To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
September 22, 2020
Re: Why hasn't climate denialism gone away as the wildfires rage
on the West Coast?
by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers' Voice
Starting in mid-August, a record wave of wildfires swept through the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. More than 7,700 fires burned, scorching almost 3.7% of the land area of California. In Oregon, 500,000 people faced evacuation warnings of one type or other; some towns were destroyed; and for awhile the the suburbs of Portland were threatened. Over 626,000 acres were burnt in Washington state. Dozens of fires are still burning on the West Coast.
These fires are among the largest the West Coast has seen, including the four largest California megafires since careful records began in 1932. The wildfire wave grew so fast that any statistics about them were outdated before one could read them. 3.7 million acres have been burnt in California, which is 80% more acreage than in the entire year of 2018, which itself had set a record for wildfires. The burnt area is almost 50% larger than the 2.6 million acres of Los Angeles County, which contains not only the city of Los Angeles but 87 other incorporated towns.
Dozens of substantial fires have been burning simultaneously. At their height, an area the size of 1,000 football fields burned every half-hour, and the sky darkened over the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and elsewhere, as smoke and ash covered large parts of the West Coast. The air became poisonous, and this was a major health crisis, especially for people with asthma or other bronchial problems. Lesser levels of smoke spread towards Eastern US, and some even reached Northern Europe.
These fires are part of a series of ongoing environmental disasters this year. And we can expect worse in the coming years, because proper measures to fight global warming aren't being taken, and it would take years before even proper measures would reverse environmental deterioration. And yet the fight over climate denialism is not fading away, but becoming more severe. This underlines the need to build a powerful environmental movement to prevent complete disaster, because the capitalists just don't care about what will happen tomorrow. As environmental disaster looms closer and closer, the differences about what to do aren't going away, but becoming more intense.
Thousands of wildfires take place each year on the West Coast due to
lightning and other factors. From year to year, the acreage burnt
varies wildly, but the general trend in the opening decades of this
century is up and up. Mistaken forestry and real estate practices
set the stage for these fires. But forestry policy has been wrong for
over a century, and it's now that the fires are dramatically
escalating. And it's now that the fire season is getting longer and
longer. The reason for this is mainly climate change. The five hottest
years on record for the world were during the last decade, and the ten
hottest years took place from 2009 to the present.
Indeed, this year's megafires were spurred on by a triple-digit heat wave. For example, the Los Angeles area saw temperatures breaking into the 110s, and in certain places it didn't go below 100 at night. It's defies imagination, but the press reports that one weather station in Los Angeles reached an incredible 121 degrees Fahrenheit for awhile on September 6; this is within 10 degrees of the highest officially-recorded temperatures anywhere on Earth in recent years. (1)
Yet no matter how hot the cities and forests get and how dark the
sky gets, there are some who will not concede the reality of climate
change.
The bourgeoisie is split on its attitude towards global warming. So
long as the government follows market fundamentalism, it can't really
solve the issue, but a section of capitalists doesn't even want to try,
and is closing its eyes to the looming disaster. Even as megafires, a
multitude of hurricanes, the death of sea life in patches of the ocean,
the dramatic drop in world insect life, and other disasters take place
one after another, Trump and his cohorts take a "what, me worry?"
attitude.
So the fires have to be blamed on phantoms and ghosts. Hence the mindless right-wing has declared that they are a result of arson by antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement. If many conservatives were "looking under their bed" for communists after World War II, and segregrationists blamed the civil rights movement on outside agitators, now radical arsonists are supposed to be everywhere. This encouraged the formation during these fires of a number of armed groups to search for these illusive arsonists, and some armed roadblocks were set up.
Yet of the thousands of West Coast wildfires over the years, only a handful have been due to arson, and so far, not for political purposes. Urban arson is generally done for insurance fraud, and sometimes for revenge, although there are also apparently a few people who set fires in the countryside for gratification. The vigilante arson hunt and roadblocks having interfered with fire-fighting, the police and authorities have repeatedly refuted the arson scare, and have also noted that the few arsonists being investigated were not tied to political groups.
