Intensified by Fossil Fuel-Driven Climate Crisis, ‘Godzilla-Level’ El Niño Smashing Records Ahead of Peak

“As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels,” said one scientist, El Niño “occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”


A firefighter douses flames as they push toward homes during the Creek Fire in the Cascadel Woods area of unincorporated Madera County, California on September 7, 2020. The El Niño event of 2026 is expected to cause a variety of extreme weather, including dry conditions in some regions and extreme rainfall in others, in 2027.
(Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Sep 22, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Although “El Niño comes and goes,” as one climate scientist said of the naturally occurring warm-weather phenomenon on Monday, experts are in agreement that this year is different—with meteorologists already recording a temperature rise of 3.07°C in the Pacific Ocean, putting it at a statistical tie with November 2015, when El Niño caused the ocean to warm by 3.08°C.

The temperature rise is not expected to peak until November and December, when an average of 14 models examined by Zeke Hausfather of Carbon Brief and Berkeley Earth found that a temperature rise of 4.1°C is forecast.

The event has been underway since June, Hausfather wrote, and has been gathering strength “faster than any previous event on record.”

Scientists typically track the strength of El Niño—which leads to heavy rainfall, higher global temperatures, and other extreme weather as warmer Pacific waters are pushed to the south—using the Niño 3.4 anomaly, or ONI, which determines how much hotter the central Pacific is compared with a 30-year rolling average.

A temperature rise above 2.0°C is considered a “very strong” El Niño, and scientists and policymakers are already calling this year’s event a “super El Niño,” with some experts using the terms “Godzilla-level” and “jaw-dropping” to describe the weather conditions that can be expected in the coming months due to the warmer climate.

As Common Dreams reported late last month, planetary heating driven by fossil fuel emissions is intensifying El Niño, while the naturally occurring phenomenon can in turn worsen the impacts of the climate emergency.

In the last 40 years scientists have recorded a 16% increase in the strength of El Niño events, according to a study published in Science last month. They’ve also gotten 36% stronger than they were before industrialization began.

The “double whammy,” as The Guardian called it, could make 2027 the hottest year ever recorded, blowing through heat records that have just been set this year—and that have been linked to the deaths of people around the world from extreme heat and flooding.

“This event is a huge redistribution of energy in the climate system and is dangerous because it is unfolding on top of a much warmer, human-influenced climate system,” climate scientist Friederike Otto of Imperial College London told The Guardian. “So, in many places around the world we will see never-before-experienced heat extremes, with all their consequences on health, food security, and water stress.”

Despite the fact that El Niño predates the human-caused climate emergency, Otto said, “as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, it occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”

This year’s event is likely to be the most intense El Niño in 1,000 years, reported to The Guardian, with hotter and drier conditions already linked to deadly wildfires in Indonesia and crop losses in Central America and the Caribbean region due to drought conditions. Rice production this season is expected to fail in Indonesia, according to the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University.

As the Southern Hemisphere’s summer months approach, southern Africa and Australia are at heightened risk of wildfires and droughts as well. Meanwhile, cocoa production could be damaged by extreme rainfall in parts of South America.



“All strong El Niño events on record have continued to strengthen well into the winter—and the models are in near-unanimous agreement that this one will, too,” wrote Hausfather at Carbon Brief. “If the forecast holds, the current event will peak between November and January at a level far beyond any event previously observed in the instrumental record.”

In California on Monday, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in an effort to prepare communities for El Niño’s impacts in the coming months, which could include coastal flooding and heavy snow in mountain regions.

Hausfather noted that strong El Niño events like those that occurred in 1997 and 2015 were also “associated with hundreds of billions of dollars in damages globally.”

“This event,” he told The Guardian, “is leaving those past ones in the dust.”

‘The Diagnosis Is Unambiguous’: 2026 Planetary Health Report Finds Pressure Mounting on Earth Systems

“Seven of nine planetary boundaries are transgressed, and pressure on all seven is at its highest recorded level,” said one scientist.

A protester is seen in Los Angeles during a climate change demonstration holding a placard that says, “There is no Planet B.”
(Photo by Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Sep 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Like other recent warnings from climate scientists, the message sent by the latest Planetary Health Check report on Monday was clear: “We need to move fast,” as the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the group behind the report, said.

“Seven of nine planetary boundaries are transgressed, and pressure on all seven is at its highest recorded level,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute (PIK).

The report finds that seven measures of the Earth’s health are no longer within the “safe operating space”: ocean acidification, freshwater change, land system change, climate change, modification of biogeochemical flows, introduction of novel entities, and change in biosphere integrity.

Just two markers, stratospheric ozone depletion and the increase in atmospheric aerosol loading, have shown improvement over the last decade, said the Planetary Boundaries Science Lab at PIK.




“The diagnosis is unambiguous,” said Boris Sakschewski, the lead author of the report. “Pressure is rising across every planetary boundary already outside the safe operating space. It means that the risk of large-scale, persistent, and potentially irreversible change is increasing, while our margin for error in tackling these problems is shrinking.”

The scientists behind the report emphasized that with recent news regarding the state of the planet’s crucial coral reefs, forests, and extreme weather events like heatwaves and flooding, it should come as no surprise that the Earth’s boundaries have been transgressed, as continued fossil fuel emissions have caused runaway planetary heating.

Earlier this month, United Nations scientists said the planet can no longer avoid at least a temporary temperature rise above 1.5°C over preindustrial levels.

Oceans have also become so warm that stressed coral reefs have less and less time to recover from climate damage, as Common Dreams reported last month, and a UN report last year found that the world’s governments are not moving fast enough to end the destruction of forests.

Last month and the summer of 2026 both set heat records, with extreme heat killing more than 1,000 people across Europe, and wildfires spreading across the continent and Canada. Record-breaking heat was also recorded in parts of Asia and the Middle East.

