Pedro Henrique de Christo
The Santa Ana Winds caressed my face on a fall afternoon in 2010. I was in Los Angeles and had just finished a week of field research on the Supreme Court’s Consent Decree over the LAPD that had obliged the police to improve its procedures, diversity and respect for human rights following the brutal police killing of Rodney King, which was followed by historic uprisings in the city. I was there participating in a Harvard University research project about public safety, resilience and urbanism representing one of my favorite professors, Christopher Stone, who is now at Oxford.
All sorts of things happened during this week. I had to act as a Spanish language translator, met community leaders from East LA recovering local youth, especially latinos and blacks, as they got out of the prison system, trained Brazilian Jiu-jitsu with LAPD’s cops to gain their trust and spent the week hearing that the most important goal was to fortify community resilience in partnership with the state and private sector to avoid future tragedies.
The research was impactful, it helped assess the success of the consent decree in the US and brought effective practices of the angelina experience to Brazil: police cameras on cars and cops uniforms as well as Teams II, the obligation for cops to do beats in pairs so there is always a witness. I learned a lot, was happy with the feeling of having done my job and for arriving in Malibu to surf with friends from San Diego, where I had lived. They had driven up the Interstate 405, aka San Diego Freeway, to pick me up in West LA and enjoy the weekend together. Before getting in the water, looking at those incredible Pacific waves, beautiful women and happy people, I could not stop thinking about how it was much easier to develop resilience to crimes and risks in general in wealthy Malibu as opposed to East LA. But this was before the Climate Crisis made itself omnipresent. These days nobody is safe, rich or poor.
L.A. Fires, Peter Szekely, Creative Commons
Now, in midwinter 2025, we watch Hollywood fires, literally and figuratively, devastate over 40 thousand acres in Los Angeles, Malibu included, forcing more than 200.000 people to evacuate more than 12.000 structures, from houses to schools, hospitals and businesses, all burnt to the ground. Not even the biggest city in California, an American state with a GDP that would rank as the world’s 5th richest country, is ready to face the impacts of the climate crisis, or better, of the Climate Crime. As we say in Brazil, “before we start what matters we must name the cattle.” And this saying is not by chance, as the first letter of the Greek alphabet, alpha, comes from aleph or eleph, which means ox in phoenician and hebrew. Words matter. To quote Gospel, John in Chapter 1, Verse 1, “In the beginning was the Word.”
The heartfelt “global warming”, created by advertising and marketing companies connected to the Republican party and Big Oil, sounds more like Christmas commercial branding. Fortunately, today most of the media calls it the Climate Crisis, and vanguard platforms such as our very own Fervura no Clima were pioneers in calling it Global Boiling, a term assimilated by the UN’s secretary-general, Antônio Guterres. Last week, Tezporah Berman, creator of the Fossil Fuel Non-proliferation Treaty, one of the most significant initiatives for global decarbonization published in The Guardian an article entitled “Los Angeles is on fire and big oil are the arsonists”, which makes clear that what we are living is, in fact, premeditated damage.
Berman explains that Exxon’s scientists knew 50 years ago that to continue producing and burning oil, gas and coal would increase the global temperature by 0,2 C per decade, a calculation extremely close to what we have observed, and that it would generate terrible impacts on the planet and humanity. Not long afterward, all of Big Oil acquired this knowledge.
What did Big Oil magnates do with this information? Instead of investing in other cleaner sources of energy they hid the truth, silencing their own scientists, buying and controlling other researchers with fat research funds focused on palliatives that would never solve the problem. They took actions –and still do– to suppress the findings of the scientific community (which is predominantly conscientious and reliable), as well as leaders and activists with massive disinformation campaigns, making use of nefarious tactics such as greenwashing, sportswashing and culture washing, not to mention accusations of targeting climate activists personal data with hired hackers.

Ricardo Stuckert, PR (Presidência), Creative Commons
Big oil put lobbying and corruption in practice on a global scale together with politicians interested only in their own pocketbooks in exchange for immoral subsidies, which increased 345% in the last decade, at a time when (2023) private investment in solar energy (USD 323 bn) has surpassed investment in oil (Alisson, G). They made this effort without generating wealth for the people in the countries where they were enabled. This claim can be confirmed by the prevalence of the “Dutch cow disease” in the major oil producing countries and the donations of USD 445 million from Big Oil to the recently sworn US president, the climate denialist and Big Oil radical Donald Trump. Trump’s attitude seems eerily similar to that of the French monarch Louis XV before the French Revolution who said “Après moi, le déluge“, meaning, “after me, the flood”, as if the world only mattered while he and his accomplices were alive.
