You Smell the Smoke, But Not the Bullsh*t?

They’ll Blame the Wind, the Weeds, the Weekend…Anything But Climate Change.

Here’s how wild journalism has gotten in 2025:

What’s driving the explosive fires in the West?

The Washington Post just wrote a 1,300-word article about wildfires raging across nine states, in the middle of record heat, with more than a million acres burned so far—and somehow never said the words “climate change.”

Not once. Not even a cough. Not a single whisper of the actual crisis.

That’s like writing about a 10-car pileup and forgetting to mention the ice on the road. Or covering a robbery and forgetting to mention the suspect.

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The Fire Is Real. The Journalism Is... Smoldering.

The article tries to pull you in with a line straight out of a disaster movie trailer, banking on your adrenaline before you’ve even settled into the seat:

"Wildfires are growing explosively in the western U.S. amid hot, dry and windy conditions..."

Sounds cinematic, right? You can practically hear the ominous strings in the background. And for the first few seconds, it works and you’re gripped. But just when you’re expecting the next line to tell you why the West is suddenly living inside a Michael Bay film, the ride takes a hard, stomach-dropping turn: nothing. No mention of the decades of steadily rising global temperatures, no nod to the fossil fuels pumping heat into the system, no connection to the climate emergency scientists have been screaming about for a generation.

That’s not just an oversight. That’s strategic silence of the kind that keeps your pulse up while carefully steering your attention away from the real culprit. It’s like a roller coaster that launches you into a pitch-black tunnel; you feel the speed, you feel the drop, but you can’t see what’s right in front of you.

It’s reporting like a meteorologist refusing to say the word “rain” while you’re standing in a downpour. Or like a doctor rattling off every symptom you’ve got while tiptoeing around the name of the disease. The effect is dizzying…you’re hooked by the drama, then left spinning, wondering why the most important part of the story never came.

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They Named the Winds, the Drought, the Slope—Just Not the Cause

The piece lists every variable they could get their hands on:

• Snow drought that left mountains bare

• Early snowmelt rushing off before replenishing reservoirs

• Dry chaparral turning into kindling

• High-elevation lightning striking like matches from the sky

• 50 mph gusts carrying embers for miles

• Monsoon delays leaving soils and streams gasping

• “Critically dry vegetation” just waiting to ignite

They almost blamed the slope angle before even considering blaming the climate crisis that ties all these conditions together. It’s as if they’ve created a laundry list of symptoms without ever telling the reader the name of the disease.

They quote analysts who carefully chart the spread, meteorologists who measure every gust, and a state climatologist talking “long-term dryness” but somehow still no C-word. That omission is not accidental; it’s a choice. Every term is presented in isolation, as though each one is some quirky natural fluke instead of a piece of a well-documented pattern driven by human activity.

They talk about heat like it’s a ghost that’s here one day, gone the next, with no source to haunt it back to. Drought is described like it just wandered in off the porch without decades of data showing its increasing grip. The planet is screaming, science is standing on the rooftop with a bullhorn, and The Post is whispering into a wind tunnel, hoping the reader doesn’t ask the one question that ties it all together: why is this happening so often, so fiercely, and to so much of the West at once?

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This Isn’t Journalism. It’s Climate Theater.

This is weather reporting with the politics airbrushed out in a genre of journalism that spends paragraphs measuring the flames while studiously ignoring the match. It’s crafted to look responsible, to feel “balanced,” while in truth saying absolutely nothing about who lit this crisis or who’s still throwing fuel on it. It’s the performance of information without the delivery of accountability.

Why? Because you can’t risk ticking off the advertisers who sell SUVs between paragraphs. You can’t unsettle syndication partners who want a clean, controversy-free feed. And heaven forbid you alienate readers who still treat climate change like a passing mood instead of a structural emergency. Better to keep it in the realm of “interesting weather events” than to drop it into the category of “man-made planetary disaster with culprits and costs.”

When the house is on fire, and the paper spends its time lovingly describing the drapes, the angle of the smoke, and the height of the flames but won’t say what lit the match ya’ll that’s complicity of the highest order.

You can list all the smoke columns, wind speeds, and vegetation types you want. You can quote meteorologists until the page breaks. But if you won’t name the arsonist—if you won’t point to the industry, the policy, the decades of profit-driven denial—you are not just avoiding the truth. You are joining the cover-up, putting a polite gloss over an act of violence against the future.

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Journalism That Protects Everyone But the Future

What does this style of reporting really shield? Let’s be blunt:

• Fossil fuel companies who’ve known for decades what their product would do to the planet

• Policy inaction at every level, from Congress down to county zoning boards

• Politicians cashing oil checks while publicly shrugging at “extreme weather”

• Readers who want the optics of information without the weight of accountability

The moment you say climate change out loud, you’re forced to follow the thread back to uncomfortable truths:

• Federal deregulation that gutted environmental protections

• State-level stalling designed to keep donor money flowing

• Corporate lobbying that bought silence and delay

• Media cowardice that chose advertiser comfort over public clarity

Instead, the audience is spoon-fed safe, inert phrases:

“Surprising fire behavior”
“Unusual aggressiveness”
“A lack of monsoon rain”

Those sound like curiosities in a nature documentary, not red flags in a planetary emergency. It’s not “surprising” if scientists have been issuing reports since 1990. It’s not “unusual” if this same pattern happens every single year. The only truly unusual element is the level of verbal gymnastics and linguistic sidestepping required to avoid naming the obvious culprit—and the beneficiaries who profit from that avoidance. This is protection not for truth, but for the systems that set the fire in the first place.

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Say the Goddamn Words

Call it climate change. Call it a fossil-fueled inferno. Call it the outcome of 40 years of greed, deregulation, and calculated political inaction that let oil lobbyists write the script. Call it the climate crisis your kids will inherit because every time the media dodges those two words, it buys another news cycle for the people profiting off the disaster.

But don’t call it “weather.” Don’t say “surprising.” Don’t hide behind adjectives when the noun is clear. Don’t file 1,300 words about a catastrophe and pretend it just “happened” like some unlucky accident. This is human-made, engineered by decades of burning, drilling, and lying about the consequences.

If you smell smoke but won’t name the fire, you’re not reporting…you’re stalling, you’re laundering reality for the comfortable, you’re doing PR for the status quo. You’re making sure the reader never has to connect the dots between the flames on their TV and the gas pump in their driveway.

Count the words:
38 fires. 9 states. 1 planet. Generations of warnings.

Zero mentions of climate change. And that silence? That’s the loudest thing in the piece. It’s louder than the crackle of the burning forest, louder than the sirens, louder than the evacuation orders. It’s the quiet that lets the cycle keep spinning, and the next fire keep burning.

If you’ve read this far, it’s because you know how dangerous this silence is and you also know why we can’t rely on billionaire-owned outlets to fill it. Independent voices are the only ones naming names without flinching, but keeping this work alive takes resources. If you believe this kind of no-BS reporting should exist and reach more people, upgrade to a paid subscription today.

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