#airpocalypse

A very recent example of the interaction of the three aspects of sustainability- environmental, social and economic factors. 

"It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible." -GOODREADS

"...a quote of Bill McKibben, who says, “Today is our chance to understand what it really feels like every day on a fossil-fueled planet, for the billions of people unlucky enough to really bear the brunt.” He said, “My eyes are stinging a bit from the smoke, but I’ve never seen more clearly.”

“Airpocalypse”: David Wallace-Wells on Red Skies, Raging Wildfires & Pollution Link to Climate Crisis June 08, 2023

David Wallace-Wells echoes this sentiment. He is a New York Times opinion writer. His latest columns headlined “There’s No Escape From Wildfire Smoke” and “As Smoke Darkens the Sky, the Future Becomes Clear.” David is author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.

"But who knows really what the course of these fires and this smoke will be, given that so much of Canada is today burning genuinely out of control?

When you look at the map of the fires of the country, it’s awash in red marks of out-of-control fires. And to this point, the country has experienced something like 14 times as much land burning as they have experienced on average over the last decade. And that’s a remarkable, unbelievable, unprecedented amount of burning, especially when you consider that the baseline comparison of the last decade was itself enormously elevated, because we are living in a degraded climate with more and more fires. And so, when we say Canada has burned 14 times more land than over the last decade, that decade would have been an unthinkable amount of burning a decade or two before that. So we’re heading into a future defined by many more of these fires and much more of this smoke."

Links

"As Smoke Darkens the Sky, the Future Becomes Clear"

"There's No Escape From Wildfire Smoke"

"The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming"

"Our Voice of Fire: A Memoir of a Warrior Rising"

Record-breaking Canadian wildfires continue to fill skies across much of North America with smoke, putting about 100 million people under air quality alerts. New York City recorded the worst air quality of any major city in the world as a result of the haze. Around the world, air pollution is already responsible for as many as 10 million deaths per year, and the problem is likely to get worse, says New York Times opinion writer David Wallace-Wells. He explains how today’s smoky skies are a glimpse of our future in the climate crisis, when warmer temperatures and dry conditions will continue to increase the size and severity of wildfires across the globe. “It’s not just that we’re getting more fires, and it’s not even that they’re getting larger. They’re also getting much more intense, which means that they are cooking much of the landscape,” says Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. We also hear from Cree/Iroquois/French journalist Brandi Morin, who just returned from reporting on the wildfires raging in the remote Indigenous community of Fort Chipewyan in Canada’s North, which she calls the “epicenter of the effects of climate change because it’s downstream from one of the largest oil production developments in the world, Alberta’s oil sands.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Democracy Now! co-host Nermeen Shaikh. Hi, Nermeen.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Hi, Amy, and welcome to our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to see you here in the studio. If we were outside, here in New York, it would be a bit more difficult.

Over 90 million people across large swaths of the United States and Canada woke up to hazy skies and air quality alerts for a third straight day today as thick smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to blanket areas as far west as Kansas, as far south as the Carolinas. Here in New York City, the sky turned orange Wednesday as the city’s air became the most polluted in the world. New York Governor Kathy Hochul called the situation “an emergency crisis.”

GOV. KATHY HOCHUL: It has an immediate impact on people’s health: irritation to the eyes, the nose, breathing, coughing, so — and even shortness of breath. So, our message right now is going to be reiterated multiple times, because it is simply stay indoors.

AMY GOODMAN: As people were urged to stay inside, delivery workers took to social media to share pictures of themselves still working in the extreme conditions. A number of schools have closed due to the smoke, along with public parks. Hospital emergency rooms reported an increase in patients with respiratory issues. Flights were grounded at airports in the Northeast. Health experts are advising people who need to be outdoors to wear an N95 mask if possible, to block out the dangerous fine particulate matter from the smoke. Forecasters expect the smoke to move south and west later today.

Climate scientists say this comes amidst a steep increase in wildfires during the 21st century due to hotter temperatures and drier conditions created by climate change.

Meanwhile, to the north, in Canada, many of the fires generating the smoke continue to burn out of control. This is Canadian Federal Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair speaking Wednesday.

BILL BLAIR: As of today, there are 2,293 wildfires that have occurred in Canada. Approximately 3.8 million hectares have been burned. And across the country, as of today, there are 414 wildfires burning, 239 of which are determined to be out of control. Also as of today, an estimated 20,183 people remain evacuated from their homes and communities.

AMY GOODMAN: Also on Wednesday, Democracy Now! spoke to Brandi Morin, a Cree/Iroquois/French journalist based in Alberta, Canada, after she returned from reporting on the wildfires raging in the remote Indigenous community of Fort Chipewyan.