In June, the UN Children’s Fund found that nearly every child on Earth is now exposed to at least one climate hazard driven by fossil fuel emissions, including flooding, heatwaves, and drought.

“Pakistan’s 2025 monsoon floods affected more than 6.9 million people,” said PIK. “Global ocean heat content reached a new record in 2025, with Hurricane Melissa rapidly ramping up to a Category 5 hurricane and striking Jamaica after passing over exceptionally warm seas. From January 2023 to September 2025, bleaching-level heat stress impacted about 84.4% of the world’s coral reef area, making it the largest global coral-bleaching event observed to date.”

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, chair of Planetary Guardians, implored readers of the Planetary Health Check report to “read that list again: Pakistan, the Caribbean, Europe, the reefs beneath our oceans. These are not separate emergencies; the planet is telling us, in every region at once, that it is out of balance.”

“As chair of Planetary Guardians, I hear this same story wherever I go, whether from a pastoralist watching the rains fail season after season or a coastal community watching the sea rise,” said Ibrahim. “The 2026 Planetary Health Check puts data behind what communities on the frontlines already know from living it. We do not have the luxury of treating these as separate crises any longer.”

Rockström emphasized that while “we do not have the luxury of time... we do have the knowledge, capacity, and solutions to change course.”

“Accelerating action to return to the safe operating space across all planetary boundaries is essential to protect lives and livelihoods,” said Rockström, “and to deliver on the promise of shared future prosperity.”

 

The smoke of capitalism

By Frans Ari Prasetyo

Published 19 September, 2026

Each year, the islands of Indonesia witness colourful apparitions, oscillating between red and yellowish-brown hues demarcating the geographical locations of tropical forest fires. For nearly a month between August-September, Indonesia consumed the smoke of capitalism through forest fires and exported it to neighbouring countries without their consent. In the fires’ aftermath, tropical forests were converted into monoculture plantations, dominated by oil palm. Corporate and state occupation, facilitated by the fires, forms part of the circuit of capital accumulation within this commodity infrastructure.

During the 1960s, about 80% of Indonesia’s territory was covered in forest. However, the country experienced the world’s highest rate of deforestation, triggered by fires and illegal logging. Land became an asset that could not be removed; transforming it into a productive commodity required a regime of exclusion. By the beginning of the 21st century, Indonesia had lost 12 million hectares of tropical forests. 

Various companies and groups have monopolised Indonesia’s forest, controlling 60 million of a total of 130 million hectares. Corporate control of forests includes Forest Concession Rights covering 25 million hectares granted to 303 companies, and Industrial Plantation Forests (HTI) covering 10.1 million hectares granted to 262 companies. Furthermore, oil palm plantations cover 12.3 million hectares and are controlled by 1605 companies, while mining concessions covering 3.2 million hectares are controlled by 1755 companies, highlighting extreme inequality in land control.

Forests have been regarded as state assets since the Dutch colonial government implemented domein verklaring (free state domain), which stipulated that all land for which no one could prove ownership was state property. The transition towards forestry capitalism is becoming increasingly evident. Its primary driver is extensive extractivism through forest-based collective violence as a form of accumulation by dispossession within the state’s version of development. This is all designed to ensure the capitalist territorial logic of power remains constantly interconnected and interwoven. The smoke from forest fires marks the start of this process.

There is no safe haven, as anger mounts among Indonesia’s 280 million people, as well as in neighbouring countries forced to endure the export of unwanted haze. Responsibility has once again been shifted onto the individuals who suffering, rather than those fuelling the fires. This reveals the limitations of capitalist climate policy and explains why neoliberal solutions are so out of step with the scale of the crisis: safety must not interfere with profitability. That contradiction is resolved by shifting responsibility back onto the citizens who breathe in the smoke — the first touch of the palm oil capitalist economic cycle.

The impact of climate change remains a subject of considerable debate. This is a capitalist scheme: fossil fuel industry-funded disinformation and dependence on palm oil create political uncertainty while simultaneously ensuring the occurrence of forest fires in Indonesia. Palm oil is found in half of the products sold in supermarkets and in biofuels. About 50% of the world’s supply is grown in Indonesia, mostly on large plantations. Government land concessions granted to palm oil companies, totaling 22 million hectares, cover a third of Indonesia’s agricultural land, not to mention independent plantations operating under different land concession schemes.

Forest fires, which are used to clear land for oil palm plantations, demonstrate the importance of a rules-based global order. If rules can be bent, suspended or selectively interpreted whenever strategic interests demand, we are entitled to ask: whose order is this, and whose interests are ultimately served by these rules, such that fires become part of the global supply chain for certain commodities?

Following the occurrence of forest fires in Indonesia, there is a possibility that land use changes may be legalised through the implementation of Ministry of Forestry Regulation No. 448 of 2020. This particular regulation designates “authoritative land” under the forest area release policy scheme, thereby rendering them legally permissible for oil palm, food crops or mining activities. Moreover, in the event of a forest fire occurring in a production forest area, the designation of a “coordinated land” can facilitate its conversion to oil palm or food crop plantations. Both these factors suggest that forest fires are state-sponsored, as a straightforward and cost-effective method of land clearance.

Indonesia is the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, surpassed only by China, the United States, and the European Union. This significant contribution to global emissions can be attributed to several key factors, including substantial deforestation, frequent peatland fires and extensive coal usage. In Indonesia, the access of mining oligarchs and palm oil tycoons to policy-making, government insiders, financial institutions and opinion leaders is facilitated by the state and public officials. These entities are lauded by an international community mesmerised by the illusory image of development and growth. Within the context of a capitalist rent-seeking economy, this dynamic is seen as fundamental for capital accumulation.

