Are you supposed to wish people a happy Earth Day? I'm not sure. But to celebrate, I'm going to be talking about a big climate problem on behalf of our food waste fighting sponsor Mill. It's an issue that I care a lot about, so please do stick around for the ads.

Lemonada.

In the Wiser Than Me episode, you're about to hear, I mentioned my house, a beautiful, perfect old Spanish revival home that was built in the 1920s, where we raised our two boys and lived

happily ever after for 31 years. A few weeks later, that very house and everything in it,

all burned down in the Palisades fire in Los Angeles. We lost everything. All of our family photos and

treasures, every memento from my career. I mean, just everything. It's an unspeakable personal

tragedy, but truthfully, in the end, we do count ourselves lucky. Our family is safe, thank God. We have a place to stay. We have some insurance. We have the resources to weather this storm, and God knows not everybody does have that. This wildfire happened about two weeks before inauguration day, and since that day, it has been a

metaphorical wildfire. We have been overwhelmed with a chaotic frontal attack on everything,

from science to the economy, to immigrants, to democracy itself. It is just completely nuts.

It's so nuts that we're barely even talking about maybe

the biggest danger lurking in the shadows, actually hardly the shadows, the climate disaster.

It may feel existential right now, but, you know, truthfully, the climate crisis is not something

that is on the way. It's actually something that is very much here right now.

There's a metric that scientists use to determine the role of the climate emergency and fire risk.

This metric considered a set of factors like temperature, humidity, wind speed, and precipitation to estimate that the fire that burned down the Pacific

Palisades and Altadena in Los Angeles was 35% more likely thanks to climate change.

So, yeah, the climate crisis helped burn down my house, and I take that very personally. I know it's hard, of course,

but now is not the moment to turn our attention away from championing the environment.

Here's an example from right here in Santa Barbara, where I am right now. A decade ago, a decrepit pipeline in the Santa

Barbara Channel exploded and spilled more than 400,000 gallons of oil into the Pacific Ocean,

closing fisheries, upending lives, killing sea life, and threatening a vital ocean ecosystem that is already under immense stress.

It was one of the biggest oil spills in California history.

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