Arson, however, is only one category of human-caused fires, albeit the only category that the Trumpists want to talk about. In fact, there are many more fires from individual negligence or bad practices, such as the notorious fire in San Bernardino County, CA caused by setting off fireworks during a gender-reveal party early this month. In Oregon, the burning of outdoor debris is legal and a major source of fires that go out of control. But there are also fires, and lots of them, caused by utilities not doing maintenance on power lines. It seems that about 250 fires a year in California have been caused by one company alone, Pacific Gas and Electric, including the deadly 2018 fire somewhat misleadingly known as the "Camp Fire" (its origin was not a campfire but a faulty electric transmission line near Camp Creek Road), which was the deadliest US fire since 1918, killing over 85 people. (2)
And there are many fires caused by lightning. Moreover, the main reason human-caused fires spread rapidly is environmental conditions. But for the conservatives and Trumpists, the arson hysteria allows them to ignore global warming and even the many fires caused by corporations. Indeed, they are horrified at regulations that call on the corporations to take more care, and regard rules for the recreational use of forests as infringements on their freedom.
Trump ignored the West Coast fires for some time, and then sought to
obscure the growing danger of global warming by pointing to bad
forestry by liberal governors as the supposed cause. Just as he
presented drinking hydroxychloroquine and bleach as simple cures for
COVID-19, he now accuses liberals of not raking the forests, thus
leaving excess debris to burn. Presumably the fires are all the fault
of those outsider, suburban activists who are too busy protesting
racism to take time to have their children do the chores and rake their
yards.
In fact, wrong forestry practices are a problem, but Trump's concern
is a fraud. His interest is letting the timber companies devastate the
forests as they like. And he blames the governors for wrong forest
management, forgetting about the vast tracts of federal forests in the
Western states; indeed, over half of California's forests are under
federal, not state, management.
Moreover, the need for change in forestry methods shows the need to take science seriously, which goes against everything Trump stands for.
What is the problem with current forestry? Well, for one thing, the
timber companies would be happy to log all the old-growth forests
and turn large tracts of land into monoculture forests, with only one
type of quick-growing tree. But there is also an issue of how to
maintain forests even when they are saved from the timber companies.
What should be done about fire? It is thought that prior to 1800, even
more acreage burned in California every year than are burning this
year. But those fires were low-intensity fires that had a very
different effect on the forests than the current firestorm-style fires.
Those fires were nowhere near as destructive as the present ones, and
were part of a natural cycle; currently there are megafires and many
so-called "crown" or canopy fires, in which the flames don't simply
burn up the undergrowth but leap rapidly into the forest canopy and
spread rapidly.
The federal government began a program of preventing all forest
fires over a century ago, and it gradually became more and more
effective. It is now believed that this was a mistake, because it
creates the conditions for fires, when they eventually do break out,
becoming megafires. It lets combustible undergrowth accumulate, and it
changes forests in various ways. It leaves the forests more vulnerable
to periodic droughts, that naturally occur in the West. And then the
forests are especially vulnerable to the higher temperature of global
warming. So there has for years been a lot of discussion of setting
controlled fires to imitate the previous natural fire cycle.
Of course, just because a fire is supposed to be controlled, doesn't mean it won't break out and go wild. And wild or controlled, it creates smoke and ash. So improving forestry isn't a simple matter, because the conditions have changed in the last 200 years, and one has to take care and not just blindly imitate the past. The higher temperatures not only make it harder to have controlled fires, but are a danger in themselves to the forests. There is also the runaway penetration of real estate interests into the countryside, which complicates forest management--can't have a controlled fire where there's a house or business on the land. And there is the general water problem in the Southwest, with agriculture and cities competing for limited water resources. Indeed, thanks to global warming, even when there is sufficient rainfall overall, it no longer restores the snowpack on the mountains as before -- so that water floods rather than being released from melting snow gradually throughout the warmer months of the year.
This means that improving forestry involves careful scientific work and overall attention to the West Coast environment. Controlled fires should only be one part of a general plan. And they certainly aren't a substitute for dealing with global warming, because global warming is a gigantic factor making everything worse. Moreover, an overall environmental plan for the West Coast involves water planning and thus extensive regulation of industry, agriculture, and real estate. Trump, however, is implementing deregulation as fast as possible.
