Living With Heat

August 2, 2024
by Eve OttenbergFacebook

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Mequite Flats Dunes, Death Valley National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The earth gets hotter, as rich nations continue their coal, oil and gas burning spree, while those who urge a course correction get…thrown into prison. The latest casualty of a judiciary dedicated to preserving ecocidal plutocracy is Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam, sentenced to five years in jail in the U.K. for his efforts to stop the corporate insanity defiling the planet. You may think “defiling” is a strong word. But with a heat index of 144 degrees Fahrenheit in Dubai July 16, multiple heat domes baking enormous swaths of the globe this month at record-smashing temperatures for record-smashing lengths of time, and the four hottest days IN A ROW ever recorded in July, you might want to thank Hallam for attempting to arrest this calamity. But if you do, be prepared for the violent, most rapacious aristo-oligarchs in human history – especially those peopling the top echelons of giant oil corporations – to try to shut you up.

Those moneyed bigwigs have been fiendishly effective when it comes to tarring the climate movement and climate science as junk. It seems the hotter the planet becomes, the more undeniable the evidence of our senses and statistics, the more these fantastically wealthy polluters double down on their planetary pyromania. They do not care what happens to the next generation and suffer from the delusion that they will be immune to the climate fiasco unfolding now. So they go on pooh-poohing extreme weather and dangerous heat and leading the best congress their money can buy by the nose.

Back to Hallam. His crime? In his own words: “Giving a talk on civil disobedience as an effective evidence-based method for stopping the elite from putting enough carbon in the atmosphere to send us to extinction.” Hallam recounts in his recent posts that when, during his trial, he described the climate apocalypse we face – “floods, wildfires, mass heat deaths” – the judge muzzled him. “He sent out the jury and threatened to arrest me if I didn’t stop.” Hallam kept talking. The jury was kept out of the courtroom.

The accused cited the Dutch Supreme Court ruling “that all governments have a legal obligation to prevent the emissions of greenhouse gases.” When the jury returned, Hallam referred to case law, but the judge ordered the jurors to disregard him, even as he highlighted “the objective danger I’ve experienced as a farmer unable to grow food.” Indeed, some experts argue that by the end of the century, the much warmer earth will be unsuitable for growing wheat. So I guess those alive then will have to get their carbs from something other than bread.

 Things are bad for this planet, our only home. In the past two years, global temps have shot way up, past scientific predictions, while ocean heat has blasted through all recorded precedents. According to the New York Times April 10, “the ocean has now broken temperature records every day for more than a year.” This kills marine life, causes coral bleaching and impacts weather, already severely eccentric and out of kilter from atmospheric warming. “Biblical flooding, scorching heat, collapsing grid systems, animals crumbling, waters rising, crops wilting, economy on the brink and millions displaced,” wrote Robert Hunziker in CounterPunch June 21. “Welcome to the future of climate change…Pakistan.” To prevent that future from spreading to other parts of the globe, we must stop burning fossil fuels, pronto.

This article cites an interview from Inside Climate News June 8, entitled “As Temperatures in Pakistan Top 120 Degrees, There’s Nowhere to Run.” This is something no nation, no leader wants to invite. Right, Donald “I Dig Coal” Trump? We can assume the Dems are somewhat on board (vide: Kamala “Prosecuted Polluters” Harris who has specifically addressed this matter of our collective fate), but the GOP is not. However, Trump’s surprisingly heartening plan to encourage Beijing to plant new industries here in the U.S. could easily include what China excels at, namely renewables.

Producing renewables means big bucks and entails lots of new jobs, and for GOP skeptics who want to boost fossil fuels, well hello? Wasn’t the multi-week, crushing heat dome over North America in July enough for you? Or do you actually want this heat/hurricane/wildfire catastrophe to get worse? It’s not good for business when electrical grids crash, whole cities like Houston lose power and sweltering residents decide, in large numbers, to move elsewhere. Or is the GOP content to let the south and west become uninhabitable?

Pakastani environmental lawyer Rafay Alam is quoted by Hunziker: “There is a significant denialism on climate change in places like the United States…It’s extremely infuriating to see people who’ve participated in this global warming deny it, deny any accountability, try and move on as if nothing’s happened and try to continue to make money and drive that bottom line.” Alam says multitudes in the Global South share this view. But the problem is that waking up your average American businessman is almost impossible, his uninformed mind is already made up, and climate doom, homo boobus thinks, is bad fer bizness. Well, it IS bad for business, at least for business as it’s conducted now, but it’s good for a whole slew of new, green businesses. However, no American entrepreneur wants to hear that what he does will ultimately end the world as we know it, why, that could scare off customers…almost as fast as a hurricane blows away their roofs.

