Is California the New Pompeii?

The fires ravaging one of the world’s most prosperous regions are a metaphor for the flawed times we’re living in, writes Jacques Attali. You earn a lot more in California developing on-trend video games than designing software that reduces energy consumption, saves water, or improves education and health. Flipping these priorities would be all it takes to avoid a decline as terrible as the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Isn’t there something pathetically ridiculous about watching tens of thousands of Californians crammed into their huge gas-guzzling cars, leaving their vast Los Angeles properties with expensive garden sprinkler systems or their charming San Francisco wooden houses, fleeing from the climate change-induced fires that they’re largely responsible for?

This isn’t the first time this has happened. These fires have broken out in autumn for the last few years, with many believing they’ll become routine, even talking about “fire season.” But is it really routine when 17 fires break out simultaneously, when 50,000 hectares of forests (approximately 123,553 acres) go up in smoke, when, in the San Francisco region alone, more than 1 million people are without electricity and 200,000 have been forced to evacuate their homes? Doesn’t it matter when the air becomes unbreathable for most Californians and drinking water is scarce?

Is it really an accident that all this is happening in the most advanced American state, home to the headquarters and labs of some of the most important media, software and biotechnology companies in the world, the most promising start-ups and some of the world’s most prestigious universities?

Inconsequential Technology

California is a place where brilliant minds from all over the world (including France) are making their fortunes developing inconsequential technology, fortunes which they spend on sumptuous houses, lush gardens and fleets of cars, planes and boats. Living in totally isolated places, in the midst of human misery and the collapse of nature.

It’s also a state where we see the culmination of all the world’s problems; a disastrous road network, rundown electricity infrastructure, defective drinking water systems, neglected public utilities, food waste, and a record number of often undocumented homeless people and the working poor.

There’s a simple answer to these questions. You earn more money in California developing the latest on-trend video games than designing software that reduces energy consumption, saves water, or improves energy efficiency, education and health. A lot more money than you make building bridges, roads, waste management facilities, dams or power plants.

Immense Chaos

When California becomes truly unlivable, these firms will have to move to Oregon, Washington or Massachusetts. This won’t be easy. This will cause long and drawn-out chaos, which will contribute to the decline of the American superpower.

Relatively speaking, this looks uncannily like what happened 2,000 years ago in Pompeii. In 62 A.D., the first warning signs of the catastrophe appeared in the form of earthquakes. From 70 A.D. onward, the rich started leaving the declining city before it was finally destroyed in 79 A.D. by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. It has never been rebuilt. It was the first sign of the slow decline of the Roman Empire.

Americans still have all the means to act. They have done so many times in their history in equally difficult situations. If they start over, infrastructure will become the biggest sector in their economy. They’ll save energy, water and land. America can thus be reborn, once again, as the world’s leading superpower.

Europe, too, would do well to follow this regenerative path, unlike so many people here who still dream of us becoming a new California.