BRANDI MORIN: I was in the northern part of Alberta in a remote Indigenous community of Fort Chipewyan that has been evacuated. It’s only accessible by boat or plane. And the fire is encroaching on their community. It’s about seven kilometers away. It’s nearly 25,000 hectares. It’s massive.

But what is significant about this community is that it is the epicenter of the effects of climate change because it’s downstream from one of the largest oil production developments in the world, Alberta’s oil sands. And so they’ve been dealing with, you know, pollution and the impacts to their lands and to their health for many years now. And they just got through these oil companies dumping toxic tailings into their river just a couple of months ago. Their leaders were testifying in Ottawa. It’s just — this community has experienced kind of trauma after trauma, and now they’re literally getting burned out. It’s insane. …

We are in an emergency here in Canada. We are experiencing unprecedented wildfires. The federal government is predicting that it’s only going to get more severe as we get further into the summer season. This is going to be our norm. We are starting to get into the thick of the effects of climate change, and it affects us all as a whole. The smoke from Alberta to Ontario to Quebec are the remnants of this crisis that nature is in, you know, to where whole communities, who are the least contributors — I mean, our Native communities are the least contributors to this, and we are the most impacted, to where they are fleeing their homes and their livelihoods.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Cree/Iroquois/French journalist Brandi Morin, who just returned from reporting on the wildfires raging in the remote Indigenous community of Fort Chipewyan in Canada.

For more, we return to New York, where the smoky skies around our office here in Manhattan were documented by our producer Messiah Rhodes. Yes, New York City, now the epicenter, the worst air quality in the world, reported yesterday.

I wanted to read first a quote of Bill McKibben, who says, “Today is our chance to understand what it really feels like every day on a fossil-fueled planet, for the billions of people unlucky enough to really bear the brunt.” He said, “My eyes are stinging a bit from the smoke, but I’ve never seen more clearly.”

David Wallace-Wells echoes this sentiment. He is a New York Times opinion writer. His latest columns headlined “There’s No Escape From Wildfire Smoke” and “As Smoke Darkens the Sky, the Future Becomes Clear.” David is author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, David. It’s great to have you with us. “As Smoke Darkens the Sky, the Future Becomes Clear.” Talk about what we’re experiencing here in New York and through many parts of the United States, how it connects to Canada and what’s happening there, and how all of this relates to the climate catastrophe.

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, in New York and all across the Eastern Seaboard, we are breathing in toxic air. Everyone who’s outside can see it, can feel it in their nose and their eyes, can taste it in their mouths. This is not just unhealthy air. It’s at levels that have been judged to be hazardous. And while it’s true that the U.S. — while New York is these days registering the unhealthiest air quality in the world, it’s not just that we are breathing the equivalent air that people in Delhi breathe every year, where in that city the average resident loses nine-plus years of life expectancy thanks to air pollution. The pollution in New York City yesterday was actually considerably worse than that.

We’re going to be — you know, that smog is going to diminish over the next few days. We’re going to return to something that feels probably unhealthy but somewhat like normal. People in Delhi and all across the developing world don’t have that luxury. While they don’t reach peaks like this, they also don’t get to troughs like we’re going to get to. But it means that everybody across one of the most densely populated places in the world is suffering to some degree from the consequence of wildfires, which are driven and powered by climate change.

And what’s really striking to me about this experience is, as a native New Yorker who’s lived his whole life in New York, you know, I used to look at the fires in California with horror, but also with a little bit of relief, to say that this was a climate disaster that was affecting people, ruining many lives, harming millions of people’s health, but it was distant, and it felt quarantinable to me. I knew enough people in California to know that they had moved on from being scared directly of fire to being scared of smoke, but I didn’t really reckon with, until this year, just how unquarantinable or how uncontainable that smoke threat is.

In America, 60% of the smoke impact of wildfires is felt outside the state in which those fires are burning. And even if we started to wrap our minds around that over the last couple of years, I think this smoke event, which is coming from another country, is another level of distance entirely, and it’s a reminder that this is not a crisis that is escapable. No matter where you live, no matter how modern the metropolis that you live in is, no matter how distant you may feel from the impacts of the degradation of the natural world, no matter where you are, you will face some of these impacts sometime soon. And in a case like today in New York, it will feel quite claustrophobically apocalyptic. It’s not going to be forever. We’re not going to be breathing this air six months from now, presumably. But who knows really what the course of these fires and this smoke will be, given that so much of Canada is today burning genuinely out of control?

