In 2017, as Donald Trump prepared to enter the White House, California’s leaders went on the offensive. They would, they said, use the power of the world’s fifth-largest economy to stand up to the president, serving as what then-California governor Jerry Brown described as a “beacon of hope to the rest of the world”. If Trump blocked the climate research that was key to the state’s environmental agenda, Brown threatened, “California will launch its own damn satellite.” There has been little of that swagger from Sacramento this time around. The wildfires that tore through Los Angeles less than two weeks before Trump’s second inauguration have blindsided California’s leaders. The Democrats who preside over the state now find themselves begging Republicans in Washington to deliver the type of basic aid that the federal government ordinarily doles out to those affected by natural disasters.
Such catastrophes usually elicit a sense of unity but the fires have revealed deep divisions. Many in Trump’s party responded to the suffering in Los Angeles with glee, making dubious claims about the city’s firefighting budget and the management of its reservoirs to feed a longstanding caricature of left-wing mismanagement. Even as the fires raged, prominent Republicans looked for ways to pin the destruction on the Democratic politicians who occupy all of California’s state offices and the mayoralties of most of its large cities. (It is one of 15 states where Democrats control both the governor’s office and legislative supermajorities.) LA was burning, Republicans said, because Democratic politicians spend more time protecting illegal immigrants, criminals and endangered species than their own citizens. “Everyone is unable to do anything about it,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “That’s going to change.”
Trump has spoken of Chicago, Detroit and even New York in similar terms but none has found itself as reliant on his goodwill as LA. The short-term fight will be over emergency aid and whether Congress attaches conditions that compel changes to the Californian environmental policies that Republicans blame for the fires. Trump will have difficulty fully abandoning LA, which is due to host the Olympics in the final year of his presidential term. He was in office when the Games were granted to the US and is certain to shuffle around the host city in 2028 with a smile on his face. A man who prides himself on a knack for construction will be eager to boast about his role in saving the Olympic city rather than blame local politicians for its ills.
But the next four years are likely to be painful for California as it struggles to rebuild while seeing its national government as an obstacle not a partner. Indeed, those who run the US now treat the state – which is home to one-eighth of its population and responsible for one-seventh of its GDP – as something of a distant, wayward colonial territory. A January announcement from Trump about how his White House would deal with the entertainment industry was telling: “It is my honour to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone to be special ambassadors to a great but very troubled place: Hollywood.” Californians might soon have an opportunity to express whether they share that sense of detachment. The so-called CalExit movement tried but failed to place a secession plebiscite before voters during Trump’s first term; now it is trying again. If it succeeds in qualifying, Californians would vote on the state’s secession from the US in November 2026 – almost exactly halfway between the wildfires and the Olympic moment, when Trump will want to brag about LA’s rise from the ashes.
LA-based Issenberg is Monocle’s US politics correspondent.
On a hot, dry July morning, lightning sparked a wildfire in a Colorado canyon 37km south of Denver. Just 24 minutes later, first responders were at the scene dumping water from two helicopters and a 40-person ground crew had mobilised to hike deep into the terrain.
By evening, the fire had been extinguished, after growing to just 12,000 sq km. The risk of a hard-to-control, fast-moving blaze that could engulf nearby homes had been prevented.
Such a destructive prospect is increasingly common in wildfire-prone areas, such as the western regions of the US, the Mediterranean, Australia and Argentina. The reason why Colorado could muster such a speedy response that day? It has two 360-degree cameras mounted on mobile-phone towers. Made by Pano AI, a San Francisco-based start-up that was founded in 2020, the ultra-high-definition cameras scan, identify and monitor wildfires.
In the Mountain state, two electricity utility companes had separately invested in the Pano system, which costs $50,000 (€45,000) a year per camera. The two cameras triangulated the fire’s co-ordinates and a staffer at Pano’s intelligence centre verified the image’s accuracy to confirm that the cameras had not misidentified fog or clouds as smoke.
“We combine human and artificial intelligence to deliver the best quality of alerts to our customers,” says the company’s co-founder and CEO, Sonia Kastner. Historically, wildfire detection has relied on trained spotters in lookout towers deep in the mountains. Often, there isn’t any available land to put up new fire towers in areas near urban populations. “However, there are plenty of telecommunication towers, water tanks and other existing structures that we can mount cameras on,” says Kastner.
With $45m (€40.8m) in venture capital funding to date, Pano has sold its kit to 10 US states, from California to Arizona; it has sold five to Australia and one to a Canadian province. The company’s 30 or so customers include timber companies, ski resorts, government land agencies, energy companies, wind-farm operators and private landowners.
As wildfires become a year-round threat, technology such as Pano’s has the potential to play a crucial role. Demand for such systems, for which existing infrastructure is used and AI complements rather than replaces human know-how, is only likely to grow.
