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The firefighters earn $5.80-$10.24 per day plus $1 an hour when responding to active emergencies, according to CDCR

Hundreds of incarcerated firefighters are helping battle the destructive blazes that are rapidly spreading across southern California as a powerful windstorm devastates the region.

The California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR) said on Wednesday that it had deployed 395 imprisoned firefighters across 29 crews while the county fights multiple out-of-control blazes fueled by extreme winds and dry conditions. The incarcerated crews are embedded with the California department of forestry and fire protection (Cal Fire) and its nearly 2,000 firefighters, who have been stretched thin from several simultaneous emergencies.

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Firefighters said the destruction from the California fires was unlike any they had seen in their decades-long careers

• California wildfires – live

The sun glared red as it sank into the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday, casting an orange hue over the carnage smoldering on the southern Californian coast. It will be a day not soon forgotten in Los Angeles, which by evening was flanked by catastrophic wildfires in nearly all directions.

It’s too early to determine the full extent of the destruction caused by the blazes, but in the neighborhoods bordering the Palisades fire it was clear the impact was enormous.

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Huge wildfires roaring through the Los Angeles area of Pacific Palisades has left the neighborhood in ruins. Resident Sanah Chung left his Pacific Palisades home when a mandatory evacuation order was placed but returned to protect his home from the fire. 'I know this looks pretty stupid, but If I can save one ember from burning down my house, I'll take the risk,' said Chung.

• Visual explainer: why are the LA wildfires so bad?

• Celebrities among thousands to flee homes as Los Angeles wildfires rage

• After ‘tremendous demand’, water tanks used for fighting LA wildfires ran dry early

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City’s supply completely filled before fire, but within hours three 1m-gallon tanks serving Palisades depleted

As firefighters battled three wildfires raging across Los Angeles in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the water tanks supplying Pacific Palisades – where the largest of the fires broke out – ran dry.

Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer and CEO of the Los Angeles department of water and power, told reporters that by 3am Wednesday, the three 1m-gallon tanks serving the Palisades had been depleted.

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As officials urge people to stay indoors, those experiencing homelessness struggle to shield themselves from toxic air

Thick, noxious clouds of smoke engulfed Los Angeles as several wildfires rage across the region, creating heightened hazards for the tens of thousands of unhoused people living on the streets in the county.

As authorities ordered evacuations for more than 82,000 people in various parts of LA and urged others to remain indoors to shield themselves from the gray smoke, unhoused Angelenos were struggling to protect themselves from the pollution.

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Companies started pulling back from the state as earlier fires made it harder to turn a profit. Experts warn the exodus could grow.

No companies bid for the chance to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It was the second auction in four years that failed to draw strong interest.

Residents of Los Angeles have fled deadly wildfires engulfing the suburbs of the West Coast megalopolis, as firefighters struggled to contain the flames overnight amid fears they would worsen. Tanner Charles posted this footage to X saying 'video of the moment my friend and I abandoned his house after we tried to save what we could. Please be praying for him and his family.' California officials ordered more than 30,000 people to evacuate their homes as hillside blazes ripped through the coastal Pacific Palisades neighbourhood. People escaped by car and on foot

• California wildfires – latest updates

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El presidente electo de Estados Unidos dijo que el país necesitaba la isla, parte semiautónoma de Dinamarca, por motivos de seguridad nacional. Pero hay otros posibles intereses.

Blazes devastate affluent Pacific Palisades with more than 30,000 people under evacuation orders

• California wildfires – latest updates

Fast-moving wildfires raging through Los Angeles have left Hollywood movie actors and reality TV stars fleeing their hillside mansions, as wind-whipped blazes devastated affluent neighbourhoods along the coast.

More than 30,000 people have been put under evacuation orders in LA, and a state of emergency has been declared as the infernos swept through the Pacific Palisades, a ritzy area near Malibu popular with celebrities.

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How a team of researchers is reducing skin temperature under clothes and energy bills with some forward fashion thinking

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This year is on track to be the hottest in recorded history. With rising temperatures and more intense and frequent heatwaves, keeping cool in summer will get harder. Air conditioning can only go so far, especially when extreme heat raises the risk of electricity outages.