The process by which less developed or peripheral countries, such as Indonesia, are steered towards integration into the neoliberal system has been shown to result in deforestation and chronic ecocide. These countries become locked into a relationship of dependency with “developed” nations and the international financing of the global economy, caught in a debt trap and lopsided trade agreement. The maximisation of production of extracted primary commodities, such as palm oil and coal, extracted from tropical forests across the planet, including in Indonesia where the prices of these non-value-added goods are kept low, serves to reinforce global supply chains despite causing environmental and social damage.

Below we will examine how the palm oil industry is embedded within capitalism — a process that begins with forest fires. Indonesia accounts for as much as 55% of the global palm oil market. Palm oil represents projects that will always exist as a defensive measure, hiding behind nationalism and economic development to remain part of the global supply chain of neoliberal capitalism, while securing policies they desire within the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) and COP forums.

The concept of high conservation value is regarded as a Trojan horse of deceit, employed by palm oil companies to mislead unsuspecting communities and governments. This is done to meet the controversial assessment criteria of the RSPO and ISPO as a form of pseudo-conservation within the sustainability criteria for palm oil. The outcome is that palm oil companies gain access to North American and European markets. These standards offer a certain degree of transactional flexibility, adapted to prevailing local, national and regional political directions shaped by neoliberal policies. Through agreements such as the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), these countries aim to import only “sustainable” palm oil at lower tariffs. But what sort of “sustainability” can be offered by a commodity production system that begins with the burning of tropical forests and peatlands — the lungs of the world?

Under President Prabowo Subianto (2024–29), Indonesia has become a major force within the global capitalist system in producing palm oil and minerals such as coal and nickel, even though its domestic policies are admired even by some nationalist left-wing circles. The government’s response to palm oil resulting from forest fires will invariably feature nationalistic rhetoric about the economy and job creation, while also invoking Indonesia’s territorial integrity. What we are witnessing today is the consequence of public policy choices, not the supposedly neutral forces of the market or technological change. To speak of a natural or pre-political economic system is a profound misunderstanding of historical and social reality.

Following in the footsteps of his predecessor, President Joko Widodo or Jokowi (2014–24), Prabowo has never been willing to disclose land data, particularly regarding oil palm plantations and mines, as required by the Supreme Court in 2017, as well as Indonesian Law No. 14/2008 and a decision by the Public Information Commission No. 057/2015 to disclose the names of landowners, locations, land areas and maps of the regions — including landowners affected by fires. How can we prevent forest fires, improve the climate and reduce emissions, if the factors causing the damage are ongoing? Forest fires as a climate disaster represent an epic battle against smoke, a stark manifestation of global neoliberal corporate criminality and state capitalism.

How do those responsible for forest fires evade Indonesian law? Corruption, collusion and cronyism are rife, creating systemic impunity between corporations, particularly palm oil companies, and the state. This is facilitated by regulations protected by the House of Representatives and enforced by the police and military. There is also a lack of organised resistance and action against deforestation and the palm oil industry. We are confronted with the central issue of climate change, inextricably linked to the development of palm oil plantations that have been constructed on a foundation of capitalism and further enhanced by imperialist elements, resulting in the preservation of extinct species. The haze from forest fires blurs the landscape, creating a faint silhouette.

The damage caused by those who set forest fires with impunity is severe. This is further compounded by the spatial concentration of companies competing for concession licences and the subsequent flow of capital, thereby establishing a mutually beneficial relationship that is challenging to dislodge, particularly when major corporations support campaigns for local, national and even presidential elections as part of their corporate strategy.

Electoral democracy and regional autonomy, achieved through the 1998 reforms, conceal another side to campaign financing: one that bypasses strict regulations on corporate political spending and opens the door to virtually unlimited spending and undisclosed “black money,” which dominate Indonesia’s current political system — a system in which the palm oil and mining oligarchies wield immense influence. A palm oil tycoon can outspend millions of people to control their political future.

During the 2019 presidential election, a “palm oil is good” campaign emerged, backed by Jokowi’s incumbent administration. As in 2024, Jokowi faced off  in 2019 against Prabowo — a former military general with a history of human rights violations and a business owner who controls thousands of hectares of land in Indonesia, particularly in Kalimantan. Prabowo finally won in 2024, with Gibran Rakabuming — Jokowi’s eldest son — as his running mate. Jokowi and Prabowo are much the same: both are backed by tycoons who operate large-scale land holdings for oil palm plantations and mining across Indonesia under various company names. Consequently, any moratorium is nothing but a paper tiger, while continuing land reform and deforestation serves merely as a populist slogan.

Prabowo is a fan of oil palm, which he refers to as a “miracle crop” and strategic national commodity. He is intent on expanding oil palm cultivation in Papua beyond the current level, which has already reached 250,000 hectares. He states the claim oil palm causes deforestation is a false and cruel accusation, as oil palm is also an evergreen tree and no different from other forest trees.

Fuelled by antek asing (foreign agent) rhetoric, the harassment of activists and civil society organisations is set to continue. This has become a favoured tactic of Prabowo’s administration to discredit critics and counter public sentiment regarding foreign aid in the wake of natural disasters, citing nationalism and national resilience as justifications. This term emerged when floods and landslides struck Sumatra in 2025 as a result of deforestation and expanding oil palm plantations, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands affected. 

However, during the 2026 forest fires — when the effects of smoke had already reached neighbouring countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines, and amid fears of international threats and sanctions — assistance to extinguish fires from Japan and Malaysia was finally accepted. Furthermore, Prabowo is reviving the colonial term londo ireng (Black Dutchman), thereby importing a dangerous authoritarian logic that trades democratic accountability for loyalty tests and targets critics in the media, including those questioning the government’s defensive response to these forest fires.

