This commentary is by Walt Amses, a resident of North Calais.
The images of people in Maui fleeing toward the safety of the ocean as an apocalyptic, hurricane-driven firestorm bears down unfolds like a horror movie, as it becomes clear that losing a step or two might be the difference between life and agonizing death.
By all accounts, this wildfire exploded like a bomb, speeding through Lahaina without warning — another vengeful environmental revolt, the latest in a series of climate hellscapes heralding the arrival of this week’s new normal.
As the death toll exceeded 100 last week, and over 1,000 unaccounted for, officials expected the number to rise significantly as the grim task of sifting through tons of debris, much of it reduced to ash, searching for remains, dragged slowly on.
The recovery is tediously prolonged, becoming painfully apparent that the same blast-furnace heat that melted steel reduced bodies to brittle shells, so fragile they easily crumble, or even wisps of powder scattered ritualistically over the places they loved by Pacific breezes, as they might have been by distraught loved ones.
But even one of the worst tragedies of its type is not big enough to transcend American politics, with theatrically aghast Republicans — who routinely write off thousands of gun deaths to “freedom” — quick to blame President Joe Biden for a mountain bike ride and time at a Delaware beach, even as praise poured in for the White House’s rapid deployment of resources to the stricken island.
Hawaiian Gov. Josh Green thanked Mr. Biden for sending emergency relief so quickly: “We’re honored to have the President jump to it so fast. In six hours he approved the presidential declaration (of disaster). It was incredible. Within six hours! And so that opened up FEMA and amazing support for recovery.”
Echoing Green, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz said in a statement: “Recovering from these devastating fires will take significant time and resources and we need all the federal support we can get.”
While the GOP’s sudden concern for human suffering might easily be dismissed as an exercise in the sleight of hand necessary to deflect attention from their likely presidential nominee’s deepening legal quagmire, far-right politics does play a major role in the dangerous situation facing not only Hawaii but the rest of the nation and world as well.
Conservatives have propped up the fossil fuel industry for decades, profiting handsomely while suppressing any indication that petroleum products play a role in global warming, which ExxonMobil knew over 40 years ago would “lead to dramatic environmental effects by 2050.”
Capitalism, left to its own devices, rewards massive greed massively and the oil industry reflects perfectly how making money transcends all else, including human lives.
As reported in The New Yorker, while gas prices soared last spring to well over $4 per gallon and people struggled to pay bills, Big Oil’s profits were through the roof, with major producers ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips all earning, after taxes, profits of over $5 billion — and that’s only the first three months of the year.
They don’t have anything against you personally; it’s just business. But as we are learning perhaps too late, the financial dividends of oil extraction are dwarfed by its extensive devastation of the natural world.
The tar sands of northern Alberta are challenging to describe in size and scope; words feel insufficient and seem like an exaggeration. Imagine a gouged-out hole in a pristine boreal wilderness covering over 54,000 square miles, roughly the size of Florida, visible from space. The oil extraction project going on there for decades is a filthy degradation of the earth where sludgy deposits of bitumen, mixed with sand, clay and water are — eventually — converted to usable, synthetic oil through a hugely expensive and environmentally disastrous process, leaving enormous loads of toxic waste as well as water and air pollution.
A riveting new book that reads like fiction but isn’t, John Vaillant takes us to the center of the tar sands, Fort McMurray, 600 miles north of the border, “an island of industry in an ocean of trees,” connecting, according to a Guardian review, “all those trees and that industry in an increasingly deadly symbiosis.”
In “Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World,” the author outlines how one of McMurray’s byproducts is the very climate change that came home to roost in 2016 when a gigantic, fast-moving wildfire took the area by complete surprise, similar to the fate suffered in Maui last week.
The same familiar circumstances were at play in the forests around Fort McMurray as in Hawaii: rising temperatures, dropping humidity and strong winds leading to fires of unusual intensity that caught officials unaware, leading to the mass evacuation of nearly 100,000 people in Alberta and the desperate flight toward the sea in Lahaina.
Created by climate change, according to Vaillant, these conditions have led to an atmosphere “more conducive to combustion than any time in the past 3 million years.”
The price the world pays for oil extends far beyond the gas pump. Previously safe places are no longer safe. Fire and water inexorably march through communities like a merciless, invading force bent on obliterating any illusions of safety we continue to harbor.
We’re no longer shocked by reports of blistering temperatures lasting for weeks on end; tropical downpours more likely in a monsoon; and the threat of rising tides, 100-degree ocean water and a planet at the tipping point.
Earth is screaming. Hopefully, someone is listening.