Wearing light, loose-fitting clothing is well recognised health advice to beat the heat in sweltering temperatures, especially important given that heatwaves kill more people than any other extreme weather event.

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Hillside homes abandoned and 30,000 evacuated as infernos rip into north and west areas of Californian city

• Southern California wildfire – live

Residents of Los Angeles have fled wildfires engulfing the suburbs of the US’s second city, as firefighters struggled to contain the flames overnight amid fears they would worsen on Wednesday morning.

California officials have ordered more than 30,000 people to evacuate their homes as hillside infernos ripped through the coastal Pacific Palisades neighbourhood. People escaped by car and on foot.

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Exodus from target-setting group is attempt to head off ‘anti-woke’ attacks from rightwing politicians, say analysts

• Business live – latest updates

The six biggest banks in the US have all quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group, with the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as president expected to bring political backlash against climate action.

JP Morgan is the latest to withdraw from the UN-sponsored net zero banking alliance (NZBA), following Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. All six have left since the start of December.

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President-elect Donald Trump seems hell-bent on filling his cabinet with anti-science extremists, including climate science deniers. While these nominations are dangerous, what’s even more disturbing is the opening they create for fossil fuel corporations that have masterminded climate deception campaigns to regain social license. ExxonMobil, Shell, and trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute now profess to accept climate science—even as they exacerbate the crisis by continuing to expand fossil fuel production and kick the climate action can down the road with greenwashing and doublespeak.

In a cynical effort to please climate-conscious investors, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods may choose to keep climate science deniers like DOE nominee Chris Wright at arm’s length. But with global temperatures rising, the carbon budget dwindling, and climate-driven disasters affecting people and communities around the world, we cannot afford to accept ExxonMobil, Shell, or other major fossil fuel corporations as the lesser evil—or even worse, as integral to climate solutions.

Trump reignites overt climate denial

During his campaign, Trump sought $1 billion from oil and gas CEOs in exchange for a pledge to reverse environmental regulations and prevent new policies from being enacted. Since Trump’s election to a second term, fossil fuel industry interests have published their wish lists—and patrons have been rewarded with appointments to key posts in the administration. And we’ve already seen a resurgence of outright climate science denial.

Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, has denied the well-established connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Liberty Energy, the fracking corporation he heads, describes its Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) focus as delivering secure, reliable, affordable access to energy. Its ESG report downplays the urgency of the climate crisis and misrepresents the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This deliberate distortion of ESG builds on years of anti-ESG efforts by far-right activists including Vivek Ramaswamy, appointed by Trump to partner with fellow billionaire Elon Musk in weakening federal regulations and slashing government spending (notably, oil and gas subsidies are not on the chopping block).

Congressional allies pump up oil and gas

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has continued its attack on ESG investing, most recently in an unhinged report that rallies behind ExxonMobil against an alleged “cartel” of climate-conscious investors. The committee seems to be living in an alternate reality in which investors using market tools to influence corporate strategy is somehow illicit, while fossil fuel companies colluding to fix prices is not. The Judiciary Committee’s upside-down world is detached from reality, ignoring both record high US oil and gas production under the Biden administration and the fact that renewables continue to be cheaper than fossil energy.

Representative Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee embraces anti-climate positions that ExxonMobil itself long ago abandoned, alleging that commitments to reach net zero global warming emissions by 2050 are part of a “left-wing climate agenda.” Does ExxonMobil, the nation’s largest energy corporation, really need protection by a paternalistic Congress against powerful bullying investors? More likely, ExxonMobil recognizes that to compete in the global market, it must convince investors that it is taking action to reduce heat-trapping emissions and limit the worst effects of climate change. (As my colleague Dr. Carly Phillips has shown, ExxonMobil’s recent climate reports are misleading at best, dishonest at worst—textbook examples of greenwashing).