One can always hope, and maybe we’ll get lucky, that the latest shocking heat trends are a fluke and that climate scientists’ more conservative – though equally devastating in the long term – predictions prove correct. Activists, however, won’t sit on their hands and wait. Take Hallam again. Prison guards, he posted July 22, have one main maxim: “Break the rules and you will be punished.” That, Hallam writes, corresponds to “politics at the end of the world. You can vote for whoever you want to as long as they don’t stop the project to destroy the human race over the next two decades…Civilizations…commit suicide, to use historian Arnold Toynbee’s famous phrase. Actually, they all destroy themselves eventually…because they are so sure they will not destroy themselves.”

Hallam argues that currently capital “has escaped control by the state…And soon capital will lose…” That’s because its externalities, i.e. carbon pollution, ruin the livable world. Historically, capital refused to pay for its externalities, for destroying and deforming the earth, and there’s no sign that’s about to change, even though, as of July 23 – just for instance – the whole ocean basin of the North Atlantic experiences a heatwave up 1.5 degrees Celsius above normal. This, while ocean temps have shot up 16 degrees Fahrenheit above average. The ocean is vast. It takes lots of carbon pollution to do this. But that’s what our vaunted, unchecked, rampaging, late capitalism has wrought, and that’s merely one example among hundreds.

Another for instance: In May and June, a heat dome stalled over Mexico and temps shot up over 113 degrees Fahrenheit, killing dozens of people, while bats, birds and monkeys got so hot they fell dead from the trees. This is not normal. This is life-threatening. It did not happen in the 20^th century; back then summers were hot, but not nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks on end on, say, the North American East Coast. If we want to arrest this disaster, business as usual must rapidly alter. Such a prescription may be anathema to plutocrats, but they, too, should consider what the world will be like in mere decades. Is it really worth gambling dying of heat prostration, or drowning in a flood, or being swept away by a hurricane? Because a broken climate will not spare the rich. It will kill them, too.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Busybody. She can be reached at her website.

The Enormous Flaw in Wildfire Data

by Sarah Hyden

 August 2, 2024
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Tanques Fire, i.e. Tanques Intentional Burn   Photo: U.S. Forest Service.

Both Congress and the U.S. Forest Service have told us that our forests and communities are experiencing a “wildfire crisis” – that an increasing amount of wildfire is burning on our landscapes, and fire severity is increasing. The primary “solution” they are currently planning and implementing, embodied in the Wildfire Crisis Strategy, is a substantial increase in logging, thinning and burning treatments in our forests, for which Congress has provided billions of dollars of funding, along with the mandate to get it done.

So that begs the question – to what extent are we actually in a wildfire crisis? Certainly the aggressive and environmentally damaging logging and over-burning that is being carried out in some forests, with much more to come, should be based on solid data and science.

The basic premise of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy is that wildfire is greatly increasing on our western landscapes. One would think that this should not be difficult to ascertain, as the Forest Service and other land management agencies maintain records and maps of wildfire perimeters. This data goes into national wildfire databases, such as MTBS (Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity). MTBS is “an interagency program to map the location, extent and associated burn severity of all large fires (including wildfire, wildland fire use and prescribed fire) in the United States across all ownerships from 1984 to present,” This program is largely run by the USGS and the US Forest Service, and datasets include state and federal fire history records.

However, Forest Service wildfire perimeter data is vastly compromised in that a large proportion of acres burned within the officially designated wildfire perimeters are actually ignited by the US Forest Service themselves, most often by aerial ignitions via drones and helicopters. In many cases, the majority of a fire that is called a “wildfire” on national forest lands is actually Forest Service intentional burning. This strategy for managing fire has increased to the point that numerous fires are substantially expanded by intentional burning.

Currently, the Tanques Fire in the Santa Fe National Forest, originally ignited by a lightning strike, is being expanded through aerial and ground firing operations under command of the Forest Service. According to a Forest Service news release, the fire was first reported on July 18, and by July 25, the fire had grown to only 13 acres.