Indonesia has responded to the forest fires with a spirit of adaptation, viewing them as an inevitable disaster to be weathered to ensure investment flows in promptly. Furthermore, the farcical measures to tackle the fires — such as using manual fire extinguishers and even the president’s suggestion to use cassava flour — along with allowing children to remain in school so that the president’s “Free Meal Nutrition” scheme, which has caused tens of thousands of food poisoning cases, can continue to run, have enraged the people. The forest fires have exposed the limitations of capitalist climate policy as a palliative for a “normality” that must be dismantled, and illustrate why neoliberal solutions are out of step with the scale of the emerging crisis.

In tackling forest fires, Prabowo appointed Haji Isam — a palm oil tycoon and mining oligarch — as head of the Kalimantan Forest Fire Extinguishing Task Force. However, following public controversy, this was changed to a private entity appointed as a technical adviser, which also provided operational funding for firefighting amounting to US$500,000. As well as controlling thousands of hectares of coal mines in Kalimantan with a turnover of 400,000 tons a month, Haji Isam owns 17,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in South Kalimantan and 22,782 hectares in East Kalimantan, and is currently expanding into Papua. 

Haji Isam is a business owner who purchased 2000 excavators from China to clear tropical forests and peatlands in Papua for Prabowo’s 2.25 million-hectare “food estate” project, intended for rice production for food and sugarcane for bioethanol. However, these commodities may change, as both will struggle to be productive given Papua’s climate and soil conditions. They are likely to result in failure similar to the one million hectare food estate during the Jokowi era. Consequently, the alternative scenario would be to replace them with oil palm, under the pretext of producing bioethanol and reducing dependence on fuel imports, while also appealing to nationalist sentiment, as Indonesia has set a target of 20% bioethanol (E20) in petrol by 2028 and projects energy self-sufficiency.

A total of 25 palm oil holding companies are owned by prominent figures within the palm oil industry, 20 of which are listed on the stock exchange. These companies continue to successfully obtain capital by issuing shares. Financial institutions have provided substantial capital to palm oil conglomerates controlled by these tycoons over the past two decades, through direct lending and by underwriting the shares and bonds sold to investors. Key banks providing palm oil financing are the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (Singapore), CIMB Group and Malayan Banking (Malaysia), Bank Negara Indonesia and Bank Mandiri (Indonesia), Credit Suisse (Switzerland), Rabobank (Netherlands), BNP Paribas (France) and Citigroup (US). Consequently, financial capital has supported the palm oil industry, and as the land for these plantations is acquired through the clearing or burning of tropical forests, it indirectly contributes to forest fires, the smoke from which returns without provoking any significant outrage against Indonesia.

Neoliberalism’s crisis, particularly after the 2008 economic crash, has further strengthened the search for alternative state approaches to accumulate the fruits of production through state intervention and control, in the form of state corporations or state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The relationship between the state and the mode of economic production has become increasingly close. The state no longer merely acts as a regulator through legislation, but also features as a player in economic production activities. To accommodate the palm oil sector, in 2025 Prabowo established an SOE called PT Agrinas Palma Nusantara, led by a military general, which controls 1.7 million hectares of palm oil plantations — an area set to expand, partly through the reclamation of forest areas, including those burnt or deliberately set alight.

Its resource wealth is not an intrinsic or natural quality, but a constellation of materialities, relationships, technologies and discourses that must be harmonised to make it a viable investment. At present, we urgently need to scrutinise the political and legal structures that amplify and protect capital at the expense of communities and forests. If elected officials fail to establish ecological justice, the common good and equality before the law, then it matters little who wins the presidential, parliamentary or local elections, because an oligarchy is far easier to create and maintain when insulated from political pressure. We must wait to see how these fires will end but, in the meantime, we have every right to be concerned about the direction Indonesia is heading without its tropical forests. The fires have scorched the lungs of the Earth and the smoke is already in our lungs.

Frans Ari Prasetyo is an independent researcher, planner and photographer whose work explores landscape politics, spatial planning and grassroots movements in Indonesia. His research focuses on the political ecology of land use, infrastructure development and the struggles of marginalised communities, including youth movements, underground collectives and rural populations affected by state and corporate development projects.

Sitting on a time bomb

By Phil Hearse

Published 21 September, 2026

Knowledge and concern about the climate crisis has grown exponentially in the past 25 years. But not among ultra-conservative and fascist political forces such as Donald Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement in the United States, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Reform UK in Britain.

In his infamous United Nations speech a year ago, Trump denounced global heating as the “biggest scam in world history.” Since his re-election, Trump has withdrawn the US from the Paris Accords, closed offices and programs dealing with climate change, terminated dozens of experts working on global heating and, crucially, withdrawn billions of dollars aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change. 

But here is the irony: the US has been the site of hundreds of climate disasters. Among the best-known are Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the wildfires that hit Malibu and Paradise in California.

Hurricane Katrina and Sandy

Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005, was one of the most destructive natural disasters in US history. In New Orleans, the disaster significantly worsened when levees and floodwalls failed, allowing water to flood about 80% of the city. The human consequences were enormous.

More than 1800 people died, while hundreds of thousands were displaced from their homes. Many people could not evacuate before the storm and the disaster exposed major inequalities in income, housing, transport and emergency assistance access. Katrina caused about $108 billion in damages and made hundreds of thousands of homes uninhabitable.

Hurricane Sandy affected the Caribbean and eastern US in October 2012. As it approached the northeast, the storm became extremely large and interacted with other weather systems. New Jersey and New York experienced the most serious impacts.

One of Sandy’s greatest dangers was its enormous storm surge. Seawater flooded coastal communities and large parts of New York City, including streets, road tunnels and subway tunnels. Airports were flooded, transport networks were disrupted and about 8.5 million people lost electricity. At least 650,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. Sandy caused 147 direct deaths across the Atlantic basin, including 72 in the mid-Atlantic and northeast.