Major fossil fuel corporations lit the fuse decades ago

Climate change denial is no accident. It was plotted decades ago by the fossil fuel industry—for example, in an infamous 1998 memo by a task force of the American Petroleum Institute, which said that “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognize) ‘uncertainties’ in climate science.” As my UCS colleagues and I wrote in the Climate Deception Dossiers, this plan was eerily reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s strategy, succinctly described in an internal corporate memo as, “Doubt is our product…”

Source: UCS

The fossil fuel industry’s concerted disinformation campaign has been so successful that ExxonMobil, one of the ringleaders, can now claim to accept climate science while cronies like Chris Wright and Jim Jordan continue to stoke doubt.

Fossil fuel interests have been in Trump’s inner circle from the jump

In 2016, President Trump tapped ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State. As I wrote at the time, Tillerson was an inappropriate and deeply troubling pick for the post, for countless reasons—here were five of the most distressing ones.

One of those reasons was the ways Tillerson doubted and downplayed climate change. And after his service in the Trump administration, the Wall Street Journal revealed new evidence that Tillerson had dismissed the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (and striving to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius) as “something magical.” Worse still, just months before the agreement was signed, Tillerson asked, “Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough?”

Climate scientists, backed by robust research, say so. The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5° C found that surpassing 2 degrees C of warming would significantly increase the frequency and severity of climate impacts, including extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, and threats to human health and livelihoods. However, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C, could substantially reduce these risks, highlighting the critical importance of ambitious global climate action.

In 2017, Tillerson said he disagreed with President Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. He was fired from his position in the administration just nine months later.

ExxonMobil hides behind extremists

ExxonMobil is staking out a different position in the second Trump administration.

2024 wrapped up as the hottest year on record, with warming temporarily reaching 1.5 C. Unlike Tillerson or Trump, current ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods professes to support the Paris Agreement. However, the corporation pushes technological “solutions” that can’t bend the emissions curve steeply downward in the critical period between now and 2030.

In December, ExxonMobil released its plan to 2030, which calls for an 18% increase in oil and gas production, thanks largely to growth in the Permian Basin (after last year’s acquisition of Pioneer) and offshore Guyana. Woods bragged about reducing ExxonMobil’s upstream (exploration and production) emissions intensity by 20% between 2016 and 2023—and says it is aiming to cut emissions intensity 40-50% by 2050.

However, upstream emissions intensity measures emissions per unit of production—and excludes emissions from burning oil and gas, which constitute roughly 85 percent of the heat-trapping emissions attributable to ExxonMobil. So, if production is increasing—as ExxonMobil’s is—absolute emissions will continue to climb even if upstream emissions intensity significantly decreases.

The corporation says it is pursuing “up to $30 billion in lower-emissions investment opportunities”—which for ExxonMobil means carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, and lithium. Among other projects, ExxonMobil’s Low Carbon Solutions business is developing a Texas plant to produce hydrogen from fossil gas (if the tax credit included in the Inflation Reduction Act survives) and a gas-fired power plant to support a data center. (Read more about how data centers’ rapidly growing energy use is changing electricity supply and demand—and what it means for energy infrastructure planning—in this blog by my UCS colleague Mike Jacobs).

Fossil fuel lobbyists grab seats at the table

ExxonMobil’s Woods was one of more than 1,770 fossil fuel industry lobbyists granted access to the annual UN climate negotiations (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The heads of Aramco, BP, and TotalEnergies were also registered to participate as guests of the host country.

Woods made headlines when he discouraged US President-elect Trump from withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement. Although some media outlets credited Woods with supporting climate policy and pushing back against Trump’s anti-climate agenda, what he actually said was, “The way you influence things is to participate, not to exit.” What I see in the oil and gas industry’s participation at COPs is not a commitment to climate action, but the determination—and access—to interfere with a fair, fast, and funded phaseout of fossil fuels by the international community.

What to watch out for in 2025

As 2025 begins, the challenges for climate advocates are at least threefold: 1) mobilizing fierce opposition and marginalizing climate science deniers who secure positions of power in Congress or the administration; 2) inoculating state, federal, and international policymakers against deception and greenwashing by ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel corporations; and 3) defending and expanding the use of ESG investment strategies against bad-faith Congressional “oversight.”

With federal climate and clean energy policies likely to be stalled or rolled back, climate litigation is a key arena for progress in the United States. Preserving access to justice through the courts will be essential, in the face of veiled threats against climate-related litigation in Project 2025 and Trump’s promise to stop climate accountability litigation against the oil and gas industry.