The Amazonian COP
The organized crime has reached a point where it has dominated in large measure the currently highly criticized UN Conference of the Parts on the Climate, the COP.
The 30th edition of the COP will be hosted here in Brazil in 2025 in the Amazonian city of Belém, PA, under the first conference president in four years not nominated by Big Oil, the highly competent diplomat André Corrêa do Lago, a leader on climate since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.
A crime is defined when (1) an action and or omission constitutes an offense that can be sued by the state and is punishable by law; or (2) action or activity that, even if not illegal, is considered maleficent, shameful, or wrong. In short, a crime is a confirmed offense of premeditated damage. Therefore, it is imperative to call what we are currently living as Climate Crime, even more because this crime has generated and continues to worsen the greatest existential crisis in the history of humanity.
We must stop oil and prepare our cities to survive while we regenerate the environment in a complimentary manner, since just planting trees does not make a difference anymore.
In the future, when looking back we will conclude that we have been at a turning point since 2023 when extreme events arrived for good in our cities and reached scales never before seen in the forests and countryside. In 2024, as we surpassed the UN agreed 1.5C temperature increase goal (compared to pre-industrial levels), we watched as the state of Rio Grande do Sul here in Brazil was shattered by catastrophic rainfall. When the rain water encountered unprepared territories due the denialism of their leaders, it caused complete havoc. This tragedy took place in the Southern region of the country right after it had experienced the largest drought on the planet in 2023. In the second half of the year we burnt in flames in the Amazon, Cerrado and southwest of Brazil, resulting in the destruction of an area the size of England.
And now, we watch Los Angeles, one of the greatest icons of the most powerful country on the planet, the US, and São Paulo, the economic capital of South America, be brought to their knees in the beginning of 2025. In Brazil’s wealthiest city, heavy rainfall flooded metro stations bringing back memories of scenes I had witnessed in New York during hurricane Sandy in 2012.
In L.A. the Climate Crisis has been at the root of a mega-drought that began in 1999, turning all the seasons into fire seasons, with even more intense heat waves, in a perfect alignment of factors for a disaster such as the one we are witnessing. The pleasant Santa Ana Winds have been supercharged, reaching upwards of 100 kph; and the topography of Southern CA and Northern Mexico creates wind tunnels from the coast to the top of its mountainous elevations, very similar to Valparaíso in Chile, creating anabolized conditions for the spread of fires.
Add to this another human mistake that is manifested in the unintended consequences of terraforming, a transformation process of the soil, air and environment through human intervention, that brought water from Northern California to make a desert area artificially green (to grasp this better watch the great movie Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson, or simply cross the border from San Diego to Tijuana). This together with the crescent hydroclimatic volatility due to the climate crisis in the region that has been causing the aforementioned megadrought and compressing precipitation into shorter periods, what generates the combination of biomass in excess to the original environment and the process for it become dry and ready to be burnt. To make things worse, now after the fires other risks emerge such as landslides, with increased risk due to the destruction of native vegetation and its roots holding the soil, and the terrible water, soil and air contamination by toxic substances from burnt materials
It was not necessarily the urban density, which is good for diminishing emissions, and can be prepared to be resilient, but rather the overwhelming use of wood in the construction of housing together with the obsolete 20th century urban and landscape design, the terraforming, which have contributed to the catastrophe. Los Angeles was a disaster waiting to happen, as are, for similar reasons, Valparaíso in Chile and Cape Town in South Africa. And, as are also São Paulo, Porto Alegre, RS, and other cities but due to the other extreme of the hydroclimatic volatility, strong rains and floods.
As we have seen since last Friday, January 24th, a series of historic mistakes in the capital of the state of São Paulo which covered rivers and lowlands with concrete and asphalt in an incompetent urban design without drainage and the necessary public green spaces, also a kind of terraforming, in conjunction with high emission climate crime, generated scenes characteristic of apocalyptic movies. Beco do Batman, a well known tourist spot, turned into a river during a waterspout in São Paulo’s West Zone; people held on for their lives by grabbing onto metro corridor rails in the city’s blue line subway connecting North and South to avoid being carried away; and in the Sé Central station tens of thousands accumulated while waiting for the subway to start working again without any idea of when they would be able to return home. In surreal fashion, São Paulo’s mayor Ricardo Nunes declared swiftly that nothing could be done to anticipate and prepare for rains such as these.
