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Given the scale and level of devastation caused by the LA wildfire, it is inevitable that partisan activists on social media will begin the blame game: are politicians or is climate change to blame?

The answer is both, says Fred DuVal, Public Affairs Consultant and President at DuVal & Associates. There is plenty of blame to go around, says DuVal, as to how we have prepared for – and mitigated – wildfire. And the political leadership of both parties will have to answer for policy failures around development corridors,  wildland-urban interface policy, housing density, water distribution, and other pertinent public policy issues.

But beyond how we manage the predictability and spread of fires, says DuVal, we must address why they are more frequent, more intense, and spread more quickly than in past decades.

It is true that there have always been Santa Ana winds and fires throughout the history of the southern California coast.

But the volume and scale of the many LA fires (5 simultaneously) is so dramatically larger – by many orders of magnitude (120,000 evacuated). Why? According to DuVal, the answer is far larger than can be explained by public policy components.

This is true in LA, as well as Maui (the state’s worst fire on record), the recent Smokehouse fire in Texas (the state’s largest on record), the California Camp fire in 2018, etc. – plenty of examples. In fact, 80 percent of California’s deadliest wildfires have occurred in just the last decade. Canada experienced its worst year for wildfires in 2023 (18 million acres) – and more than double the previous record! The fire in Greece last year was the largest ever recorded in the European Union. Last February, the fire in Chile killed 140 people – the worst ever. I could keep going…

All these locations don’t share the same Mayor, Governor, or President. They don’t share the same housing density, firefighting budget, or development strategies. Or the same public policy bent – be it liberal or conservative.

What they do share is the same science. And the same climate. And each of those locations is hotter and dryer than ever before. Heat sucks the moisture from vegetation and nurtures plant growth that is more flammable. And heat stimulates stronger winds that move wildfires faster. These scientific facts are universal and have nothing to do with which politicians failed – and plenty have!

According to DuVal, the scientists are pretty unanimous that the world is warming (leaving aside the causes), and the resultant drought – and dryer forests – is one of the major culprits for the unprecedented scale, volume, intensity, and spread of wildfire. So there are many other causes for this heartbreaking disaster in LA worth debating, but a warming planet is indisputably one of them.

About Fred DuVal

As the leader at DuVal & Associates, Fred DuVal oversees a bipartisan consulting firm specializing in intergovernmental relations. DuVal also serves as Director at DriveTime Automotive Group and as Chairman of the publicly traded Excelsior Mining.