Karen Strokes, LA Chokes

Karen’s Climate Myopia Ignores the Real Environmental Hazards in LA

In the rarefied air of Los Angeles politics, where mindless platitudes and proclamations masquerade as policy, Mayor Karen Basura recently unveiled her latest “Climate Action Plan”. It is a sweeping document of intangible ambition: carbon neutrality by 2045, which is to say…spending a whole lot of your money on expensive technology with dubious outcomes you won’t see in your lifetime. Basura framed it as bold leadership, adding another layer of bureaucracy: a Climate Cabinet? Yet while she virtue signals with these nebulous aspirations, a multi-frontal environmental assault is devastating the health of Angelenos; a true environmental emergency she has not only ignored, but exacerbated.

In January of 2025, an ocean of flammable brush that had been neglected for 5 decades by both city and state government around the Pacific Palisades…caught fire and exploded into my neighborhood, razing 6,000+ homes to the ground. Our superlatively progressive community, a leader in “eco-friendly” technology had its copious solar panels, EVs, and power banks vaporized to toxic moon dust. Even though Karen Basura was absent that day, inexplicably off galavanting in Africa, her presence was most definitely looming large over our town, regardless; her policies doomed us.

Basura’s budget cuts had reduced the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) to 1960s-era staffing and funding levels in critical areas. Pre-fire, Karen and the City Council approved a nearly $18 million slash to the LAFD’s budget right before the fires, including $7 million from overtime that funded wildfire training, aerial operations, and disaster preparedness. LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley had warned in a December 2024 memo that these reductions “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.” Karen ignored her repeated warnings.

And while everyone likes to use the loss of our home as fodder for their political warfare by labeling it a “climate disaster”, it was truly nothing more than a disaster of failed bureaucracy. It was the rekindling of the 8-acre Lachman Fire from New Year’s Day, which firefighters testified was still visibly smoldering when crews were ordered to leave the scene days earlier. Topanga State Park employees had told the LAFD that they would monitor the fire, but they never did, and it continued to smolder, until the predicted wind event breathed ferocious new life into it.

A key reservoir, Santa Ynez, sat drained and offline for a year, leaving its helispots offline and hydrants dry in elevated Palisades neighborhoods during the blaze. Winds, while fierce Santa Ana gusts elsewhere, never exceeded 44 mph in the immediate Palisades, hardly the “hurricane-force” catastrophe some narratives claimed. All of these failures by incompetent leadership led to that containable eight-acre brush fire rekindling into the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history, and one of the worst environmental catastrophes in all of American history.

The Palisades Fire released an estimated 24 million square feet of aerosolized toxins, more than 2.5 times the volume from the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11. Melted “green” infrastructure contributed heavily: electric vehicles, solar panels, and lithium power banks burned and leached heavy metals into the air and soil. Firefighters and residents tested with alarmingly elevated levels of mercury, lead, cadmium, and beryllium. Independent soil sampling in burn zones found arsenic, lead, and mercury exceeding safety standards even on parcels declared “clean” by federal crews.

Beyond the 12 poor souls Karen left to burn alive in their homes, studies attribute over 400 excess deaths to the fire’s toxic plume and disruptions. These include exacerbated respiratory and cardiac events, delayed medical care, and long-term exposure effects eerily reminiscent of 9/11 first-responder illnesses. Harvard researchers and others tracking the LA Fire HEALTH Study warn of lingering PFAS, microplastics, asbestos, and metals harming lungs, hearts, brains, and immune systems for years. Every day I spend on my burned out lot, I end up with rashes flaring up on my exposed skin.

Unscrupulous politicians like Karen Basura and activist media outlets rushed to frame it as a “climate disaster,” a preview of global warming-driven doom. Forgetting the fact that Santa Ana-drive wildfires are routine in this area, this narrative conveniently sidestepped the bureaucracy: zero proactive fuels reduction in high-risk wildland-urban interfaces, a fire department stretched thin by cuts, a state park that let embers linger, and infrastructure neglect. This unparalleled environmental catastrophe was entirely preventable, and in a very direct way. Unlike the promise of Karen’s Climate Cabinet, which wants you to believe that if we make drastic changes to our way of life, in 100 years, perhaps the weather will be 2.3% less angry; meanwhile, very real and immediate threats to our health are being ignored.