What is to be done?
But the truth is there is plenty that can be done. First, there exist new high precision modeling technologies developed in digital twins to predict how floods, landslides and other climate risks will behave in 4D (3D: x, y, z; and t-time). This has been created by the Brazilian-American start-up 4DMDT – 4 Dimensional Modeling and Design Technologies, and is capable of providing high accuracy predictive knowledge for anticipation with the appropriate measures. The name of the discipline which comprises these measures is Climate Urbanism, an urban strategy developed from Social Urbanism in Medellín together with effective urban sustainability and resilience practices created by leading urbanists from New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg’s terms in office and a team of urban designers fresh from Harvard and MIT with the community of the favela of Vidigal in Rio de Janeiro.
In Los Angeles right after the fires, photos of houses that had survived the flames unscathed popped up on Reddit together with the concept of passive architecture, an awful name for a great idea. “Passive Architecture” is basically a resilient form of architecture that averts the triggers that send houses up in flames and builds housing units in an airtight envelope with highly efficient materials to be energy efficient, resilient and sustainable. Its design makes use of cast-in-place concrete garden walls that surround yards with sparse adaptive vegetation while avoiding eaves and overhangs so as not to accumulate embers and eddies and metal roofs upgraded with fire resilient underlayment with smooth volumetry for the same reason, featuring windows with triple glazing or vacuum insulation among other components.
These houses are compact and unadorned with walls that have a one hour fire rating, tempered glass on all windows and doors to protect the interior and its front is built with heat-treated wood that is shielded from flying sparks and embers by the application of extruding walls and roof line. As Kriston Capps at Bloomberg noted, the architects of these houses were quick to point out that although new resilient building codes and techniques are fundamental, the most important is to develop resilient urban and landscape design between the houses and between the urban fabric, rural properties and forest areas.
These techniques together with urban and landscape design keep forest fires from becoming urban fires such as this one in Los Angeles, which joins the historic fires of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake, San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake and the one in Edo, current Tokyo, in 1657 that destroyed 70% of the city among the greatest fires in history. If we do not stop oil and prepare our cities with Climate Urbanism, fires such as these will be recurrent, as well as floods like the ones seen in São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul that have hit Brazil hard already in 2025 in the states of Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, and Santa Catarina, among others.
Urban and landscape design are key
However, somebody might ask what do you mean by “urban and landscape design” in the case of LA or Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo? In LA’s case, curiously nobody has spoken in the mainstream media about the most important means of avoiding fires (together with stopping oil), which is to increase humidity in the soil and therefore in the vegetation (biomass) and air, thereby avoiding forest and urban fires as I learned working in Valparaíso with my friend, Claudio Magrini, an Italian based in Chile who is a professor at UDP-Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago and an expert on landscape architecture in Latin America.

São Paulo subway flash flood, january 2025, Sou Enfermagem, Creative Commons
Extreme rains and floods
And what about with extreme rains and floods such as in Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo? The construction of floodable parks and hybrid infrastructures, composed of green and gray structures spread through the city in what became known as a sponge city, can go a long way towards controlling these waters.
Double burden: droughts and flash floods
What if in your city there are droughts and then when it rains it pours causing severe flash floods, such as in the city of Cabrobó in PE, located in the São Francisco River Valley of Northeastern Brazil and as will soon be the case in São Paulo, Latin America, and in a great number of cities in the world due to hydroclimatic volatility?
These will require urban redesign with multifunctional resilience structures, not only to absorb the water as a sponge, but also distributing a waternet of hard structures surrounding floodable parks and other blue structures to store the excess water that, associated to clean energy structures, can squeeze this sponge bringing the water back to the superior layer of the soil and the surface in times of droughts. This will help to avoid fires and improve the living environment for humans (and biodiversity in general). In these three cases there is a need for conscious terraforming that strengthens nature, one of the pillars of Climate Urbanism.
The world urgently demands a great urban, structural and territorial transformation with climate urbanism strategies capable of integrating anticipation (4D modeling), resilience (adaptation) and clean energy (mitigation) together with environmental regeneration and social, economic and spatial inclusion.

Valparaíso fires, Chile, Global Giving, Creative Commons
Nowhere is safe anymore. Some months ago Hurricane Helene destroyed several cities in the western part of the state of North Carolina in the US, an area that has long been considered a climate haven; the Pacific Northwest region was also considered a safe haven up to the hard hitting 2021 heat dome; as well as the idyllic state of Hawai up until the Maui fires in 2023. As the climate scientist Peter Kalmus pointed out in the New York Times, “for those that have lost everything in the climate disasters, the apocalypse has already arrived.”

