CALIFORNIA IN BURNDOWN - HERE IS WHY - " Yet for all his rhetoric, Newsom has helped expand the fossil fuel industry in California along similar lines to Trump’s policies nationally. During his first 10 months in office, Newsom approved 33 percent more new oil and gas drilling permits than his predecessor, Jerry Brown. He also dropped a proposal from earlier this year to further regulate the industry after his administration received a letter from the California Independent Petroleum Association, an oil and gas lobbying group, urging him to do so."

 September 14, 2020

California is burning away

By Silvio Canto, Jr.

It's sad to see, but California may be burning itself out of existence.  It's hard to see how these cities can recover at a time when public budgets are deeply in the red and taxpayers are fleeing.

This is from Chron:

California has become a warming, burning, epidemic-challenged and expensive state, with many who live in sophisticated cities, idyllic oceanfront towns and windblown mountain communities thinking hard about the viability of a place many have called home forever. 

For the first time in a decade, more people left California last year for other states than arrived.

A couple of days ago, I met a young man visiting Texas from California.  We spoke for about an hour, and it was like reading the front-page news.

He is self employed and lives with his mom in the San Jose area.  He loves the lifestyle but is constantly wondering if he can afford to live there much longer.  Then he added that the streets are unsafe, and he is concerned to leave Mom at home by herself.

I understand that he is just one of 40 million who live there.  Nevertheless, California has reached a breaking point, as the article points out:

It is an economy, the world's fifth largest, that is built by government policy and private enterprise to favor the skilled in Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the wealthy everywhere else. The rest of California is increasingly a service economy that pays a far larger share of its income in taxes and on housing and food.

Median income in the state is $75,277. The median home price in San Francisco is $1.3 million, nearly twice that of Los Angeles. The state government is doing next to nothing to close the gap. 

Doing nothing?  What can they do?  Taxes are already sky-high.  Regulations are killing businesses.  And now the wildfires confirm that the state Legislature has been listening to too many environmentalists.

Let's hope it turns around, but I wouldn't bet on it.

PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

The California wildfires, climate change and capitalism

14 September 2020

The wildfires burning through the US West Coast, the largest on record in California and poised to become the largest in the history of the United States, have already killed 33 people and threaten to displace hundreds of thousands.

Just one of these fires, the August Complex in California, has consumed more than 875,000 acres. Until yesterday afternoon, the entire city of Portland was on alert for a mass evacuation as local and state officials warned of a “mass fatality event” if the fires reached Oregon’s largest city.

In a year that has already seen massive and uncontrolled wildfires in the Amazon and in Australia, the California fires make clear the immense dangers posed to human society by climate change, and the total inability of capitalism to address the problem.

The disaster is compounded by the coronavirus pandemic, particularly in California, where the number of cases is still increasing by more than 3,000 a day, with a total of more than 760,000 confirmed cases so far. Residents are now forced either to stay in place and socially distance, risking death by wildfire, or evacuate to a shelter and risk infection.

The official “COVID-19 Interim Shelter Guidance” from the office of Oregon Governor Kate Brown admits these dangers. The document warns: “All shelter residents, even those without symptoms, may have been exposed to COVID-19 and should self-quarantine after leaving the shelter in accordance with state and local recommendations.”

Scientists have long warned that climate change is intensifying wildfires. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned just last year that as global temperatures increase, damage caused by wildfires will grow proportionally. This has been noted for regions such as the American West, but also for Australia, Brazil, central Africa, Europe and even Siberia.

Further scientific warnings were raised earlier this year in conjunction with the record wildfires in Australia and Brazil.

Like hurricanes on the East Coast and in states on the Gulf of Mexico, the likelihood of natural disasters that form a “perfect storm” of weather conditions increases as global warming continues unabated. Hurricanes such as Sandy, Harvey and Maria, once thought of as “storms of the century,” are now expected to happen once every 16 years. The same is true of the infernos now raging.

The Trump administration is spearheading a frontal assault on all environmental regulations, eliminating even the most token restrictions on emissions, fracking and offshore drilling. Trump has also rolled back controls for emissions of methane—a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide—and appointed Scott Pruitt, an attorney previously employed by the oil and gas industry to sue the Environmental Protection Agency, to head that same organization.

Yet for all his rhetoric, Newsom has helped expand the fossil fuel industry in California along similar lines to Trump’s policies nationally. During his first 10 months in office, Newsom approved 33 percent more new oil and gas drilling permits than his predecessor, Jerry Brown. He also dropped a proposal from earlier this year to further regulate the industry after his administration received a letter from the California Independent Petroleum Association, an oil and gas lobbying group, urging him to do so.For his part, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, attempted to pose as a strong advocate for climate science. At a press conference outside the North Complex Fire, he told reporters: “The debate is over around climate change,” adding, “This is a climate damn emergency. This is real and it’s happening.”

The flagship for such hypocrisy is the “Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice” put out by Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. It asserts that a “Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face,” and claims that Biden will “[e]nsure the US achieves a 100 percent clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”

Readers should recall the legacy of the Obama-Biden administration on environmental policy before expecting Biden to carry out any of this platform. During their second year in office they spearheaded the efforts to conceal the full extent of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest oil spill to date in the Gulf of Mexico, which caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damages to the entire region. After it became impossible to hide the hundreds of milliions of gallons of oil being pumped in the Gulf, they worked to shield BP as much as possible from liability while accelerating the deep-sea drilling deregulation that caused the explosion in the first place.