Karen Basura’s and Nithya Raman’s indulgence of (and refusal to remove) drug zombie encampments throughout the city contribute to major environmental health threats for Angelenos. Vagrants are responsible for one-third of ALL city fires, often burning toxic waste in heavily populated areas. LAFD data shows 32.9% of responses from 2018–2024 were homelessness-related, surging to 16,982 encampment fires in 2025 alone—an average of 46 per day, more than double 2020 levels. These blazes frequently involve discarded batteries, electronics, and accelerants, compounding the toxin load.

The zombies also dump human waste directly into storm gutters, which leads to frequent closures of Los Angeles beaches due to toxic levels of dangerous bacteria. Post-rain advisories and outright closures have become routine, driven by fecal coliform and other pathogens from street runoff laced with encampment waste. Because Raman and Basura allow vagrants to violate the law and defecate in the streets, the combination of human waste, food waste, and rotting corpses of the mutilated dogs and cats that the mayor allows these vagrants to torture to death…there is a sudden outbreak of medieval disease plaguing the city, with a typhus outbreak leading to mass hospitalizations. Flea-borne typhus hit a record 220 cases in Los Angeles County in 2025, with outbreaks in Skid Row, Willowbrook, Santa Monica, and Central LA, 90% of victims requiring hospitalization. Karen Basura has turned Skid Row into the Oregon Trail.

Ultimately, the green initiatives are all well and good. I think EVs are great, I think every house should aim to be off grid with solar panels; we have a major fight about burying power lines in the Palisades to offset the inherent fire risks, and it would be great if we didn’t need them at all! All that said, none of these things help the environment when you have a Mayor who allows them to burn up into a toxic heavy metal poison cloud. I want Angelenos to walk more, but it’s tough to do that when you have to step over human feces everywhere. You can’t have a walkable city when you have a Mayor who allows drug zombies to overrun the public streets and make them unsafe.

There is an opportunity cost to focusing on nebulous and distant ambitions while there is an immediacy to the day-to-day hazards facing Angelenos right now. We have far more potent and preventable environmental threats: unchecked urban blight, policy-driven underfunding of core services, and ideological refusal to enforce basic sanitation and fire-prevention laws. Basura’s climate plan allocates hundreds of millions while core infrastructure crumbles and encampments proliferate; what’s the point of cutting emissions if we don’t first clean up the staggering emissions of filth and pollution from Zombieland?

And while Karen likes to virtue signal about equity, what is the reality under her regime? The poorest neighborhoods bear the brunt of encampment toxins, beach closures, and smoke plumes, yet her climate focus prioritizes distant 2045 targets over today’s lead-poisoned soil and typhus wards. There is a massive ripple effect, as well. Tourism suffers from fouled beaches, property values crater in fire zones, insurers flee, and public trust erodes when “green” products become airborne poisons under negligent leadership.

I want to reduce consumption and emissions in every available corner of LA city, however we have far more potent and preventable environmental threats in the city of Los Angeles that demand urgent focus and resources. Preventable chaos like fires and vagrants, that are being completely disregarded by incompetent and malicious politicians like Karen Basura and Nithya Raman. Until we tackle these immediate public health threats and eliminate the menace of blight and negligence in the city, these performative climate gestures are worthless at best, and ultimately detrimental to our public health with the misallocation of resources. Karen is simply trying to distract from her destruction of the city that Angelenos see (and smell) every day; we’re not fools.

As Mayor, I will make cleaning the streets our #1 priority, because I believe that the overwhelming majority of our biggest problems all stem from the same root cause. Zombieland scares away tourism and makes businesses close, business closures make Angelenos poorer, nobody can make ends meet, thousands flee the city, and the death spiral intensifies. We don’t need a litany of complex and esoteric policy papers for each of these issues…we simply need to do the most basic thing to root out the core problem and enforce the existing laws. It’s so simple, even a reality star can do it.