Around that point the Forest Service made the decision to expand the fire up to 7,000 acres with firing operations, utilizing both aerial and hand ignitions. That means the Forest Service intended to expand it up to 538X its size. The fire may have continued to slowly expand naturally, but relatively high vegetation moisture from recent rains made it unlikely that the fire would spread much on its own. It’s hard to say exactly which part of the potential 7,000 acre “wildfire” will be due to intentional burning, and which will be “natural” wildfire, but it is clear the vast majority of the acres burned will be due to USFS ignitions. Nonetheless, the Forest Service is calling the Tanques Fire a wildfire.

Recently, the Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy (an organization closely aligned with the Forest Service), along with a university professor, authored the “Tamm review: A meta-analysis of thinning, prescribed fire, and wildfire effects on subsequent wildfire severity in conifer dominated forests of the Western US.” This review is a consideration of the efficacy of forest “thinning” and prescribed fire in moderating the incidence and severity of wildfire. It begins with citing a research article to support their contention that “In the western United States, area burned [by wildfire] has doubled in recent decades (Iglesias et al., 2022).”

Map of Tanques Fire 7,000 Acre Focal Area and Planning Area    U.S. Forest Service.

This research article, “U.S. fires became larger, more frequent, and more widespread in the 2000s,” is based on data from over 28,000 fires in the MTBS dataset. Since this dataset is derived largely from Forest Service wildfire data, it includes the large proportion of fire intentionally set by the Forest Service during wildfire management operations. The agency does not differentiate in their published wildfire data between fire ignited during wildfire management operations and fire that burned due to the original wildfire ignition. The study concludes that there have been more fires and larger fires in the west since 1999 – yet we have no way of knowing to what extent this is true, given that the Forest Service is igniting more and more fire under the umbrella of wildfire management, and calling it all wildfire.

The first publicized example of such wildfire expansion was the 2002 Biscuit Fire. Timothy Ingalsbee, PhD of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology estimated that a large proportion of the Biscuit Fire was ignited by Forest Service firing operations. Inglasbee stated in a 2006 report largely focused on the Biscuit Fire: “…burnout operations can sometimes take place several miles away from the edge of a wildfire, or alternately, miles away from the fire containment line.” Wildfire expansions have increased since 2002, and wildfire starts, such as lightning strike ignitions, are often simply the “match that lit the fire” leading to numerous firing operation ignitions to implement intentional burns that they call wildfires.

The Tamm Review “found overwhelming evidence that mechanical thinning with prescribed burning, mechanical thinning with pile burning, and prescribed burning only, are effective at reducing subsequent wildfire severity.” Those conclusions are controversial and do not consider research from independent scientists. But a more fundamental issue with the Review is that the purpose and need for such aggressive forest treatments are at least partially predicated on flawed data that indicates wildfire has doubled on our landscapes in recent decades. It may be increasing given the warming and drying climate and the abundance of fuels, but who knows to what extent, since the wildfire data is so skewed by the inclusion of the Forest Service intentional burns. This data issue also affects considerations of trends in fire severity, and this should be investigated.

A significant proportion of wildfire research depends on wildfire perimeter data, including the Iglesias et al. research referenced as support for the premise of the Tamm Review. It is clear we have little knowledge of how much fire that was not ignited by the Forest Service has burned on our landscape in recent decades. It’s a major flaw in “wildfire” data. No forest management actions should be contemplated or initiated based on such data.

That Congress and the Forest Service are going forward with a strategy for addressing the “WIldfire Crisis,” without having determined with reasonable data and responsible science to what extent the crisis exists, is unacceptable  – especially considering that the remedy often involves severely damaging impacts to our forests and communities. There needs to be clear parameters developed for how to support appropriate amounts of fire on our landscapes, and any resulting plan should be analyzed with an environmental impact statement.

There is understandable concern about wildfires increasingly impacting wildland/urban interface communities, and this issue requires serious consideration and action. However, evidence clearly shows that burning of homes and communities by wildfire is not significantly impacted by logging, thinning and intentional burning treatments out in the forest, that only the 100 feet surrounding homes and other structures is relevant to structure ignitions. The best response to the home ignition problem is home hardening and treating the landscape immediately surrounding homes and other values. This takes a coordinated effort between governmental bodies, land management agencies and the public. Such coordination would more likely occur with increased transparency on the part of the Forest Service and affiliated scientists, which could build trust with the public. The accurate collection and categorization of wildfire data, which underlies research concerning wildfire, is a fundamental basis for transparency and trust – and good science.

