By John BriscoeUpdated Jan 27, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)

A pump jack extracts oil from the ground in Signal Hill (Los Angeles County). California played a role in getting the U.S. and the world hooked on oil.Jae C. Hong/Associated Press 2021

The loss of property in the Los Angeles fires — put to one side, just for now, the tragic loss of life — is yet another natural tragedy for Californians. For those few property owners who will survive with resources enough to rebuild, the years ahead will be a hellscape beyond the those we’ve seen in the images of the burned areas in Pacific Palisades and the areas of the other fires.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken one minuscule step to alleviate the distress of those whose properties have been lost or damaged. As the New York Times recently observed, California’s environmental review and land-use laws are the most sclerotic in the country. Those reviews, and the years of lawsuits they invariably entail, and the endless permits that must be obtained, all requiring the payment of exorbitant fees, would mean most properties will never be rebuilt. 

Add to that the hell that owners of property in the “coastal zone” would face. The California Coastal Commission is notoriously disdainful of private property rights, notwithstanding they are enshrined in the state’s Constitution, as well as the United States Constitution. In the past three decades, the state’s Coastal Commission has pushed an agenda of “planned retreat,” which is its euphemism for requiring people in the coastal zone to move inland. Anywhere inland.  

Why? Because, they say, human-caused (“anthropogenic” in the language of those who know) global warming has caused sea-level rise, which will cause erosion and inundation of the coast. And so, you must move. They don’t pay you to move. They simply make it impossible to stay.  

In addition to rising sea levels, global warming is also to blame, says the state, for the extraordinary weather events and wildfires we have been experiencing.

Newsom has recently issued an executive order reining in the most draconian elements of California’s laws governing rebuilding after the Los Angeles fires. That is a good, though quite small step, toward discharging the state’s responsibility.

There is global warming. Rising seas are a result, as are extraordinary weather and fire events. And if there are anthropogenic causes of global warming — and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that there are — there is one clear villain in it all.

The state of California.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still burning in September 1945 when California engaged the federal government in the Supreme Court to establish the state’s primary right to drill for oil deeper and deeper into the seabed offshore of California.  

The state pushed to drill, it won, and it coddled the oil industry, the automobile industry and the tire industry.  

In the Los Angeles basin and the San Francisco Bay Area, efficient intercity light rail service had worked well for generations. In the Bay Area, it was the Key System; in Southern  California, the Red Cars served the people. In the same years after World War II, a consortium of Phillips Oil and Standard Oil of California (today, Chevron), General Motors and Firestone Tire and Rubber combined to form an entity with the anodyne name National City Lines. The consortium surreptitiously (to the public that is — but not to the state) bought the two intercity rail lines, ran them into the ground and then “persuaded” officials on the California Public Utilities Commission and up the state government chain to allow them to abandon the rail services. And with those services, abandon the public that had been served by it. The consortium succeeded.

The days after the state gleefully gave its approval to the cessation of intercity rail service, National City Lines sent workers to rip up the tracks and rails and sell them for scrap.  And it immediately sold off the vast rights-of-way for pennies, to anyone. Reacquiring rights of way, the auto and oil lobbyists knew, would be the most expensive part of ever reestablishing intercity rail service. The state then embarked on the most monumental freeway-building frenzy in history.

Thereby California brought on the immense burning of oil for our cars and the destruction of cheap and efficient mass transit, which set the standard for the U.S. Interstate Highway System and the addiction of the rest of the world to oil. It sentenced us to climate change and global warming.

Isn’t it time the state of California stops pretending it is the Great Climate Savior and acknowledges its complicity — its leadership — in getting the world hooked on petroleum and other fossil fuels, and the great damage — “existential” is a word it often uses — that addiction has caused?  

At the end of last year, the International Court of Justice in The Hague (often referred to as “the World Court”) heard what many have described as the most important lawsuit in history. The court will this year decide whether nations whose polluting has contributed to climate change are liable to those who suffer the effects. Most observers believe the court will answer yes.

The principle applies no less to parts of nations, such as states of the United States.

Reparations from the state to the property owners in Los Angeles are in order, and soon. They are already late.  

John Briscoe is a San Francisco lawyer, poet and author whose firm represented one of the key small-island states in the pending climate-change case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.