Climate-Fueled Drought Douses American West in “Gasoline” Ahead Of Fire Season:

Submitted by Peter Wirth, CCAA co-founder.

CCAA was born out of the belief that information on the seriousness of climate change while available, was lacking in CNY media. We hoped that once individuals could understand how dangerous the issue was they would be more willing to take action. Each month we plan to include articles on how climate change is impacting the planet.

The situation will continue to get worse if we don’t reduce carbon emissions. It is simple physics. Increase the CO2 concentration and the planet warms.  The article below was written by Nathan Kauffman and published by Climate Nexus.
 

Nexus Media News X May 25, 2021

At the opening of the 2020 wildfire season, 3% of California was in extreme or exceptional drought and more than 4% burned. This year, more than 73% of the state faces similar drought conditions.

In other parts of the Southwest, juniper trees are dying off at increased rates because of the intensification of a climate change-fueled mega-drought and turning forests, with trees covered in dead needles, into 30-foot-tall tinder boxes. “It’s like having gasoline out there,” Brian Steinhardt, a national forest fire zone manager in Arizona, told the AP.

Soil in the western U.S. is drier than at any time since 1895 (the year Frederick Douglass died and Babe Ruth was born), which means, “the dice are loaded toward a lot of forest fire this year,” UCLA climate and fire scientist Park Williams told the AP. New research also shows wildfires are burning at higher elevations as climate change dries out forests previously too wet to support large burns. All this adds up, Steinhardt, a veteran of 32 fire seasons, told the AP, to “probably one of the driest and potentially most challenging situations I’ve been in.”

California, on the verge of its first ever official water shortage declaration, is increasing its wildfire prevention spending 16-fold, but states across the West, from Oregon to New Mexico, are staring down the barrel of a brutally dry and dangerous fire season. Water shortages that “just couldn’t be any worse,” according to Klamath Irrigation District president Ty Kliewer, threaten massive die-offs of the salmon central to the diet and culture of the Yurok Tribe.

One silver lining for the 2021 fire season is that 2020’s record-shattering burns were fueled by a highly unusual concurrence of record-breaking heatwaves and intense, widespread lightning strikes, UCLA meteorologist Daniel Swain told the AP. But, he added, “I’m really grasping at straws here. All we have going for us is dumb luck.”

(Fire season: AP; Higher elevations: The Conversation; California spending: Grist; New Mexico: New Mexico Political Report; Oregon: Utility Dive; Klamath water shortages: AP; Climate Signals background: Drought, Wildfires, 2020 Western Wildfire Season, California Heatwave August 2020, California Heatwave September 2020)

The Bigger Picture: Climate Justice

Submitted by Gavin Landless, CCAA volunteer.

In 1979, Margaret Bean and other residents of Houston, Texas, filed a lawsuit against Southwestern Waste Management Corp.  Their claim was that siting solid waste facilities primarily in black neighborhoods was environmental racism, and unconstitutional per the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.  Dr. Robert Bullard, husband of attorney Linda McKeever Bullard who represented Margaret Bean, conducted a study of the garbage dumps, incinerators and landfills around Houston, and found that 82% of the city’s waste was dumped in majority black neighborhoods, despite only 25% of the area’s population being black.  Bean lost the court case, but environmental racism as a concept had arrived.  Dr. Bullard, now Distinguished Professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, is known as the “father of environmental justice” and continues his advocacy work to this day.

Climate justice applies this same concept to the issue of climate change specifically, seeking to reframe it as not just a physical or environmental issue, but a social, cultural and political one.  A major reason that we have such a huge climate crisis in the first place, the argument goes, is because those entities who cause the most pollution for their own profit ensure that their pollutants primarily affect relatively powerless communities of color, and other sectors of society without the political clout to fight back.

Sadly, examples of climate injustice abound.  In 2019, researchers at Portland State University and the Science Museum of Virginia published a study showing that urban neighborhoods historically affected by racially motivated town planning are now the hottest areas in nearly all the cities they studied.  Those primarily affected today?  Lower-income households and communities of color.  Had the decision-makers behind the fossil fuel companies, petrochemicals giants and other major polluters directly felt the effects of their own damage, would the will for meaningful change have taken this long?  Probably not.

A paper from June 2020 in the journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, looked at the birth weights of almost three million babies born near oil wells in California and found that those born within one kilometer (0.62 miles) of the highest producing wells were at higher risk of having low birth weight than the other babies in the study.

Even public parks in urban areas are inequitable.  The Trust for Public Land published a study last year that showed green spaces in majority black and brown areas are on average half the size and five times as crowded as parks in majority white areas.  This matters as global warming takes hold: areas close to parks may be several degrees cooler than areas without, due to the heat island effect.

Addressing the climate crisis is inextricably intertwined with addressing other prevalent forms of social injustice in our communities, but therein lies a flash of hope.  As awareness grows about the inseparability of environmental and social issues, coalitions form and activists with a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise find themselves working together on the same big problems.  There is room for everyone in this movement and that, perhaps, is a comforting thought.

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