Global warming causes intense wildfires and widespread Code Purple health alerts for smoke-based air pollution. The warming of the planet is the result of two centuries of capitalist production. It is caused by a rapid increase in greenhouse gasses (GHGs) in the atmosphere. These gases (mainly carbon dioxide and methane) have increased steadily since the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. Global capitalist development has been fueled by burning coal, oil, and natural gas to power production, consumption, and transportation. GHGs allow the sun’s radiation to reach the earth, but trap the heat in the atmosphere that radiates from the ground, creating a hotter planet and disrupting previous weather patterns. It is similar to how cars get hot in the summer when the windows are rolled up.
Wildfires flourish under capitalism
Forest fires have historically been a natural process and often helpful to ecologies. Lightning strikes in forested areas often start beneficial fires. Today, however, global warming has created droughts in many places in the world, leading to some forests becoming tinder boxes rather than resilient stands of trees and brush. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” That now applies forcefully to much of the planet. Now even historically wet areas, such as the Amazon rainforests, permafrost areas, and marshy peat bogs have experienced huge fires. More are expected even in the Arctic by the end of the century. MacArthur Fellow Stephen Pyne has labeled the new era of massive fires the “Pyrocene” in his 2022 book, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next.
The United Nations Environment Program projected the risk of these extreme wildfires would rise 14 percent by 2030 and 30 percent by 2050. By the end of the century, that risk would increase by 50 percent.
Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2020 is a harbinger of things to come. Extreme fires raged for many months, fueled by record-shattering temperatures, severe drought and fierce winds. The fires directly killed 33 and another 500 deaths were caused by inhaling smoke. That same year, the world’s largest tropical wetland, the Pantanal in South America (located in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia) burned following severe drought and scorching weather. Nearly a third of this forest was destroyed. The wildfires in wetlands were intensified by capitalists, hungry for profit, plundering rainforests and wetlands through logging, road construction, agriculture and mining activity. Such extractive activities led to the loss of tree canopy, leading in turn to accelerated vegetative undergrowth that was then exposed to the extreme drying of global warming, and hence even more massive wildfires.
Burning forests emit vast amounts of carbon dioxide previously locked in their trunks and branches, creating a vicious feedback loop intensifying global warming. For example, about 55 million tons of carbon dioxide was emitted from Canadian wildfires in May 2023, approximately equal to 10 percent of the country’s total carbon emissions for an average year.
Workers suffer, bosses profit
The direct health impacts on the working class are severe. In the United States alone, between 2006 and 2010, fewer than 500,000 people every year were exposed to a single day of extreme levels of fine-particle pollution, also known as PM2.5. Between 2016 and 2020, that number rose to over 8 million. Such small particulates lodge in the lungs much like the deadly Black Lung disease faced by coal miners, leading to difficulties breathing, lung disease, and early death. These increasingly unnatural emissions also tie in to environmental racism. Asthma ER visits in New York City during the recent Canadian wildfire smoke were the highest in low-income, majority Black and Latin neighborhoods (Gothamist, 6/12).
The multitude of problems caused by global warming including intense wildfires will deepen over time as the world’s capitalists refuse to significantly reduce reliance on coal, gas, and oil to augment their fortunes. They pretend that solar panels and wind turbines can replace fossil fuels in the world economy while knowing full well that substantial fossil fuels are required even with these limited alternative fuel sources. Why such inhumane treatment of the global working class? Why burn us up and make us sick and die from deadly smoke? Because they have sunk trillions of dollars into infrastructure to extract fossil fuels, and they refuse to ever take a hit to their profits!
The whole damn capitalist system has to go!
That’s why nothing short of the destruction of the capitalist system can seriously address the environmental disaster that is more evident by the day. Between war, racism, repression, and devastating climate change, the need for building a revolutionary party is ever more urgent.