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"We're not giving you any of that fire money"

welcome to the boss stage of the climate-denial machine: withholding disaster relief

Author

Brad Johnson
January 15, 2025

PRESENTED BY PICA PICA

“The Palisades, Eaton, Sunset, and Hurst fires didn’t just happen — they were created,” Sunrise director Aru Shiney-Ajay writes. “For decades, oil and gas CEOs knew their actions would create dangerous temperatures, intensify droughts, and create the perfect conditions for wildfires to spread.”

“But instead of sounding the alarm, they lied to the public, saying climate change wasn’t real. And they poured money into political campaigns and movements, in turn getting the green light to drill away and receive $757 billion in subsidies from our government every year. Instead of putting that money toward rebuilding homes or creating good-paying union jobs to help stop the climate crisis, some of the wealthiest men in the world are getting even more unimaginably wealthy — and we pay the price in our tax dollars, our homes, and our planet.”

The American climate denial machine built by the fossil-fuel industry is transmogrifying into a machine of deliberate death, which blames the victims of climate disasters and leaves them to die by withholding disaster relief. This is fulfilling a campaign pledge by president-elect and convicted felon Donald Trump from this fall, in which he falsely claimed Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) had the tools to solve California’s fossil-fueled drought:

“We’re going to take care of your water situation, and we’ll force it down his throat. And we’ll say: Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have.”

Now that the fires have come, Trump’s lackeys are trying desperately to shift the attention away from their crime of climate denial.

“The policies of the liberal administration out there, I believe have made these fires worse,” Senate Majority Whip and climate denier John “Showing His” Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who has received nearly $2 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “I expect that there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time because this was a gross failure this time.”

“We probably want some safeguards that we can use to make sure things like this don’t happen again,” Rep. Ken “Fat” Calvert (R-Calif.), a climate denier from a district near Los Angeles who serves on the House Appropriations Committee, said, claiming the region “shouldn’t have had this level of a disaster.” He’s received over $500,000 from the oil and gas industry.

On Fox Business, Rep. Zach “Master Of” Nunn (R-Iowa, $125,000) said California needs to “change bad behavior”:

“We will certainly help those thousands of homes and families who’ve been devastated, but we also expect you to change bad behavior. We should look at the same for these blue states who have run away with a broken tax policy. We want to be able to help our colleagues in New York, California and New Jersey, but those governors need to change their tune now.”

Sen. Tommy “Goober” Tuberville (R-Ala.), one of the most famously stupid and racist climate deniers in the Senate, went on Newsmax on Monday and claimed California’s victims “don’t deserve anything,” because the state is run by “imbeciles” who are ruining it for the “good people” (aka Republicans) who are “overwhelmed by these inner city woke policies”1 :

“They got 40 million people in that state and they vote in these imbeciles in office, and they continue to do it. And it’s just a very small part of them in that state that’s doing it. If you go to California, you run into a lot of Republicans, a lot of good people. And I hate it for them. But they are just overwhelmed by these inner city woke policies with the people that vote for them.”

“I don’t mind sending them some money. But unless they show that they’re going to change their ways and get back to building dams and storing water, doing the maintenance with the brush and the trees and everything that everybody else does in the country, and they refuse to do it — they don’t deserve anything, to be honest with you, unless they show us they’re going to make some changes.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation), a Big Oil-backed climate denier and purportedly devout Christian, on Monday called for “conditions” on aid because “state and local leaders were derelict in their duties”:

“There's been water resource mismanagement, forest management mistakes, all sorts of problems. And it does come down to leadership, and it appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duties in many respects. So that’s something that has to be factored in. I think there should probably be conditions on that aid.”

On Tuesday, Johnson, who has received about $800,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, had the gall to raise the question of “complicity” for the fires:

“The Americans there that are affected desperately need and deserve help, but you’ve also heard us talk about our concerns with the governance of the state of California, state and local. And to the extent that there is complicity involved in the scope of the disaster, then we think that’s something that needs to be carefully regarded.”

Yeah, Mike: the “complicity” of Republican climate deniers in the scope of the disaster needs to be “carefully regarded.” Gov. Newsom should organize a top commission of climate scientists, disaster experts, and investigators of climate-polluter corruption to prosecute this case.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelynskyy has offered to send firefighters to California to join those from Canada and Mexico fighting the MAGA fires.

Sunrise spokesperson John Paul Mejia with other climate activists in front of the U.S. Capitol. Credit: Sunrise

Sunrise spokesperson John Paul Mejia with other climate activists in front of the U.S. Capitol. Credit: Sunrise

It’s Climate Denier Cabinet Day on the Hill!

Also today, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee holds a hearing on the state of the nation’s transportation system at 10 am. Witnesses include Gov. Jeff Landry (R-La.) and Vanessa Fuentes, mayor pro-tem of Austin, Texas.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee postponed its hearing to consider the nomination of Gov. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) to be Secretary of Homeland Security until Friday due to a lack of required paperwork. The Department of Homeland Security includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Noem is a climate denier.

Sunrise activists were joined by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Delia Catalina Ramirez (D-Ill.) to protest Wright’s nomination. Several activists disrupted the hearing this morning, at which Wright told Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) that he stood by his denial that climate change is worsening wildfires.

Pica pica

Before he leaves, President Joe Biden is helping broker a ceasefire between Hamas (killed 1,140 Israelis) and Israel (killed well over 46,000 Palestinians).

And he declared the creation of two new national monuments in California, Chuckwalla near Joshua Tree National Park and Sáttítla near the Oregon border.

He’s also helping “accelerate the speed” of the universal-paperclipping of human civilization, with an executive order to clear the way for gluttonous AI data centers from sea to shining sea.

It’s just a matter of time now for our promised AI god to solve global warming and save the planet, and Biden’s legacy will be secured!

On November 3, 1991, the Campbell's soup factory was demolished in Camden, New Jersey. These water towers were so cool they should have been saved.

The Los Angeles Times’s Hailey Bronson-Potts visits Edgar McGregor in Eaton Canyon and tells his life-saving story.

“I feel like I am safe in saying that we are not thriving on our changing planet,” writes climate scientist Benjamin Hamlington, the lead for the NASA Sea Level Rise team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose home in Altadena was obliterated. “And we will not thrive on our changing planet in the coming decades.”

Will Peischel ponders the future of Climate Defiance, which is holding an ”Inaugural Bash” comedy fundraiser Saturday night in DC.

Oops: “Equinor has retracted a claim that it stores about a million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually at its flagship carbon capture project after DeSmog obtained data showing the real figure was as little as a tenth of that amount.”

You’re saying coup d'é·tat over and over again but what I’m hearing is soup and crackers

Hearings on the Hill:

Climate Action Today:

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1  Gosh, what could Tommy mean by “inner city woke.” Look, Trump pal Mark Zuckerberg said it’s okay to be openly racist in public now, you don’t need to bother with dog whistles.

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