L.A. fires, the Conversation, Creative Commons
“We must create mechanisms to make the Big Oil radicals stop using their wealth to control our politicians and destroy the viability of our lives on the planet”
As everyone knows by now, with the planet continuing to boil, climate extremes are becoming stronger, more frequent and widespread. This is going to cause situations such as the fires in L.A. and the rains in Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo to increase exponentially. The most evident problems are the lost lives and the structural damage, but we can be certain that these samples of future climate chaos will be followed by the destructuring of highly important economic sectors such as insurance and housing, for instance. It is already established, as well, that there is a statistically significant correlation between temperature increase and homicides and other violent crimes (American Journal of Public Health), and water scarcity will lead to the gradual systemic collapse of our structures, societies and economies. This will happen if we do not anticipate and prepare to avoid a civilizational collapse greater than the one in the Bronze Age.
We must create mechanisms to make the Big Oil radicals stop using their wealth to control our politicians and destroy the viability of our lives on the planet. For that, one of the first steps is to end the false narrative that the climate crisis was created by all of us. No, it is the responsibility of the fossil fuel industry, the ruling political class and their accomplices – not ours as the defeatist neoliberal environmentalism likes to say.
Subsequently, it is urgent to make Big Oil pay for building up the resilience and reconstruction of our cities and structures due to the increasing extreme climate events and to promote climate litigation as an essential tool in the urgent climate transition. A remarkable example is the Climate Change Superfund Act (CCSA) recently signed into law by New York State’s governor Kathy Hochul on December 26th, 2024. This is a landmark piece of legislation to propel New York’s climate action efforts to prepare its cities and protect and restore its environment that requires large fossil fuel companies to pay for critical projects necessary to protect New Yorkers.
A 21st century climate welfare state
A 21st century climate welfare state should be the goal, tropicalizing and improving upon what is being done in Sweden, and synthesizing it with resilience, mitigation and environmental regeneration practices from Holland, and tropical Costa Rica and Singapore for example. Decision makers have to be made to wake up to the fact that “there cannot be an economy without a society, and society needs a place to live” as appointed by Sandy Trust, leader of the Planetary Solvency report by the IFoA – Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. Again, it is the time for resilience to survive the time necessary to accomplish the energy transition and regenerate the environment. And this is so because above all things we must take care of the people.
Many things need to be done well and quickly to reverse the self-destructive course established by this new radical global oligarchy represented by Trump, Big Oil and the Tech Oligarchs, which instead of developing mega solar power plants have completely embraced the fossil industry to feed their data centers in the AI race. Based on the PayPal Mafia, as demonstrated by Chris McGreal in The Guardian, this group of former founders and executives of the aforementioned internet payments company are tied historically to the apartheid regime in South Africa and make up the front lines of the Trump high level support crew.
They are epitomized by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who, shockingly, recently made two nazi salutes, sieg heils, during the American presidential inauguration, and Peter Thiel, who grew up during the 1970s in a Hitler supportive German settlers city called Swakopmund in today’s Namibia and, according to his biography, defends that women should not vote and that apartheid was economically sound. Both of them, together with other American big tech oligarchs, recently kicked in the arse by Chinese AI company DeepSeek, want to control our existence without restrictions or respect to any laws. They do not even show old fashioned noblesse oblige, an obligation to show virtue the robber barons had to display to some degree, in the construction of parks, schools, and at least public respect for democracy and human rights during the Gilded Age.
Even if the costs are very high and many powerful people have to be confronted, it is worth remembering the Roman saying, “Let justice be done even though the heavens might fall” (“Fiat justitia ruat caelum“). It is true that this is a tall order but it speaks for itself, and the heavens are literally falling already due to Climate Crime. Either we do what is necessary or we will perish as a civilization and species. It is certain that we need to accomplish herculean jobs from the Alpha to the Ômega of things and if we have to start by “giving the name to the oxes”, with the Alpha, it is good to know that we will finish with the Ômega, meaning “the great”, victory.
Pedro Henrique de Christo, climate urbanist, resilience SME, founder of the interdisciplinary +D Architecture & Urbanism studio, creator of the first 4D model for simulating urban climate scenarios, visiting professor of urban design at URBAM-Eafit Medellín, president of NAVE – Novo Acordo Verde, Director of Parque Sitiê and Master in Public Policy – MPP’11 at Harvard;