Looking back on this crazy year, one event, right at the start, seems to me to encapsulate the whole. In January, recording his podcast in a studio in Austin, Texas, the host, Joe Rogan, and the actor Mel Gibson merrily dissed climate science. At the same time, about 1,200 miles away in California, Gibson’s $14m home was being incinerated in the Palisades wildfire. In this and other respects, their discussion could be seen as prefiguring the entire 12 months.
The loss of his house hadn’t been confirmed at the time of the interview, but Gibson said his son had just sent him “a video of my neighbourhood, and it’s in flames. It looks like an inferno.” According to World Weather Attribution, January’s fires in California were made significantly more likely by climate breakdown. Factors such as the extreme lack of rainfall and stronger winds made such fires both more likely to happen and more intense than they would have been without human-caused global heating.
There’s a widespread belief that people will wake up to climate breakdown when disasters affect them. It’s equivalent to the claim that “there were no atheists in the trenches” of the first world war (if you believe this, you haven’t read Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man: “Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen”). For some people, disaster seems to provoke a doubling down. If your entire worldview is challenged by events, it’s tempting to conclude the events are at fault.
Halfway through the interminable interview, Gibson, while disputing evolution, launched a typically detailed attack on the scientific method. “Yeah, well, there’s a lot of money in, you know, claims, and I don’t know.” Anyway, he mused: “What difference is it going to make to me?” Then he suddenly swerved to climate science, and started reciting one of the oldest denialist tropes.
“Ever have a glass full of ice and watch it melt? Did you ever see the glass flow over?” “No.” “Takes up less room, you know.” In reality, sea levels are rising not because sea ice is melting, but through the thermal expansion of seawater, and meltwater flowing off the land. But Rogan happily took up the theme. “Well, there’s a lot of horseshit that’s involved in climate change for sure … a narrative gets established and then there’s a profit attached to the solution.” He referred to a study he has since cited repeatedly, claiming it shows “the temperature on Earth is plummeting”. As the authors keep pointing out, it shows the opposite. But that seems to make no difference.
So what did they blame for the fires? Mostly Gavin Newsom, governor of California. Rogan remarked: “How crazy it is that they spent $24bn last year on the homeless, and what do they spend on preventing these wildfires?” “Zero.” “Zip.” “He didn’t do anything.” Needless to say, this is completely untrue: California tripled its wildfire resilience spending between 2016 and 2024. The true figure it spent on homelessness in 2024-25 was $2.5bn. But who gives a damn? Here we see another of the grand themes of 2025: everything is now a partisan issue, and no fact can stand in the way of polarisation.
This became even starker when they turned to one of Rogan’s favourite themes, the former US chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, who has been widely and unjustly blamed by the radical right for a remarkable range of ills, from Aids deaths to the Covid pandemic. Rogan suggested Fauci’s actions were “evil”. In response, Gibson said something to the tens of millions of listeners that, in Fauci’s position, I would find highly threatening: “Well, I don’t know why Fauci’s still walking around.” “How is that guy still walking around?” Rogan echoed.
This theme led to another of the year’s motifs: the whining self-pity of powerful men. Talking of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s wildly inaccurate book The Real Anthony Fauci, Rogan remarked: “They kept that book off bestseller lists … they hid it. That’s when you find out that bestseller lists are actually curated.” “Yeah,” Gibson replied, “it’s censored. It’s all censored. Everything’s censored.” In truth, depressingly enough, Kennedy’s rubbish book spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Alongside their dismissal of science-based medicine was the usual catalogue of quack cures. Gibson claimed that he had “holes” in his head, which he appeared to suggest were caused by PTSD. But he was given “a very miraculous and great remedy for it which was to eat a bunch of fish oil, vitamin B complex and get into a hyperbaric chamber for 40 sessions”. Rogan asserted that hyperbaric chambers are “phenomenal for … everything”, and can “decrease your biological age”. He gave no warning of the dangers, which can be very great. The two men promoted ivermectin, fenbendazole, “hydrochloride something or other” and methylene blue as cancer cures: premature and irresponsible claims that could cause great harm. But all very Maha.
Early in the interview, Rogan asked Gibson what he would do if his house had indeed burnt down. “Oh, I don’t know,” Gibson replied. “I got a place in Costa Rica. I love it there … it’s in a real nice spot.” For the very rich, it sometimes seems, even the consequences have no consequences.
It now appears that Gibson has decided to rebuild his house. While I feel bad for the loss of his belongings, his ability to start again contrasts with the position of many poorer California residents displaced by fire, some of whom might have swelled the ranks of the homeless. Gibson appeared to agree with Rogan that the state should not be spending so much on them.
For now, the very rich have options. They can rebuild or move somewhere they haven’t yet wrecked, while others languish in places that might come to look like the set of Mad Max, with which, of course, Gibson is not unfamiliar. Those who rack up vast impacts then walk away, and those who spread misinformation freeload on the rest of us. They are always leaving other people to live with the consequences.
There was, however, one thing Gibson said that hit home. It was while he was dismissing evolution, and claiming that everything was “ordered” by God: “I think anything left to itself without some kind of intelligence behind it will devolve into chaos.” It could be seen as a warning for our times.