Climate Change Did Not Cause the LA Fires
A scientist says the climate is not broken, we need fossil fuels, and bad policy led to the fires.
By Emily Yoffe
01.15.2025
Steven Koonin is a theoretical physicist and a leading voice calling for what he describes as “climate realism.” Koonin was on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology for almost three decades. For five years he was the chief scientist at BP, exploring renewable sources of energy. From there he served in the Obama administration as under secretary for science at the Department of Energy. In recent years, he has engaged in policy debates about how much the climate is changing and what to do about it. He is the author of the book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. Here he discusses what caused the LA fires, and what they portend.
Emily Yoffe: Los Angeles is burning. President Joe Biden has said that climate change, which he just called the “single greatest existential threat to humanity,” is the cause. Many climate scientists agree with him. What do you say?
Steve Koonin: Nonsense. While climate might be playing a minor role, by far the greatest factor affecting how much damage results from a fire is the fuel available to it. Have you cleared the brush and other vegetation or not? Also, there’s the infrastructure that you’ve built. Are the houses fireproof? How close are they together? If we want to avoid the kind of disasters we’ve just seen in the Los Angeles basin, there are so many things we could be doing much more directly and easily than trying to reduce CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions.
EY: You lived in Altadena—much of which is now ash—for almost 30 years when you were at Caltech. When you were living there, did you think something like this could happen?
SK: I remember one very windy night in the ’90s when our kids woke up and thought the sun was rising, but it was actually a fire in the hills above nearby Eaton Canyon. We didn’t evacuate, but we were prepared to. Day to day we were more concerned about earthquakes. As for fire, we thought the county was on it and would take care of it.
I have friends who’ve lost their homes, and the house we lived in is gone. The recent fires are a tragedy that’s due to ill preparedness, not climate.
EY:Let’s say that the earth hadn’t warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius over the past 120 years. Would that have prevented these fires?
SK: No, of course not. There have been fires like this for thousands of years. ProPublica did a story a few years ago about the dangers of our policy of fire suppression, which results eventually in larger, uncontrollable fires. That story cites estimates that in prehistoric California, between 4 million and 11 million acres burned yearly. Compare that with about 1 million that burned in 2024 and 325,000 in 2023.
EY:Can you understand that people who are saying about LA, “Here it is, you didn’t believe us about the existential threat. But it’s not in the future, it has arrived.” And the proof is the fires, and the flooding of Asheville, North Carolina, and all the recent hurricanes.
SK: How often does a hundred-year weather event happen? The answer is it’s a couple times a month somewhere around the globe. With modern news coverage that’s global and around the clock, the media are always going to find some unusual weather event. What you have to do as a scientist is to think about climate as the 30-year average of weather.
EY: But the people saying we have broken the climate are often climate scientists.
SK: I would refer you to the Working Group 1 of the most recent report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was issued in 2021. They have a wonderful table, Table 12.12, that shows 33 different kinds of what they call climate “impact-drivers”: floods, hurricanes, heat waves, cold, drought, etc. And for the great majority of those drivers, the table is blank. Meaning they couldn’t find any long-term trend, let alone one that could be attributed to human influences. This makes it hard to understand how people, including the UN secretary-general, keep saying the climate is broken.
Look at the work of Patrick Brown, a wildfire and climate expert at the Breakthrough Institute. It’s true that at the end of 2024 there had been almost no precipitation in LA. But Brown has a chart showing end-of-year precipitation in LA over an 80-year span; there were many years as dry as last year, even though CO2 was much lower.
EY: There is a cavernous gap between the understanding of climate that you’re describing, and what the average New York Times reader (or current president of the United States) believes.
SK: What’s going on is not quite a conspiracy, but it’s an alignment of interests. The media want clicks and eyeballs, and it’s news when something catastrophic happens. Politicians can use “climate change” as a vague and amorphous enemy to blame for bad things—instead of their incompetence. And it gives them an excuse to dole out money or put in regulations “to fix the problem.” And if you’ve started an NGO to save the world and the conclusion is that things really aren’t that bad, you’re out of business.
