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The news on green technology is surprisingly good. Both development and installation of renewable energy and industry are leaping ahead at rates I would not have thought remotely possible even five years ago. It’s the fastest energy transition in history—and ironically the pace has only accelerated of late thanks to Donald Trump’s madcap war on Iran, which is acting as a de facto carbon tax across the entire planet. Call it Trump’s Green New Deal.
Alas, the progress is coming far too late to head off severe climate disasters. After Canada and the American eastern seaboard were blanketed by another suffocating plume of wildfire smoke in recent weeks, much of Europe is now suffering the same fate. Great swathes of France and Spain are ablaze, with little relief on the horizon. And now weather forecasters are warning that it looks like the most powerful El Niño in recorded history is coming soon.
Climate change is not going to wait for America or any other country to sort out its political dysfunctions. We can confront climate reality or be run over by it.
Wildfires are probably the most obvious consequence of a warming planet, outside of the thermometer itself. It is a basic fact of chemistry that fires burn more readily in high temperatures—one leg of the classic fire triangle. Science has further demonstrated that not only is a hotter planet more prone to severe drought, but also periods of severe precipitation. A deadly pattern is taking shape in places like France, Australia, and California, where heavy rains drive explosive growth of undergrowth and shrubbery, which is then killed and toasted by the ensuing drought, creating a regional tinderbox just waiting for a spark.
Yet it turns out that wildfire smoke might be even worse than the fires themselves. Practically every piece of research on air pollution done in the last 20 years has shown it to be worse than previously thought. A recent study found that the PM 2.5 (particulates under 2.5 microns) in wildfire smoke killed around 24,100 Americans per year between 2006 and 2020—and that does not include 2023, which saw the worst wildfire exposure event in American history, and now another comparable one just three years later.
As Robinson Meyer points out at Heatmap News, until the last few years it basically didn’t occur to anyone to model what might happen if the hundreds of millions of people living in the great North American metro complexes got regularly inundated with choking wildfire smoke, because it wasn’t thought possible. Now the science has been done, and the estimated economic damages are literally larger than every previous estimated cost of climate change put together.
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