Thread by @dwallacewells

Last week, I published a long essay about the grotesque, unconscionable, and yet entirely normalized costs of air pollution—10 million deaths a year. Reducing fossil fuel alone won’t solve the problem. Wildfire is a rapidly growing source. A thread (1/x). lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/…

"In 2020, wildfire accounted for more than half of all air pollution in the western U.S.—meaning more particulate matter infiltrated the lungs of Americans living in those states from out-of-control burning of forest than from all other human and industrial activity combined."

"By midcentury, those fires are expected to at least double, possibly grow sixfold, and conceivably more..."

"...with each tree burned releasing carbon as surely as coal, along with unconscionable masses of particulate matter recently found to be ten times more harmful to human health than that released by tailpipes or factories."

"The worst air quality in the world is now routinely registered in California, and although these record-setting events typically last only days, the smoke from last year’s fires can be held responsible for five thousand additional pre-term births in the state."

"Globally, wildfires produce only a fraction of air pollution, but the fraction is growing. Wildfire emissions from this year have already reached 4.7 billion tons of carbon, not far off the 5.1 billion produced last year by the US, the world’s second biggest emitter."

As we begin to draw down the pollution produced by burning within our control, we are unleashing a new wave of burning that lies beyond it.

“What does it feel like to live on the brink of a vast historical change?” the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson asked recently. “It feels like now,” he answered.

“A few weeks ago, my wife and I drove across the US east to west," he went on. "In Wyoming, we hit a pall of wildfire smoke so thick that we couldn’t see the mountains just a few miles away on each side of the road. It went on like that for 1,000 miles.”

Fire is eternal in the American west, of course, but when climate skeptics point to evidence of ancient megafires, they neglect to mention that at the time there weren’t forty million people living in California.

When those alive today recall the great fires of their youths, they are remembering ones that burned a few thousand acres, perhaps 20,000, maybe 50,000. In the entire 20th century, there were only five that burned 100,000. In 2020, you got ten such fires in a single year.

One single blaze, the Mendocino Complex, burned more than a million acres, creating a new term, “gigafire,” along the way.

Each of these coughs up an unprecedented amount of smoke, indeed most of them so much of it the fire creates new weather systems—pyrocumulus clouds, fire tornadoes, lightning storms ignited within clouds of smoke, the lightning traveling sometimes miles from the central flame...

...and sparking, where it lands, more fire, producing more smoke.

"The three worst years for wildfire in modern California history by acres burned are 2020, 2021, and 2018. The seven largest fires in the state’s modern history burned in 2020, 2021, 2018, 2020, 2020, 2020 and 2020."

A chart of the 20 worst published by Cal Fire midway through the 2021 season tells the story even more vividly.

About two thirds is made up of 2020 and 2021, with most of the remainder from the period 2000 to 2019, and just a tiny slice, perhaps five percent, covering the period from 1932 to 1999, when Joan Didion would periodically write about living under the threat of flames.

For most of that period, earthquakes offered a more vivid vision of local apocalypse, though as Mike Davis has sharply observed, Californians often took pleasure in exaggerating that threat.

Only recently, particularly since the Camp Fire, has fear of fire taken center stage; the climate scientist Daniel Swain recently told me that he knew multiple Californians personally who’d had to each outrun flames from multiple different fires in multiple parts of the state.

This summer, in the resort community of Lake Tahoe — where the Air Quality Index hit 700 — those trapped inside during oppressive weeks of smoke finally fled, then watched from their primary homes as fire itself threatened the vacation town.

Fear of smoke is not just novel but logical, indeed adaptive. In many parts of the state, you can be confident your house won’t burn, under any circumstances, and even the most destructive seasons now burn through thousands of structures, not millions.

You can avoid the flames of most wildfire, chances are. But smoke cannot be quarantined, which means it spreads across demarcations of class as well as state and indeed nation—this year poisoning air as far east as Boston and New York and ultimately across the Atlantic to Europe.

In California, already, air purifiers are now almost universal among the well-to-do, air-quality apps are designed for daily visits, and residents discuss wind patterns not just to anticipate fire but the path of smoke, as well.

(“The West Coast’s Hottest New Trend? Finding Breathable Air” Eve Peyser recently wrote.)

And while better forest management in fire-prone areas can reduce the risk considerably...

...the current excess of what is called in California with a horrifying informality 'fuel' means that perhaps 20 million acres—one fifth of the state, by far the country’s most populated—would have to be burned before its landscape could return to a more stable fire equilibrium.

Those 'controlled burns' are designed to release less smoke than the uncontrolled. But they do release some.

Already, in California, enough carbon is released each year from wildfire to undo all the green-energy gains made by the state’s climate policies, often described in the American context as offering a progressive gold-standard.

"The story is global, the world wrapped in smoke. In British Columbia, more carbon is now unleashed each year from forest fires than from all other sources."

"In Australia, where bushfires are an enduring feature of both landscape and legend, 46 million acres burned in the 2019-20 season – ten times the record-setting California season that would follow, and enough to kill, it was estimated, more than a billion animals."

"The smoke in Sydney Harbour was so thick ferries couldn’t navigate it, and the particulates so dense that fire alarms were triggered in office buildings, the sensors concluding that there had to be flames nearby."

"In Siberia, where ‘zombie fires’ now burn regularly through the Arctic winter, carbon released from forests in flames regularly sends heavy smoke across the North Pole to the other side of the planet."

"And then there’s South America, where 30 per cent of the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, was lost to fire in a single year – 2020."

"In the Amazon, so much land is burned to clear trees for farming that the fires release three times as much carbon as all other forms of emission in Brazil—enough to make the rainforest itself, if it were a country, the world’s fifth largest emitter..."

"and to turn the celebrated ‘carbon sink’, which might aid in our fight against warming, into a net source of global carbon."

This year, in the Amazon deforestation is up 33%.

"In theory, the burning could be halted, and it may at least be slowed if Lula succeeds Bolsonaro and returns to Brazil’s presidency next year."

"But the longer-term decline of the rainforest, and other 'carbon sink' forests elsewhere in the world, may lie outside the reach of national policy, as current global emissions trajectories suggest the possibility of an irreversible tipping point for the region by the 2040s..."

"...after which the Amazon could feature less forest and more grass, less new growth and more new dying, more heat and therefore more fire."

"The Amazon has long been called ‘the lungs of the planet’. It may soon become a bellows. Everything we burn, we breathe." (x/x)