The images have been stunning. For days now fires have been ravaging the West coast of the country to devastating effect. At least three million acres of land have been lost in California alone so far, a new record for a single year. Oregon and Washington have suffered seriously also, with Portland facing unprecedented damage. And even places not directly harmed by the fires have suffered seriously unclean air quality conditions, all in the middle of an airborne pandemic. The most frightening aspect of this may be that this kind of natural disaster may become the new normal, or, as Philip B. Duffy, a climate scientist and the president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, put it,"People are always asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’ I always say no. It’s going to get worse.”
It's a stunning thought that California, the most populous state in the country, the home of Silicon Valley, and other huge economic drivers, is becoming unlivable. But that may be where we are. For the past four years, the fire conditions have become more and more damaging. Part of the reason for this is that an increased population has led to more homes being built closer and closer to the edge of forests. But nothing contributed more to these fires than the onset of climate change. The evidence is now impossible to refute, although we know many will try to find a way.
The really frustrating thing is that all of this was predicted decades ago when climate change first starting becoming an issue. And it wasn't exactly a difficult concept to grasp: a warmer climate would lead to drier forests with trees more likely to catch fire and burn longer. And yet these warnings were mostly ignored.
How did we get here? Well, part of it is that human beings are just better at dealing with a perceived direct threat than a perceived long term one. Just look at how many people in the world continue to smoke even though the long term health effects of smoking have been known for decades. Put simply, a lot of people are willing to shrug off something bad that may happen years down the line.
But of course, politics plays a huge role. Although Richard Nixon may have founded the Environmental Protection Agency, the Republican party became the party that opposed almost any environmental protections when they stood behind Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty even as he said that trees cause pollution. And things have only gotten worse since then, with George W Bush's administration scrubbing any mentions of climate change out of their own environmental impact reports, to our current president, who once tweeted out "The concept of Global Warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non competitive"(!).
Another crippling factor was when in two thousand and ten, the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case and equated money spent on political campaigns as an expression of free speech. That opened the floodgates for corporate money to influence politics. And no company has had a bigger influence on this issue than the Koch industries, an oil company that has dumped billions of dollars into denying climate change and opposing solar power. As NPR reported, in twenty sixteen alone they spent eight hundred and eighty nine million dollars in aiding the Republican party. And their hold on that party is such that now no prominent Republican elected official can admit that climate change is real. How radical is this Republican denial? In twenty fifteen Sondre Båtstrand at the University of Bergen in Norway did a comparative study of conservative political parties all around the world, and found that America's Republican party is the only major political party in the entire world that denies climate change outright. In any other part of the world, their beliefs would be seen as fringe. Here in the US they are, sadly, part of the mainstream.
So what can we do? Well, obviously American needs to vote Republicans out until they are willing to accept the scientific proof that is literally burning in front of them. But in the short term there appears to be no easy solution, and the terrible environmental devastation that is happening now may be just the beginning.
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