Yes, We Need To Call Out The Climate Criminals Right Now

The California wildfires are not a mere act of God. These apocalyptic scenes will increase as the climate crisis worsens unless we end the culture of denial.

Southern California is in the midst of “one of the most significant fire outbreaks in history,” with over 1,000 buildings burned, 400,000 people without power, multiple people already confirmed dead, schools canceled, Hollywood productions suspended, and whole communities under threat. Firefighters, some of whom are likely prisoners, are struggling with water shortages and families are seeing all of their possessions going up in smoke.

While wildfires in California are a regular occurrence, we know that climate change is making them much worse by creating the unseasonably dry conditions under which wildfires grow out of control. Southern California has had almost no rainfall since July, and as CalMatters writes

As climate change warms the planet, wildfires have become so unpredictable and extreme that new words were invented: firenado, gigafire, fire siege — even fire pandemic. California has 78 more annual “fire days” — when conditions are ripe for fires to spark — than 50 years ago. When is California’s wildfire season? It is now almost year-round. Nothing is as it was. Where are the worst California wildfires? All over. …Welcome to the “Pyrocene,” coined by fire scientist Stephen J.Pyne. The age of fire.

Some facts about the climate crisis are obvious: first, it occurs because of the burning of fossil fuels. Second, it could have been averted. And third, we are only seeing the start of its cascading devastating consequences as we are currently heading for a future in which, as climate scientist Peter Kalmus told me, “huge amounts of the Earth will become uninhabitable.” 

It’s obvious that this situation should be treated as an international emergency requiring a massive globally coordinated response. But that is not what we have seen. Instead, it’s as if a planet-destroying comet was barrelling toward the Earth and our politicians and media responded by telling us not to look at the comet. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, recently ran a shocking op-ed by Joseph Sternberg that actually celebrated the failure of politicians to deal with the climate crisis, delighting in the fact that climate change is decreasing in prominence as a political issue, even as the effects of climate change increase in their destructiveness. Sternberg looks forward to “a dramatic uptick in U.S. fossil-fuel production” and says that substantially reducing carbon emissions is simply too harmful to economic prosperity to be undertaken. The days of worrying about climate change, he suggests, are over, although “an extensive and noisy activist and media class has built up around climate issues and won’t go gently into that good political night.” Nowhere does Sternberg mention, or even show an awareness of, the consequences of the climate crisis for human beings, such as the heat waves and droughts and wildfires that are going to ravage the land and kill a great many people. The incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump, is just as staunch in denying there is any kind of problem at all. He blames the California wildfires on environmentalists, saying that California Governor Gavin Newsom chose to protect an endangered fish rather than increase the amount of water the state had on hand. This appears to be false, but it’s also irrelevant to the question of why we’re seeing so much more of the dry conditions that make fires more likely. 

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The Republican Party is fully committed to climate denial. But even liberals want to put their fingers in their ears. Kamala Harris, of course, failed to make an issue of the climate crisis and actually ran on a pro-fossil fuel agenda. During the California fires, Jon Favreau of Pod Save America has been irritated, while scrolling through X (Twitter), that so many people seemed to be getting “political” in response to the fires, suggesting that we simply needed to deal with the fires without getting angry about their causes. Media stories about the wildfires often don’t mention the role of climate change at all, and if they do, they do not mention that climate change is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. In other words, they don’t mention the basic facts I outline above: that this is a human-caused problem, not a mere act of God. 

In response to these calamities, we need clarity. We need to help people understand what is happening to them and why. They’re going to be victimized by many more extreme weather events in the years to come, and there are no signs so far that as the effects worsen, we’re going to see our political leaders show any leadership. We have to show people how the interests of the fossil fuel industry have been put above the interests of the population at large, so that they understand the crisis is something being done to them by the powerful, not just something happening to them because life’s rough and God is capricious. Right now we’re in the worst possible situation, because the “drill baby drill” gang is taking over the federal government. That means we need many more climate activists, right now, who can conduct public education and organize people to resist having their future set on fire by a generation of politicians and corporate leaders who could not care less if their actions cause the world to burn. 

We are facing a very challenging situation, because as the metaphorical comet hurtles toward the Earth, our media are doing an absolutely horrible job explaining root causes and giving an accurate understanding of what is unfolding. But the attitude we must not have is the one that Jon Favreau has, of seeing discussions about responsibility as an offensively “political” distraction from the immediate work of helping the victims of the fire. There are going to be more fires, and they are going to get worse, and we should be furious. We need to be clear-eyed about the situation, because right now it looks like the most likely future is one of escalating natural disasters accompanied by silence or denial by all of those in a position to actually take action. 

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