The Road to Climate Catastrophe Runs Through a City Called Commerce

All around Los Angeles this month, little orange-and-black butterflies were flying stubbornly north, a vast migration of Vanessa cardui, aka painted ladies, their numbers swelled by the exceptional lushness of the spring. Last season’s fires were nearly matched in exuberance by this winter’s rains. That’s how it’s going to be from now on, the climate scientists say—long spells of extreme drought punctuated by years of unusually heavy rainfall. For now, the mountains above the city are white with snow and every unpaved patch of earth gleams an almost-electric green.

Trucks spew pollution into communities like Commerce,
California, as they make their way along the Long Beach Freeway.

The butterflies seem to favor the open channels of the freeways. Thousands flitted between the semis clogging the Long Beach Freeway in the well-named southeast LA city of Commerce. I saw a few on Atlantic Avenue too, just outside the small storefront office of the grassroots-activist group East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, which seemed like a good place to go for a more intimate perspective on the fossil-fuel economy than most mainstream environmentalist groups could hope to offer.

Read the story from The Nation by Ben Ehrenreich - “The Road to Climate Catastrophe Runs Through a City Called Commerce.”