The storm demonstrated the vulnerability of densely populated coastal areas. Damage was particularly serious as Sandy affected some of the country’s most economically important urban areas.

Paradise wildfire

The Paradise wildfire, officially called the Camp Fire, began in northern California on November 8, 2018. Extremely dry vegetation, low humidity and powerful winds allowed the fire to spread at extraordinary speed through Butte County. 

The town of Paradise, which had a population of about 26,000, was directly in its path. Residents were ordered to evacuate, but the fire’s speed caused severe congestion on the limited roads leading out of town. Paradise was devastated. 

The Camp Fire ultimately destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed at least 85 people, making it California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire. Entire neighbourhoods were reduced to ashes and thousands of residents lost their homes and possessions

The disaster highlighted the vulnerability of communities located near forests and other fire-prone vegetation. California’s dry climate creates wildfire risks, but hotter conditions and prolonged drought can dry vegetation further, contributing to severe fires spreading rapidly.

The Camp Fire also raised questions about electricity infrastructure, evacuation planning and building in high-risk areas. Paradise has since become an important example of the challenges involved in rebuilding communities after wildfire disasters.

Malibu wildfire

Southern California experienced a major disaster at the same time as the Camp Fire: the Woolsey Fire. Beginning on November 8, 2018, the fire spread through Los Angeles and Ventura counties before reaching Malibu and the Pacific coast.

The Malibu fire received huge publicity because it affected the property of celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Gerard Butler, Kim Kardashian and Robin Thicke. Kardashian and partner Kanye West employed a private firefighting company to hold off flames while they fled to another property in LA.

Strong winds and extremely dry vegetation helped drive flames rapidly through the Santa Monica Mountains. About 295,000 people were ordered to evacuate as communities came under threat.

The Woolsey Fire burned about 96,949 acres and destroyed more than 1600 structures. Three people were killed, and many homes in and around Malibu were destroyed or damaged. The fire burned large areas of natural habitat and parkland.

The disasters demonstrated that wildfires are not only an environmental problem but a major social and economic threat. Expanding development in fire-prone landscapes means more people and properties are exposed when fires occur.

Root cause

The increasingly destructive heatwaves, droughts, floods, hurricanes and wildfires in the US are not just “natural phenomena” nor simply the result of global heating. They are the result of an interaction of both, combined with the reckless actions of US capitalism.

Hurricanes are natural phenomena, as are drought, fire and extreme rainfall. But the social catastrophe that follows them is neither wholly natural nor politically neutral. It arises from the interaction between a warming climate and a society organised around private accumulation, fossil-fuel consumption, speculative property development and profound inequalities of wealth and power.

Global heating is changing the physical conditions under which US society operates. At the same time, capitalists continue to construct houses, infrastructure and entire communities in places increasingly exposed to fire, flooding, extreme heat and rising seas.

Profits from development are appropriated privately, while substantial portions of the risks are eventually transferred to the public through firefighting costs, disaster relief, infrastructure reconstruction, subsidised insurance and emergency intervention. What appears after as an unforeseeable natural catastrophe can therefore be understood as the predictable outcome of particular relations between capital, land and the state.

Global heating and extreme weather

Across North America, record high temperatures are increasingly common relative to record lows. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that climate change is already contributing to more frequent and intense extreme events across the continent and projects further intensification of heatwaves, extreme storms and wildfire activity.

The relationship with rainfall is somewhat more complicated but equally important. A warmer atmosphere can contain more water vapour, creating the possibility of heavier rain. This does not mean everywhere becomes wetter. Indeed, parts of western and southwestern US are experiencing increased aridity. Climate change can intensify apparently opposite extremes: heavier downpours in some circumstances, more severe drying in others.

Nor does climate change “cause” every hurricane in the simplistic sense sometimes implied in popular discussion. Tropical cyclones existed before industrial capitalism. But warmer oceans, increased atmospheric moisture and rising sea levels alter the environment in which hurricanes occur. Consequently, a storm striking a coastline whose sea level has already risen can produce greater flooding than an otherwise equivalent storm would have in an earlier climatic period.

A Marxist analysis need not exaggerate or simplify the science. Indeed, it benefits from doing precisely the opposite. The point is not that every US disaster can be individually blamed upon global heating. It is that capital accumulation has altered the background climatic system upon which human civilisation depends, changing the probabilities and potential severity of numerous hazards.

Fossil capitalism and climate change

The common terminology of “human-induced climate change” is scientifically correct but socially incomplete. Humanity in the abstract did not industrialise the world through collective democratic decision-making. Fossil-fuel dependence developed within particular systems of production and relations of power.

The industrial capitalism of the 19th century was coal-powered. Oil became central to the automobile, aviation, petrochemical and military economies of the 20th century. Natural gas became another pillar of industrial production, electricity generation and domestic consumption.

Enormous corporations accumulated capital through extracting, processing, transporting and selling these fuels. States constructed roads, airports, suburban infrastructure and military systems around abundant fossil energy.

The climate crisis is therefore inseparable from fossil capitalism: an economic system in which capital accumulation became historically intertwined with fossil energy.

This does not mean ordinary consumers have no environmental impact. US citizens drive cars, heat houses and purchase carbon-intensive commodities. But consumer behaviour occurs within infrastructures inherited from previous rounds of investment.

A worker who must commute 30 miles because affordable housing is distant from employment does not exercise the same power over the climate system as a corporation deciding whether to invest billions in new fossil-fuel production. To treat both as individual “carbon footprints” dissolves radically unequal economic power into an imaginary community of equally responsible consumers.

Capitalism also creates a structural obstacle to adequate climate action. Individual firms must compete, generate returns and protect accumulated investment. Fossil-fuel reserves, refineries, pipelines, power stations and associated infrastructure represent enormous quantities of capital. Rapid decarbonisation threatens to strand some of those assets.

