you’ve felt something weird lately, regarding the speed of time. If
reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change trig-
ger your anxiety. If you have reconsidered a trip on account of flight
shame, or know a friend who got a vasectomy for carbon reasons, or
you’ve been thinking about relocating to Duluth. If your parents seem
defensive. If you feel defensive around your children. If your kids cry
over glacier melt. If all these weeks and months and years of urgent
warnings about impending ecological disaster have left you in a fog of
attentional fatigue, giving you a case of what I call “apocalypse brain,”
with symptoms including weariness and sorrow. If occasionally you
become crazed with blame. If you’ve stopped recycling. Simply, if
you can’t shake a sense that this, all of this, will soon change fun-
damentally, or—fuck—is changing fundamentally. Or even if you’re
on the flip side: You reject the climate crisis, you disagree with most
every legitimate scientist and government on the planet, but still you
sense that history, that geologic time, is moving a little di≠erently at
present, a little faster, even crumbling in on itself.
Well, you’re right.
The climate crisis is here, the causes are clear, and, assuming we
carry on with business as usual (and there’s little reason to think
we won’t), the consequences will be dire: More warming, increased
flooding, heat waves hotter and longer. Food shortages, epidemics,
and more war. Surely you realize large chunks of our planet may
be uninhabitable within 80 years. Future generations will know
Miami Beach as a reef that Canadian scuba divers visit on holiday,
and southern Europe as a zone of drought. Did you ever ask yourself,
between building electric cars and escaping to Mars, which is Elon
Musk’s plan A, which is his plan B?
In Los Angeles, where I live with my wife, the climate crisis feels
extra real, if only because we know natural disaster on an intimate
scale. Wildfire, air pollution, mudslides. Coastal erosion, sea-level
rise, power outages, no rain. Chronic human su≠ering in our faces
from the sidewalk tent encampments. Chronic anxiety in our minds
from knowing the earth may cave in underneath us at any second (via
earthquake). Living in Los Angeles means keeping an “apocalypse
bag” in your trunk. It means the normal share of school and spree
shootings that a±ict the 21st-century United States, and also the
dearth of a≠ordable housing and mental health services that have
turned cities of the American West, especially the City of Angels, into
veritable refugee camps.
Daily life in Southern California provides all manner of full-size
upsetting things to feel hopeless and helpless about—and that’s noth-
ing compared with what’s coming next.
In the last book of the Christian Bible’s New Testament, the Book
of Revelation, there’s a scroll in God’s right hand that’s sealed with
seven seals. As the first four are cracked open—by a seven-eyed
lamb, no less—a group of horsemen are summoned. War. Pestilence.
Famine. Death. Harbingers of the Last Judgment, one of whom car-
ries a sword, one wearing a crown. I mean, typical stu≠ in downtown
L.A., but the iconography is beginning to feel globally familiar, at
least a sense of trembling under horses’ hooves.
Here’s the thing. All the preppers with their bug-out bags, Je≠
Bezos and his billions, his fellow tech moguls with their jets bound
for New Zealand—they’re worried about the day when shit hits the
fan. But what if the shit already hit the fan? What if the Horsemen
are here? What do we do then?War
ARAM SAHAKIAN, general manager of the City of Los Angeles’s
Emergency Management Department, grew up in Beirut during the
Lebanese Civil War. Everyday existence was food rations, sandbag
walls, living amid rubble without power. Falling bombs were nor-
mal; sometimes they hit his school. “It matures you. Very quickly,”
Sahakian said. “When I was 15, I felt like I was 30 years old.”
The climate crisis has been called “our third world war.” John
Kerry’s new coalition to wage it is World War Zero. The martial lan-
guage emphasizes the human culpability at play. “All these disasters
we see around the world—typhoons, hurricanes—they’re not natural,
they’re man-made,” Sahakian said. “Rising seas, rising temperatures,
fires—there’s a debate that they should be called man-made disasters,
not natural disasters.”
To anticipate all manner of threats, Sahakian’s department conducts
large-scale drills at its headquarters in downtown L.A. For bunker
fans, the building is beyond compare: blast-resistant exterior surfaces,emergency backup generators, reserve sewage-storage tanks, all poised
on 40 “seismically isolated” bases so it can survive massive impact.
One winter morning, city and county brass gathered for a day of
pretend Armageddon. The action took place in a Main Coordination
Room, a high-tech bunker ballroom straight out of a disaster movie.
(The department regularly turns down film requests from Hollywood,
one employee said.) There was a Jumbotron, surrounded by dis-
plays. Sixteen pods were arrayed across the floor, each with half a
dozen workstations clustered together and a wide-screen monitor
that would rise majestically from concealment if trouble sounded.
That morning, the monitors had risen. Employees from more than
30 agencies were taking part in an eight-hour simulation. I was sta-
tioned in the “Joint Information Center,” housed in a large confer-
ence room overlooking the Coordination Room. More than a dozen
o∞cers from di≠erent departments—police, fire, the airport, et al.—
sat at long tables drinking co≠ee. No one but the simulators knew
what was happening. Then a phone rang: It was Fox News—“Fox
News” consisting in this case of one of the controllers running the
simulation—wondering if the o∞cials had heard something about a
cyberattack. Soon an LAPD sergeant, playing his part, arrived with
intelligence about two emergencies: a bus had exploded near City