When you look at the map of the fires of the country, it’s awash in red marks of out-of-control fires. And to this point, the country has experienced something like 14 times as much land burning as they have experienced on average over the last decade. And that’s a remarkable, unbelievable, unprecedented amount of burning, especially when you consider that the baseline comparison of the last decade was itself enormously elevated, because we are living in a degraded climate with more and more fires. And so, when we say Canada has burned 14 times more land than over the last decade, that decade would have been an unthinkable amount of burning a decade or two before that. So we’re heading into a future defined by many more of these fires and much more of this smoke.

And the more that we are learning about the health impacts of that smoke, the scarier and more uncomfortable it truly is. You know, we think about respiratory ailments, but it affects cancers of all kinds. It affects developmental issues. It changes rates of schizophrenia, ADHD, autism, premature birth, low birth weight. And the effect on economic productivity and cognition is so profound that, according to a U.S. Census Bureau working paper published last year, exposure to air pollution alone can account for something like a quarter of the Black-white and Hispanic-white wage gap in the United States.

Thankfully, over the last few decades, because of the Clean Air Act, we’ve undone a lot of the damage of air pollution. But wildfire is reversing that trend. And in 2020, more than half of all air pollution in the western U.S. came from wildfire, which means that there was more pollution that people in the western U.S. were breathing and suffering from in that year than from all other human and industrial activity combined. And we’re going in the right direction on human and industrial activity. We’re going to be drawing down that pollution. But wildfire is moving in the other direction and is much less controllable, and as a result, I think, much scarier.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, David, we’re going to get more into the causes of these wildfires, why they’ve become more widespread, as well as more intense, but I just want to point out to our television viewers that you are in New York, in New York City, but the background that you’re sitting in front of is just a stock photo. That is not what New York City looks like at the moment. So, in your — you wrote a piece for the London Review of Books in 2021 where you cited the work of Stephen Pyne, who calls this, our present era, the “era of the Pyrocene.” So, could you explain what that means, and put it into the context of what we’re witnessing now with these wildfires in Canada and their widespread effects?

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, Stephen Pyne is a fire historian, especially eloquent and poetic one. And as a fire historian, he has quite long historical view, and that includes periods of time in which there was considerably more burning in the world’s forests, and especially in places like the western U.S., than we’re seeing today. But, of course, we had many fewer human settlements there. So, you know, it may be the case that in California every year 5,000 years ago there were millions of acres burning, but there weren’t 40 million people living in that state, breathing that toxic smoke. And there weren’t 330 million people in the United States breathing it in, either.

And his perspective is that in part because of the burning of fossil fuels and the relentless addition of carbon emissions to the atmosphere that we’ve undertaken, especially in the West but increasingly all around the world over the last couple of decades, we are moving from a familiar but quite forbidding fire regime, global fire regime, that we’ve lived under over the last couple of centuries, into one in which we’re probably still going to be burning some more fossil fuels going forward, doing more damage to the planet’s climate, and producing environmental conditions that make not just fires, but large out-of-control fires, much, much more common.

"And as I was saying a few minutes ago, the more that we understand the catastrophic health impacts of that and the more we understand this is a global catastrophe, produced, ultimately, by our addiction to burning one material — fossil fuels — but which is getting out of our control in burning the forests and bush and grass of the world and forcing us to breathe in air that is threaded and laced with all the toxins that produces."

"DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, to start with a really big headline figure, it’s estimated that about 10 million people are dying prematurely every year around the globe because of the effects of air pollution. And that is an almost unfathomably large number. It’s death at the scale of the Holocaust every single year. And while it’s morally different in many profound ways, I think we are really, unfortunately, distracted from the scale of the suffering that that air pollution produces."

"If you could start off by talking more specifically about these — why these 400 — more than 400 blazes are burning across Canada’s 10 provinces and territories, there forcing tens of thousands to evacuate — something we probably wouldn’t even know in the United States if it weren’t for the smoke that’s blanketing our country?" - A.G.

D.W.-W. "We have now added more carbon to the atmosphere by weight than the sum total of everything that has ever been built on this planet by humans. There is more carbon in the atmosphere today than the sum total of all living matter on life today — on Earth today. So we have done more damage to the world’s atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels than everything we have ever done on this planet. And it will last for centuries, at least, and probably millennia, which means that we are going to be reaping the consequences of this damage for many, many generations to come."

Links

"As Smoke Darkens the Sky, the Future Becomes Clear"

"There's No Escape From Wildfire Smoke"

"The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming"

"Our Voice of Fire: A Memoir of a Warrior Rising"

LISTEN VIDEO READ MORE Transcript https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/8/wildfires_climate_crisis

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