The transition required by climate science consequently confronts powerful owners for whom continued fossil-fuel exploitation is not an ideological abstraction but the basis of profit. The climate crisis reveals a contradiction between the requirements of indefinite capital accumulation and the ecological conditions required for stable human societies.

Wildfires: Where climate and property meet

Wildfire demonstrates this contradiction with unusual clarity. Fire is an ancient ecological process. Many North American ecosystems evolved with periodic burning. Indigenous peoples deliberately used fire to manage landscapes long before European colonisation. It would therefore be absurd to claim that global heating invented wildfire.

What climate change alters is fire weather. Rising temperatures increase evaporative demand, dry vegetation and soils, and can extend periods during which landscapes are combustible. But climate is only one side of the equation. The other is development.

US metropolitan growth has increasingly pushed housing into the wildland-urban interface: landscapes where houses and infrastructure encounter forests, grasslands, chaparral and other combustible vegetation.

This expansion is driven partly by population growth, but also by the political economy of land. Developers purchase peripheral land, obtain planning permission, subdivide it and transform it into a commodity whose value may increase enormously once houses can be constructed upon it. Ecological risk is converted into a property market.

This process generates a remarkable contradiction. The qualities that make such locations commercially attractive — the forest, hillside, canyon, mountain view, privacy or apparently untouched landscape — may be precisely those that increase exposure to wildfire. Nature is simultaneously marketed as an amenity and encountered as a hazard.

Climate change intensifies the contradiction. A development model constructed around historical expectations of fire frequency now operates in a climatic regime in which extreme fire weather is becoming more dangerous in many US western regions. The physical landscape changes, but the imperative to realise value from land continues.

Mike Davis and the political economy of Malibu

Few US intellectuals understood this relationship more than the late historian and urban theorist Mike Davis. In Ecology of Fear, Davis deals with the interlinked issues of wildfires and urban expansion. 

Long before the present succession of climate, Davis argued Southern California’s spectacular disasters revealed the political economy concealed beneath the language of natural calamity. His work provides an exceptionally useful starting point for understanding the US today. Climate change has made Davis’s analysis not obsolete but more urgent.1

In his celebrated and deliberately provocative chapter, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” in Ecology of Fear Davis attacked the conventional representation of Southern Californian wildfire as an unpredictable natural tragedy. He documented the long history of fire in the Santa Monica Mountains and emphasised that Malibu’s susceptibility to burning was hardly a secret. 

Yet expensive residential development repeatedly expanded into this hazardous landscape. Fire destroyed property; public resources were mobilised; houses were rebuilt; development continued.

Davis interpreted this not primarily as individual foolishness but as political economy. Wealthy communities possessed the economic and political capacity to demand extraordinary protection for private property. Firefighting resources, infrastructure, insurance arrangements and disaster assistance helped make settlement possible in places where the underlying ecological risks remained severe.

Davis saw affluent settlements in the hills partly as landscapes of social separation — places whose exclusivity offered distance from the working-class and racially diverse metropolis below. He argued that development in hazardous areas was sustained through various forms of public subsidy and protection.

His argument is sometimes caricatured as saying that wealthy people’s houses should simply be allowed to burn. That misses its political purpose. “Letting Malibu burn” was a provocation intended to expose the irrationality of a system that repeatedly socialised the costs of protecting highly valuable private property built within a known fire ecology.

Who benefits? Who carries the risk?

Developers receive profits when land is converted into housing. Landowners receive increased property values. Financial institutions receive mortgage interest. Affluent purchasers obtain desirable homes.

Yet when catastrophe arrives, firefighters, municipal authorities, state agencies and federal disaster programs intervene. Roads must be maintained for evacuation, utilities repaired, emergency shelters opened and ruined infrastructure reconstructed. Private accumulation thereby generates public obligations.

Davis contrasted this lavish protection of valuable hillside property with the hazards experienced by working-class inhabitants of Central LA. Poorer residents might inhabit overcrowded or inadequately maintained buildings where mundane structural fires posed persistent dangers. Their disasters lacked the spectacular imagery of flames sweeping across Malibu hillsides and frequently attracted fewer resources and less political attention.

This is the class geography of disaster.

From wildfires to urban conflagration

Davis’s warning has acquired still greater significance as settlements penetrate combustible landscapes. He anticipated the possibility of a “post-suburban fire regime”: a situation in which development and changing environmental conditions produced catastrophes exceeding the familiar category of wildland fire.

This concept helps explain why the wildland-urban interface matters so greatly. Once flames or embers enter dense settlements, houses themselves become fuel. Wooden structures, fences, garages, cars, vegetation and other combustible materials can transmit fire through neighbourhoods. What begins as wildfire can become urban conflagration.

Climate change and suburbanisation therefore interact rather than operating as separate causes. Climate change can produce hotter and drier conditions favourable to extreme fire. Property development places more structures within reach of those fires. Infrastructure introduces additional ignition sources. Once communities ignite, the built environment can amplify destruction.

The result is a chain of causation connecting the global atmosphere to the mortgage market.

The class politics of adaptation

Disaster is also profoundly unequal after it occurs.

A wealthy household may possess comprehensive insurance, savings, several vehicles and alternative accommodation. Its members may have flexible employment allowing them to evacuate early.

A poor household may have none of these advantages. Renters may lose possessions without possessing adequate insurance. Low-paid workers may lose wages when businesses close. Homeless people and outdoor workers are exceptionally exposed to extreme heat and smoke.

Even evacuation assumes resources. Instructions to “leave immediately” mean something different to a household with two cars, credit cards and relatives elsewhere than to somebody without a vehicle or enough money for a hotel.