The West Coast fires, along with the multitude of storms this year, the continuing revelations of the massive die-off of insects and animals, and other catastrophes show the need to take global warming, and other sources of environmental devastation, seriously. The world's governments react to some climate crises with emergency aid, but they are unwilling to tackle seriously the source of the crises. The world's governments are diddling, not even living up to the Paris Agreement of 2016, which itself was insufficient, and more a declaration of failure than anything else. The climate strikes of 2019 involved millions of people, but it hasn't yet budged the world's governments.
Still, one might think that as the environmental crisis deepens, there would be more agreement about it, and the debate over climate denialism would die down. Governor Newsom of California complained that "the debate is over about climate change. Just come to the state of California. ... What we’re experiencing right here is coming to a community all across the U.S. unless we get our act together on climate change.” (3) But instead of bipartisan unity against the growing danger, we see an intensifying struggle over climate denialism. The fight grows sharper and sharper with each disaster.
But capitalist class interests interfere with a scientific attitude towards what's going on in the world. The American bourgeoisie is divided over climate denialism, arguing over whether global warming is an issue. But both bourgeois factions fail with respect to the environment, because to do anything really serious about the environment would mean undertaking economic planning along with real provisions for mass livelihood, not just assurances that green jobs will trickle down to people, and neither the Trumpists or the mainstream Democrats such as Newsom or Biden are willing to do this. They don't accept planning, and they don't accept mass intervention in that planning. They are both still market fundamentalists, both still connected to big business and the stock market. The Trumpists get more and more fanciful with their denials of the ongoing disasters, while the bourgeois environmentalists persist in believing that the market will eliminate fossil fuels, or that the corporate polluters are on the way to turning green. So we need something different; we need to supplement the past climate strikes with new ones, that not only reiterate Thunberg's righteous denunciation of governmental inaction, but demand the imposition of real planning, and with mass involvement and oversight.
The Green Party has many sincere advocates of change and says it has an eco-socialist version of the Green New Deal that is different from the Democratic one. But it seems more a small electoral party, basing itself on promises as bourgeois parties do, rather than being a party of mass action and organization. It is organizationally separate from the Democrats, but it doesn't separate ideologically from the establishment environmentalist trend. Indeed, it still holds to such ineffective market measures as the carbon tax, and has consistently refrained from discussing why, if the carbon tax is supposedly a socialist measure, it is supported by the neoliberal IMF and World Bank. The Green Party campaigns by promising everything under the sun, both to establish its idea of socialism and to implement measures that only apply under private capitalism. That's a problem. For example, you can't finance the government through things like stock transfer taxes and corporate taxes, if all the large businesses are already in state hands, and yet the Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins promises both things at once. Indeed, the program envisions equalizing wealth through gradually building up "a government-owned portfolio of stocks, bonds, and real estate" (4).
The fires, and the bourgeois reaction to them, show the need for the
environmental movement to step forward more strongly and base itself on
the masses. There is an ever-sharpening battle with climate denialism.
But there is also the problem that the establishment environmentalists
won't make the economic changes needed to protect the environment.
There needs to be a working class section of the environmental movement
that both fights climate denialism with mass actions and stands for the
overall economic changes needed to protect the environment.
[1] For the last few years,
the record is held by the well-named Furnace Creek weather station in
Death Valley, California: 128 degrees on July 12 and 130 degrees on 16
August. Death Valley is of course the hottest place in California, and
it is frightening when Los Angeles comes within range of its heat. When
I first saw these figures I thought that this surely can't be true;
record world temperatures must have occurred in the Sahara desert or
some other place outside California. So I started to looked up
temperatures elsewhere. Well, according to Wikipedia, the 110s would be
incredibly hot even for the Sahara, although the Sahara reaches burning
temperatures regularly, and not as an exception like Los Angeles, and
maintains these temperatures for long periods, and over a vast area. So
128 might well be beyond what the Sahara reached in the last few years.
[2] Morgan McFall-Johnsen, Nov. 3, 2019 "Over 1,500 California fires in the past 6 years — including the deadliest ever — were caused by one company: PG&E", and Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_(2018).
[3] Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, "Exasperated California Gov. Rips Climate Deniers As West Coast Burns: 'This is a climate damn emergency,' Gov. Gavin Newsom said as massive, deadly wildfires blazed across the state".
[4] Green Party: Howie Hawkins & Jia Lee for Governor and Lt. Gov, "Issues: Economic
Democracy and Ecological Socialism". <>
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