I’ve found when you sit and talk to scientists in private, they’re almost always quite sensible about what we know and don’t know, and would not say the world is coming to an end or falling apart.
EY: The nominee for secretary of energy is Chris Wright, an energy entrepreneur and founder of the fracking company Liberty Energy. You have also done some consulting for him and consider him a friend.
You and he both have written and spoken extensively about your mutual belief that we will not, and should not, swiftly remove fossil fuels from our energy mix. He has said that we’re going to need these fuels at least into the next century, and even beyond. And you both agree that to remove fossil fuels abruptly would plunge the world into poverty and chaos.
SK: Energy touches virtually every part of our lives. Think of the economic prosperity of the last 100 years, the expansion of global life expectancy from 32 years to 72 years; even the death rate from extreme weather events has plunged by a factor of 50. All this was built on abundant, safe, economical energy, largely from fossil fuels. They continue to be the most reliable and convenient way to help the half of humanity that lacks access to affordable, reliable energy.
I would say that clearly the CO2 we have released is having some effect on the planet getting warmer. Is the warming all due to CO2? I don’t think we can say that. And it’s simply not plausible to assert that a rise in global temperature over the next hundred years comparable to the one that happened over the past 100 years will be catastrophic.
Look at Europe, especially Germany, which is ahead of us on decarbonization. They’re becoming a basket case—economic decline, deindustrialization, and buying gas from Vladimir Putin. That’s the worst of all worlds, all caused by an ill-considered, precipitous rush to decarbonize.
EY: You’ve also pointed out that despite the concerted effort to turn to wind and solar, fossil fuels still make up around 80 percent of the globe’s energy mix.
SK: And the world has spent more than $10 trillion in the last two decades trying to replace fossil fuels with renewables. But among the many problems with wind and solar is that they are simply too unreliable as sources of energy. Wind and solar can be an ornament to the system but can never be the backbone of the energy system.
I think the better alternative energy is nuclear, and I hope Chris Wright is able to encourage the development of small nuclear reactors.
EY: The people who say we need to decarbonize and do it now would say the reason you and Wright and others of your ilk assert the things you do is because you are shills for oil and gas, and that’s what makes you climate deniers.
SK: Actually, I’m a climate realist, and an energy realist—they go together.
EY:Chris Wright has said he thinks to some degree the apocalyptic talk about climate is unnecessarily scaring children about the future. Do you agree?
SK: I agree that we are unnecessarily terrifying children. We should be giving children optimism, and a sense of what humanity has been able to accomplish, and what they will be able to accomplish if we give them the right tools.
EY: In the Obama administration, you were under secretary for science at the Department of Energy. Have your views changed since then? And do your former colleagues think you’ve lost your mind?
SK: My understanding about climate has evolved as I’ve read more of the research papers and the UN reports. There are some former colleagues who think I’m the devil. But there are many others who say privately, “Steve, I’m glad you wrote your book, because I dare not say it myself.”
EY: Weather used to be something people discussed when they were trying to avoid contentious issues. But now discussing weather can become quite combative. Do you see a way forward so that, as a society, we can talk more rationally about energy policy and its trade-offs?
SK: I think that’s changing because people are realizing the cost and disruption associated with rapid decarbonization. The banks and investment community are pulling out. And people are recognizing renewables are not all that wonderful. They’re rebelling against the restrictions put in by the Biden administration that are coming for gasoline-powered cars.
The physicist Richard Feynman, who was my neighbor in Altadena, said, “Nature cannot be fooled.” And regarding energy, I would say, “Nature, technology, and economic realities can’t be fooled.” I think people are going to start to educate themselves more about the technical and economic realities of energy, and I hope that they will take a closer look at the climate science as well. Then more people will be asking, “Tell me again, why are we doing all this?
https://www.thefp.com/p/climate-change- ... eve-koonin
