Progress on the Front Lines of the War Against Climate Change
On November 8th the Woolsey Fire exploded, roaring through the mountains in Malibu where I live. My wife, two year old son and dog jumped in the car with a few family photos and joined over 250,000 others in a mass evacuation, a line of cars chased by a cloud of apocalyptic smoke.
The wind blew the fire away from our house but our neighbors were not so lucky. The fire destroyed 1,643 structures, killed three people and devastated the regions wilderness.
This is only the latest climate emergency in drought-plagued California. In 2017, Ventura was hit with the state’s then-largest wildfire burning nearly 300,000 acres. In early 2018, 23 people died in the Montecito mudslides. Later in the year, the Camp Fire left the town of Paradise in total ruin, killing 86 people. Over 1 million acres has burned in California in the last year.
Following the fires my neighbors Anthony Kiedis and award-winning documentary filmmaker and activist Rory Kennedy joined me in authoring an op-ed in Rolling Stone asking government officials to declare a climate emergency in California.
Our call to action was clear:
“It’s time for our state and local governments to step in. According to the landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have only 12 years left to mitigate climate change.
The clock is ticking. We need to come together and help solve the greatest threat to humankind and embrace our responsibility to be good stewards of the planet for future generations. Join us by pressuring your elected official to declare a climate emergency in your state and city.”
Along with the Malibu Foundation and The Climate Mobilization we also convened an event bringing together artists, climate experts and victims of the recent wildfires to call on the state of California to pass legislation declaring a climate emergency — and to address the emergency with the urgency it deserves. Margaret Klein Salamon, Robert Kennedy, the artist Shepard Fairey and others spoke eloquently about why the time to act is now.
Now, in a very exciting development, California State Senator Henry Stern (who represents the area devastated by the Woolsey Fire) and a group of California lawmakers have introduced legislation calling on the state of California to invest $100 billion to drastically reduce its carbon emissions and reliance on fossil fuels by 2030. The legislation would also declare a climate emergency, pointing to the recent fires as well as other impacts including child health.
“We have to live in California, hopefully for the rest of our lives, and hopefully in a way that doesn’t burn down our homes, that doesn’t make our kids sick, allows us to get to work without losing our minds in traffic,” Stern said on the steps of the state Capitol with a group of young people from around the state behind him.
Senator Stern knows something about the emergency that climate change has created — his home burned in the Woolsey Fire. His introduction of climate emergency legislation shows exactly the kind of leadership that we need to win the war against climate change, and represents clear and exciting progress in this fight.
We are capable of this. We can win the war against climate change. We are beginning to make progress but the fight has only just begun.