The fossil fuel industry will attempt to cash in on its political influence in the United States by advancing deregulation, facilitating increased oil and gas production on federal lands and waters, expanding subsidies and other giveaways, blocking mandatory climate disclosure, evading liability for climate damages and corporate misconduct, and stoking political and legal attacks against activists and organizers. As President-elect Trump opens the floodgates to all kinds of disinformation—including climate science denial—some pro-fossil forces will fight climate and clean energy policies directly. But others will more stealthily seek to delay and undermine the transition away from fossil fuels, claiming to support climate action while defining “climate solutions” in their narrow short-term interests. These efforts to regain social license by those most responsible for the climate crisis are particularly insidious.

Both approaches—and the actors who employ them—endanger our health, environment, energy security, human rights, and democracy. Even as we steel ourselves to refute a barrage of lies from top officials in the Trump administration and Congress, we must resist compromising with leaders of an industry that has deceived the public and policymakers for decades, evaded accountability for the harm it has caused, continues to obstruct the urgent transition to renewable energy, and has not earned the public’s trust.

The tiny nation of Niue has raised £3m selling sponsorship of its marine protected area at just over £100 for a square kilometre

Niue, also known as the Rock of Polynesia, is one of the tiniest island states in the world. It takes a mere two hours to drive around it, giving views of its rugged limestone cliffs and occasional sandy coves. These coves give way to caves and chasms, once used for storage, burial sites and even as living spaces. But perhaps what visitors seek most are its crystal clear waters, home to spinner dolphins, eels, grey reef sharks, sea snakes and humpback whales.

Now the island is engaged in an innovative plan to try to conserve these vast and pristine territorial waters. The scheme, which has been running for a year, involves selling off sponsorship of the ocean surrounding the island to individuals or companies for NZ$250 (£116) a square kilometre. So far, it has raised NZ$7m, nearly halfway to its target.

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By the time Jon Oei’s family drove toward the ocean, it was dark and the power was out: ‘There were no lights, and everything was on fire’

• Live coverage: Pacific Palisades fire doubles in size
• Full report: windstorm fuels California wildfire

In the past few months, Jon Oei’s parents, who live in the highlands of the Pacific Palisades, have received multiple wildfire evacuation orders, the most recent in the early hours of New Year’s Eve, he said.

So on Tuesday, when a wildfire began not far from the family’s home, they did not immediately evacuate.

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A guide to the steps you can take before, during and after a fire as they grow more frequent and more intense

As the climate crisis makes wildfires in the American west more frequent, longer and more intense, preparedness can help residents across minimize damage and prevent loss.

Here are steps that can be taken before, during and after wildfires to protect yourself and others, compiled from government guides, fire association websites and weather service advisories.

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Fueled by major windstorm, Pacific Palisades fire touches museum site but officials say collection safe

• Follow live: Palisades blaze doubles in size to nearly 3,000 acres

A rapidly spreading wildfire in southern California reached the grounds of the Getty Villa museum north of Santa Monica on Tuesday, but officials said no structures had burned and the collection was safe.

The Pacific Palisades fire, fueled by a major windstorm and prompting mass evacuations in Los Angeles county, burned some trees and vegetation on site at the Getty Villa, but museum leaders said the galleries and archives were protected.

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A wildfire has erupted in Pacific Palisades, an affluent community north of Santa Monica, on Tuesday consuming more than 1,200 acres and destroying homes. A large swath of the region is under what officials have described as ‘extreme risk’ from a destructive storm. The city of Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency for the 'wind event'

• Wildfire destroys homes as strong winds hit southern California

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Fire quickly consumed hundreds of acres in the Pacific Palisades, an affluent community north of Santa Monica

A fast-moving wildfire erupted in Los Angeles county on Tuesday, quickly consuming more than 1,200 acres and destroying homes in an affluent community along the Pacific Ocean.

Whipped by unusually strong winds, the fire prompted frenzied evacuations through winding roads in the Pacific Palisades, an area north of Santa Monica, with residents fleeing on foot as flames approached.

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