causing the megafires, and every year we choose to do nothing about it. Fire suppression has reduced natural, seasonal burning that has historically reduced the amount of flammable detritus, or fuel, on our land. The fuel has built up over decades, and this has gradually leveled up our state’s risk from chronic local wildfires to chronic regional megafires. Megafire risk is something leaders throughout state history have understood — long before “global warming” was a thing you could cry about on Twitter for bluecheck claps — which is why our state has conducted so many controlled burnings. But, admittedly, we’ve never conducted enough of them, and the controlled burns we did used to manage dropped by about fifty percent these last few decades, bottoming out smack in the middle of our last, historic drought. To further complicate the situation, left-wing NIMBYism in California’s major population centers has forced housing out of cities and into fire zones, increasing the human risk associated with the persistent, annual string of natural disasters we know are coming. Our now seasonal megafires are not an act of God or Trump. Megafires of this magnitude are a public policy disaster, decades in the making, and for state policy the blame lays squarely on the shoulders of state politicians.

The more I talked about controlled burnings this week, the more pushback I received along the lines of “half of California land is controlled by the federal government. So Gavin’s right, it is Trump’s fault!” Here, finally, we have a reasonable critique of the federal government. It hasn’t adequately managed federal land, and as recently as this past April we had examples of federal failure in this regard. The vast majority of federal land is uninhabited, and therefore — while extremely important, for sure — not quite as critical to manage as the more populous regions of the state. Nonetheless, if the federal government can’t take care of the land it controls in California, California should demand the federal government sell or give it to the state. Even if unsuccessful, an attempt here would be an easy, slam dunk political win at home. This morning, we did receive a small inkling — a coy wink — at a land management argument, if with a cynical mischaracterization of state authority. But it’s a relatively marginal talking point in Newsom’s propaganda repertoire. He isn’t trying for a win like this because he doesn’t want to talk about land management. He’s telling people to vote in politicians who “believe science,” and are ready to focus on carbon emissions at the federal level. Never mind the actual scientists begging him to focus on controlled burnings. Why? Because were he to critique the federal government for its failure to manage federal land he would implicitly invite critique of his own failure to manage the rest of the state. From here, in the middle of a crisis that will likely last years, if not decades, he’d be judged on his success in the capacity of land management only, with such success measured not in favs or retweets on his “love the planet” Ferngully Twitter game, but in numbers of acres of California land pre-emptively burned. In Newsom’s defense, this is not a small problem. The ProPublica piece linked above cites experts arguing for a controlled burning of 20 million acres to bring California back to safety. We’re currently burning less than 30 thousand a year.

Sacramento is a maze of incentive misalignment. Regions want office zoning, but not housing. In the Bay Area, for example, cities want local autonomy in transportation, with no powerful regional body capable of fully controlling — and therefore planning — the broader region. Every town wants controlled burning somewhere. But no one wants to take the risk in their own backyard. It’s NIMBYism all the way down. Politically, while necessary, proper land management is not a hot sell. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the solution to our problem. Perversely — and hear me out, folks — maybe the governor needs more power. Emergency measures? I don’t know, we shut down barber shops for six months. Where the fuck did that power come from?

Anyway, congrats on the plastic straw ban. But the west coast is now on fire.

Mobile mesh networking ftw. For years in tech the dream was circumventing the government entirely. The state was believed an intractable disaster of waste, idiocy, and sociopathic career politics. As it was too difficult to improve government from within the machine, you had to reinvent it. In many corners of the industry this is still a thing people talk about, and in some sectors the strategy is both viable and welcome from the government itself. But the odds of a tech company saving us from wildfires, for example, with zero authority over the hundreds of millions of acres of land at risk are pretty slim. This is however not to say there’s nothing anyone can do to help.

I sat down with Daniela Perdomo for an episode of Anatomy of Next some months back, in the distant time before pandemic, and talked about her company goTenna, which designs and develops technologies for off-grid and decentralized communications. The uses are many, but in the narrow case of wildfire technology of this kind means our first responders are no longer at risk of communication blackout when towers go down.

Daniela and I talked about public infrastructure generally, decentralization, and this question of the fires in particular. Check it out!

By the way, alien life on Venus maybe. Scientists sort of accidentally discovered phosphine gas in the lethal death planet atmosphere of Venus? We’ve seen this kind of thing on Jupiter, product of natural (non-living) phenomena like storms. But storms of this particular kind don’t seem to happen on Venus, which means bacteria is, if not definitely what’s generating the gas, our best guess. And that’s sort of a massive deal?

Let’s be real, if we aren’t all capable of even temporarily pausing our bullshit to come together and explore credible signs of alien life on a closely neighboring world (closer than Mars!) we probably deserve the orange sky oblivion.

-SOLANA