The California wildfires have shown that even the rich and famous are not immune to Climate change – and the authentic response of many of them is a message to us all

“Wildfires don’t care about wealth or status,” began the New York Times this week, describing the Celebrity homes obliterated by fire in California. But what the report didn’t add, leaving it instead to Neil Young’s website, was that climate change cares even less. As President Trump took time out of his busy schedule protecting his hair and insulting the French to blame poor forest management, Young laid it on the line: “As a matter of fact this is not a forest fire that rages on as I write this. We are vulnerable because of climate change.”

In the early stages of the climate crisis, it often felt as if the opposite were true: floods, droughts and heatwaves were always somewhere else’s problem, usually the global south, where they could be chalked up to some pre-existing vulnerability, in a shoulder-shrugging: “OK, so earthquakes aren’t great, but if they’d had better building regulations …” Times moved on. This year, the global heatwave was so pronounced that even habitual climate sceptics – the Sun newspaper, for example – felt moved to point out that the world appeared to be on fire.

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