Sarah Hyden has been working to protect the Santa Fe National Forest for well over a decade. She was a co-founder of the Santa Fe Forest Coalition and was the WildEarth Guardians’ Santa Fe National Forest Advocate. In 2019, she co-founded The Forest Advocate, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to protection of the Santa Fe National Forest and all western forests. The Forest Advocate maintains an active website that publishes forest advocacy news and resources — theforestadvocate.org.

Chicago Firefighters Are Fighting For a Just Contract

by Joe Allen

 August 2, 2024Facebook

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Image by Jack Plant.

During the past two years, four Chicago Firefighters have died on the job, including Jermaine Pelt, an eighteen-year veteran, whose death was ruled a homicide. 2023 alone was, according to the Illinois Fire Institute, the deadliest year for Chicago Firefighters since 1998. So far, 2024 hasn’t seen any deaths on the job, but that should not conceal the fact that death and injury are always close by.

Larry Langford, spokesman for the Chicago Fire Department, told the Chicago Sun-Times last November,

“It is very unusual to have four in-the-line-of-duty deaths in four separate fires within a year,” Langford said. “I don’t remember having four members in four separate incidents in a year [die in the line of duty]. I don’t remember that since I’ve been on the job, that’s been almost 25 years.”

“It hurts to the bone,” Langford said of the string of tragedies. “We’ve gone years and years at a time without any line-of-duty deaths or even serious injuries. [The recent deaths are] almost too much to take.”

With such unprecedented casualties, why has the City of Chicago led by Mayor Brandon Johnson refused to agree to a just contract with Chicago Firefighter Local 2? Is Mayor Johnson acting out of spite towards the firemen, who endorsed Johnson rival Paul Vallas for Mayor?

Recently, Brandon Johnson—who was hailed soon after his election as “Chicago’s Organizer Mayor”—added insult to injury when he denied the firemen a permit to march near the United Center, where the Democratic National Convention (DNC) is to be held from August 19-22 to voice their demands to convention delegates. Chicago’s firemen are part of a growing list of activists who have been denied permits to march near the convention center or permitted to march miles away from the view of convention delegates. He should be roundly condemned for this.

Firemen did hold, however, a small demonstration near the NASCAR race during the July 4 holiday weekend that saw over one hundred fires in the city with 109 shot and 19 killed. During the demonstration, union President Pat Cleary told the local NBC affiliate that he met regularly with the city for the last three years to get a new contract to no avail. “It’s a slap in the face, that’s the message that they’re sending to us. They don’t appreciate us.”

“Our medics are overworked,” Cleary said. “We don’t have enough paramedics and besides not having enough paramedics, we don’t have enough ambulances.” Among the union’s demands are to add 20 ambulances to the city’s fleet of 80, and hire more paramedics, with annual pay raises and promotions. “Last month alone – 800 days of overtime. That’s not 800 hours or 800 8-hour shifts, 800 days of 24-hour shifts had to be worked by 10% of our department,” according to Anthony Snyder, director of Emergency Medical Services for Local 2.

Fire department politics is a real mixed bag, where firemen deal with the same issues that the rest Chicago’s public sector workers are in constant battle with city over: wages, pensions, safety, and staffing issues, but these issues are also mixed in with issues of racial and gender justice issues, where the fire department and the firefighters union has been on the wrong side too many times. Unfortunately, Local 2 regularly also endorses for reelection some of the worst people on the city council, many of whom are former firemen.

In 2016, some precincts in communities where firemen live, were the only ones that voted for Trump. As I wrote about the 2023 Mayor’s race,

“The Northwest and Southwest sides, where large numbers of cops and firemen live, saw some of the largest numbers of early voters. Traditionally, they are conservative Democrats—pro-union but hostile to liberalism—with a visible number of Trump supporters.”

It can be a very insular world, where firemen perceive that their only reliable ally is Chicago’s notorious police union, led by John Catanzara. Yet, Local 2 also supported Mahlon Mitchell, the African-American leader of the Wisconsin Fire Fighters for the leadership of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) in 2021. He lost.

Political endorsements for political office, however, should not be the issue when it comes to a contract fight with the city for Chicago’s broad Left or the “Progressives” in the leadership of many local unions, who are almost entirely Johnson supporters. Firemen are workers who deserve our support. There are few better ways to reinforce the worst Trumpian politics among a minority of firemen than being silent or on the sidelines with their very legitimate contract fight with the city.

Chicago’s firemen and paramedics are on the frontline of the urban crisis. Mayor Brandon Johnson should stop stalling and sign a just contract.

JOE ALLEN is the author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service.