Climate inequality therefore cannot be measured solely by those whose house physically encounters the hazard. Class determines the capacity to anticipate, escape, absorb and recover from catastrophe.

The same principle operates with heat. Air conditioning can transform lethal outside temperatures into an inconvenience, but only for those who can afford it. A construction worker, farm labourer or delivery worker encounters heat as an occupational hazard precisely because their labour must continue under conditions from which wealthier people can retreat.

Capitalist society distributes environmental vulnerability through the labour market and housing market long before the hurricane arrives or the temperature record is broken.

Trumpism and climate denial

Trump’s politics represents an unusually aggressive defence of the fossil-fuel economy. Trump has repeatedly attacked climate policies, promoted increased oil and gas exploitation and portrayed environmental regulation as an obstacle to prosperity. In September, for example, he attacked Britain’s net-zero policies while urging greater exploitation of North Sea oil and gas.

This is not merely rhetorical climate scepticism. It has been translated into state policy. In February, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rescinded the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and eliminated the federal greenhouse gas emissions standards for highway vehicles that depended upon it. The administration described this as the largest deregulatory action in US history.

The administration’s argument should be represented accurately. It maintains that the Clean Air Act does not provide the EPA with the statutory authority claimed for these regulations and argues the regulations impose enormous economic costs without materially affecting global climate change.

A Marxist interpretation, however, asks whose conception of “cost” dominates such calculations.

Environmental regulation imposes visible costs upon particular corporations and consumers today. Climate damage produces costs distributed across society and across decades: destroyed homes, higher insurance premiums, failed crops, damaged infrastructure, firefighting expenditures, heat mortality and disaster reconstruction. 

Deregulation therefore appears to “save” money by shifting costs from capital onto society, workers, governments and future generations.

The Trump administration’s relaxation of vehicle-efficiency requirements illustrates this conflict. Government estimates associated with the weaker standards indicate lower initial vehicle costs but substantially greater fuel consumption and carbon emissions between now and 2050.

Trumpism consequently does more than deny or minimise climate science. It translates the immediate interests of fossil-fuel production and carbon-intensive accumulation into a populist political language: cheap petrol, consumer freedom, energy dominance and opposition to supposedly elitist environmental regulation.

Its success among sections of the working class cannot simply be dismissed as stupidity. Decades of neoliberal restructuring have made many workers suspicious of policies whose costs they are expected to bear. A badly designed transition can close a refinery, raise household energy costs or eliminate industrial employment while leaving corporate wealth untouched.

The left cannot answer right-wing climate politics simply by demanding sacrifice from ordinary people.

Climate politics and green capitalism

A Marxist climate program must instead confront ownership and class power.

Market mechanisms alone are inadequate when investment decisions controlling energy, transport and housing remain dominated by private profit. Carbon pricing may alter incentives, but a sufficiently rapid transformation requires huge planning and investment: renewable electricity, transmission networks, public transport, building insulation, resilient infrastructure and the managed retreat of development from locations that cannot reasonably be defended.

Such policies immediately raise distributive questions. Who pays? Who owns the new energy infrastructure? What happens to fossil fuel workers? Who decides where housing is constructed? Should developers profit from hazardous land and subsequently transfer disaster costs to the public?

A socialist response insists that decarbonisation cannot be achieved by making poorer households absorb the costs while leaving concentrated wealth intact. Workers leaving fossil industries require guaranteed employment, retraining, pensions and regional investment.

Public transport and energy-efficient housing need to provide material improvements rather than moral instruction. Adaptation needs to prioritise vulnerable communities rather than simply defending the most expensive property.

This is the substance behind the idea of a just transition. Without redistribution, climate policy can become another form of austerity. With redistribution and democratic planning, decarbonisation can become part of a wider transformation of everyday life.

Disaster capitalism and nature

Karl Marx described capital as possessing an extraordinary drive towards expansion. Competition forces firms to accumulate, innovate and enlarge production. Historically, this produced enormous rises in productive capacity.

But capital treats nature as a free input or waste repository. The atmosphere became, in effect, a free dumping ground for carbon generated by industry. The bill for that historical externalisation is now arriving.

The irony is that capitalism creates new commodities from the crisis it helped produce: private firefighting, air filtration, climate-controlled buildings, insurance products, carbon markets, disaster reconstruction and new adaptation technologies.

Those with sufficient money can purchase more protection while those without experience climate change directly. A society may become simultaneously richer in commodities and less secure ecologically.

Davis’s importance lies in understanding this process spatially. Capital does not merely exploit nature; it reorganises landscapes. It determines where factories, roads and suburbs appear, which neighbourhoods receive investment and which populations inhabit hazardous environments. Environmental catastrophe has a geography produced through previous rounds of accumulation.

Paying for the climate crisis

The rising incidence and intensity of extreme weather in the US cannot be understood through meteorology alone. Anthropogenic global heating is altering the climatic background, increasing extreme heat and heavy rainfall and contributing to more dangerous fire weather in substantial parts of North America.

But climate hazards become social disasters through decisions about land, housing, infrastructure and investment. This is where Marxist analysis adds something essential.

The central question is not whether climate change exists. It is who produced the emissions, who profits from the economic system that generated them, who is exposed to the consequences and who will be required to pay for adaptation and reconstruction.

Wildfires make these contradictions dramatically visible. Fossil-fuel combustion contributes to a hotter and, in many western US regions, more fire-prone climate. Property capital simultaneously extends development into combustible landscapes.

Private actors realise profits from development while public institutions assume substantial responsibility for protecting and rebuilding endangered communities. The wealthy generally possess greater resources to escape and recover, while workers and poorer communities absorb disproportionate social consequences.

