“When the hills of Los Angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And Los Angeles is burning.”

(Los Angeles is Burning by Bad Religion from their 2004 Album, The Empire Strikes First)

Like so many things concerning the ever-deepening climate crisis, we were warned years ago what was to come, whether by artists such as the American punk band Bad Religion’s prescient song, “Los Angeles is Burning” or by the international army of scientists whose research has been raising the alarm since the1980’s.

I was one of the founders of the Canadian Climate Action Network in the 1990’s. It brought together environmental, indigenous, labour, development, and faith-based groups from across Canada to unite their efforts to press urgent and meaningful climate action in the face of all the warnings. Unfortunately, the rewards of producing and consuming fossil fuels far outweighed the warnings about the consequences of climate breakdown. So here we are.

As I write this blog, parts of Los Angeles are burning. Over 12,000 homes and other structures have been destroyed or damaged. Twenty-four people are confirmed dead, so far. Nearly 10 million people living in Los Angeles County have been told to be ready to evacuate.

Last year was yet another year that was declared the hottest on record by the World Meteorological Organization, only this time it blew through the internationally adopted threshold for the dangerous level of atmospheric warming; 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.

We are days away from the inauguration of Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “giant hoax”, promising his followers he plans to “drill, baby, drill”. For some reason, he reminds me of the character Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from the movie Apocalypse Now, who infamously said “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning.”

So how do we respond to these realities? The ecological economists maintain that a meaningful reduction in energy and material consumption might be the only thing that will make a meaningful difference. And that is what we should strive for as individuals and families, and as businesses and governments.

Using less energy and material resources would require a conservation ethic and a conserver lifestyle; a culture shift that is nowhere on the horizon. Living in a throw-away society and embedded in a growth-based economy without such a change in our cultural norms makes the drive to consume seem practically insurmountable.

In Leonard Cohen’s song, Bird on a Wire, he sings,

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch

He said to me, “You must not ask for so much”

And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door

She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

In this moral dilemma, “more” has been winning. In our finite world, we will eventually be forced to do with less.

So, we must prepare. We must prepare to be more self-sufficient in food as the storms and droughts ravage the areas of the world from where we import most of our food. The climate impacts are now driving up the cost of food. We must prepare to be more self-sufficient in energy, to rely on the energy locally available from the sun, the wind, flowing water, and organic wastes. We must move back from the coastlines and the floodplains to secure our homes and infrastructure from flood waters. And we must bolster our emergency measures organizations to provide the security we need against the climate storms that afflict us with increasing intensity.

Our governments have a vital role to play in creating security for their citizens in the face of this growing insecurity. We need supportive policies and programs and adequate budgets to achieve local food security, to achieve local energy security, to secure our coastlines where they are most vulnerable, and to provide adequate emergency measure services.

We don’t have time for the current piecemeal approach in the face of our rapidly warming atmosphere and overheating oceans. We need to muster the ingenuity, creativity, and determination of New Brunswickers, and all Canadians, to engage in this societal project to successfully adapt to the rapidly changing environment that a century of burning fossil fuels has wrought.

Thirty-five years ago, I was at the forefront of civil society organizations pressing our governments to lead the way in transitioning away from the burning of fossil fuels. Now that the wolf is at the door, we also need to ensure that he won’t be able to blow our house down. Today, I lead a political party that recognizes we need to achieve both of these things.

• David Coon is the leader of the Green Party of New Brunswick and the MLA for Fredericton Lincoln.