Trumpism offers one response to this crisis: defend fossil capital, weaken environmental regulation, expand extraction and present continuing carbon-intensive capitalism as economic freedom. It has political power partly because liberal climate politics has too often failed to demonstrate how decarbonisation can improve rather than diminish working-class living standards.

Davis offered a radically different way of seeing the problem. His genius was to look at a burning hillside and see not merely flames and vegetation but class relations, property values, state power and urban history. The landscape itself contained a history of political choices.

His analysis has become more relevant as the climate warms. What he described in Malibu can increasingly be recognised elsewhere: private development advancing into hazardous territory, enormous resources mobilised after predictable catastrophe, and reconstruction preparing the conditions for another cycle.

The phrase “natural disaster” consequently conceals the most important question. Nature supplies the hurricane, drought, heat or fire, but society determines what stands in its path.

What society for a warming planet?

The climate crisis is therefore ultimately a struggle over what kind of society will inhabit a warming planet.

One possibility is an increasingly fortified capitalism in which wealthy communities purchase protection, insurance retreats from unprofitable territories, public money repeatedly rescues private property and the poor are left increasingly exposed to heat, flood and fire.

Another would treat energy, housing, transport and adaptation as matters of democratic planning rather than opportunities for accumulation.

Global heating has transformed that choice from an abstract ideological dispute into a material necessity. Fires, floods and heatwaves are warnings not merely about atmospheric chemistry but about a social order whose pursuit of endless accumulation is colliding with ecological limits.

Davis’s radical insight was that catastrophe exposes the normally hidden organisation of society. In the age of global heating, the US is receiving that lesson with increasing frequency: the climate may produce the hazard, but capitalism determines much of the vulnerability — and class determines who will most likely pay the price.

Phil Hearse is a veteran revolutionary socialist, a member of Britain’s National Education Union and a supporter of Anti*Capitalist Resistance

• 1

  Much of this article is based on Mike Davis’s writing, including “ Who Will Build the Ark?” (published at New Left Review), “ El Diablo in the Wine Country” (published in London Review of Books) and Ecology of Fear (an excerpt of which can be read here).

  His writing on other topics includes The Monster at Our Door (2003), which predicted a mass epidemic that eventually occurred as COVID (this has been updated as The Monster Enters); Planet of Slums (2006); and Prisoners of the American Dream (1998). 

  See a complete list of his book at Verso’s Mike Davis page.

With Türkiye to Host COP31, Wildfires Spark Demand for Fossil Fuel Phaseout

“The climate crisis is here, and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events are increasing day by day,” said 350.org’s Türkiye manager.


Flames and thick smoke rise from a forest fire in Adana, Türkiye, as firefighting efforts continue on September 8, 2026.
(Photo by Eren Bozkurt/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Sep 09, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Scientists have long warned that the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis means more frequent and destructive wildfires, and blazes raging in Türkiye this week have sparked a fresh call to rapidly phase out planet-heating coal, gas, and oil.

As firefighters battled blazes in three southern Turkish provinces, Efe Baysal, Türkiye manager at the global advocacy group 350.org, pointed out that the country is set to host the next United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP31.

“In November, the world will gather in Antalya for COP31 to discuss the steps that must be taken against the climate crisis,” Baysal said in a Wednesday statement. “Today, however, that same city is battling an uncontrollable wildfire that began in Aksu district of Antalya and spread throughout the region. Reports of fires are also coming in from Adana and Mersin.”

“Our prayers are with those fighting the blazes on the ground to defend life,” he continued. “The wildfires occurring primarily in Antalya demonstrate this truth once again: Rising temperatures create the conditions for fires to start more easily, spread faster, and become more destructive. The climate crisis is here, and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events are increasing day by day.”

Baysal said that “assuming the COP31 presidency, Türkiye’s responsibility is even more crucial. At COP31, Türkiye should aim to produce concrete outcomes to advance the transition away from fossil fuels. To make this leadership credible, Türkiye should announce a timeline for a phaseout of coal without delay.”

“It should initiate a just transition to renewable energy that will reduce our dependence on coal, oil, and gas,” he added. “It is not enough merely to respond to the consequences of the climate crisis. We must eliminate the causes that exacerbate it. COP31 is an opportunity for Türkiye to demonstrate true leadership in this direction.”



Previous UN summits on the planetary crisis have ended in deep disappointment, with critics calling the “empty deal” that came out of COP30 in Brazil last year “a stark reminder that the answers to the climate crisis do not lie inside the climate talks,” and, a year earlier, blasting COP29 in Azerbaijan as “a dumpster fire” and “a big F U to climate justice, to the poorest communities who are on the frontlines of climate breakdown.”

Since those summits, there has been a constant stream of events that have fueled fears of a hotter world—and United Nations scientists are now warning that preventing at least a temporary temperature rise above 1.5°C, relative to preindustrial levels, is not possible, but humanity can still limit the damage by dramatically lowering emissions.

“This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires, and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said last week. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible.”

The fires in Türkiye have already proven deadly. The Aksu district mayor, Isa Yildirim, said on social media that one person died after suffering a heart attack during the fire there.

That blaze has also caused injuries. Citing the Turkish Anadolu Agency, The Associated Press reported that “two people were hospitalized with injuries to their legs while six others affected by smoke were treated on site.”

As Deutsche Presse-Agentur detailed Wednesday:
Forest fires are common in Turkey in the summer months, fueled by long periods of drought and strong winds.

Cihan Erdönmez, an expert at Istanbul University, said triggers for the fires were often poorly maintained power lines running through forests.

Forestry Minister İbrahim Yumaklı said there had been more than 5,000 forest fires in Turkey in 2025 and 96% of them were directly or indirectly caused by humans.

Meanwhile, 350.org called the current blazes “a reminder that a hotter, drier climate will continue to exact its toll on ordinary people unless leaders act urgently to phase out fossil fuels.”