Obama spearheaded efforts to expand offshore and Arctic drilling. In 2015, he let Royal Dutch Shell resume drilling after a series of near-disasters three years prior. That same year, he opened up the Atlantic coast for drilling for the first time, despite warnings against offshore drilling issued in the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon.

The Obama White house did nothing to stop the environmentally destructive hydraulic fracturing (fracking) techniques that massively expanded under Obama and Biden in the search by various corporations for cheap sources of natural gas.

Biden’s platform also shows that the “Green New Deal” is a vacuous slogan that can mean anything one wants. Biden can call for a “Green New Deal” while simultaneously declaring, “I am not banning fracking,” which has already poisoned much of Appalachia.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released the initial “deal” proposal, she called for “a transition to 100 percent renewable energy within 10 years, and actions to “virtually eliminate poverty in the United States.” Essentially the only common characteristic between the two plans is the assertion that it is possible to solve the climate crisis without challenging the capitalist system and the private ownership of production.

It is also significant that the demand for a “Green New Deal” has been adopted by the Green Party. While they may seek to contrast themselves from the Democrats, the Greens' program on climate change makes a call to “Enact an emergency Green New Deal to turn the tide on climate change,” essentially verbatim the language in Biden’s plan.

The Green Party also calls for a “WWII-scale national mobilization to halt climate change,” modelled on the original proposal by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The wartime rhetoric only underscores the nationalist character of this approach, based on the idea that the climate crisis can be solved in a single country, or through capitalist states addressing climate change via treaty agreements.

Climate change itself is a global phenomenon. As many recent scientific papers on the topic have stressed, the only real solution to halting global warming and all its ongoing and oncoming catastrophes is through a reorganization of the world’s energy production and transportation infrastructure and the development of new technologies to immediately halt carbon emissions.

To seriously address climate change it is necessary to carry out a major reorganization of economic life on a global scale. The framework of energy production has to be transitioned from one that uses fossil fuels to one that relies on renewable energy. This, in turn, requires an international effort, involving a massive influx of funding for infrastructure and the development of current technologies and investigation of new ideas, rather than the squandering of trillions of dollars on war and the self-enrichment of the world’s billionaires.

The technology exists to solve these problems, as well as for increasing the living standards and quality of life of the world’s population. Yet it is impossible to do so within the framework of the capitalist system.

Any effort to genuinely tackle climate change comes into conflict with the nation-state system and the broader framework of capitalism itself. The necessary influx of funds to temper the fires and abate the climate crisis collide with the private ownership of production and the enrichment of a tiny elite at the expense of society as a whole. As long as a handful of billionaires dominates society, with every aspect of economic life geared to their personal enrichment, not a single social problem—including climate change—can be solved.

This makes the solution to climate change an inherently class question and a revolutionary question. It is the working class that will suffer the brunt of the impact of global warming. It is the working class that is objectively and increasingly defining itself as an international class. It is the working class whose social interests lie in the overthrow of capitalism and the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, which will open the way to the establishment of an economic system based on the satisfaction of human need, including a safe and healthy environment.

Millions in the US choke on hazardous air as West Coast fires continue to rage

14 September 2020

As fires continue to rage across the West Coast of the United States, millions of people have suffered from the destruction of their homes, the deaths of loved ones and animals, mass evacuation, and the health risks posed by hazardous air quality. The 2020 fire season has quickly spiraled into a social and environmental catastrophe, far surpassing California’s last historic Camp Fire in 2018.

Roughly 100 large fires, some of which have merged into massive complexes, have broken historical records as 3.4 million acres have burned in California, joined by over one million acres in Oregon and over 600,000 acres in Washington.

Experts can only describe the fires as “unprecedented” in their size, speed, and destruction. To give a sense of the nature of these flames, 900,000 acres burned in a single 72-hour period in Oregon alone.

Thirty-three confirmed deaths have been counted as of Sunday, including a one-year-old boy in Renton, Washington. Dozens were missing in Oregon over the weekend, with rescue crews working to identify them.

The western US wildfires, seen from space, on Sept 9, 2020. (NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin)

Further, tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, sometimes scrambling in a matter of minutes as flames quickly approach their neighborhoods. About 12 percent of the Oregon state population, or more than 500,000 people, were given varying degrees of evacuation alerts for the weekend.

“We didn't know what to grab. We didn’t pack. Who knows what to do when you're going through this?” Nailah Garner told KOMO News regarding her husband’s and her experience fleeing their home in a small forested town of Vida, Oregon. After the fires swept through the area and she returned to the apocalyptic scenes, Garner commented, “It's all gone, and it looks like a war zone hit it.”

Many have sought refuge with family members or friends who lived in less risky areas, soon after being forced to pack up again and travel further as evacuation orders expanded. Others have traveled to evacuation sites that were hastily set up at churches, schools, fairgrounds, and event centers.

Given the heavy agricultural importance of many of the affected regions, families have had to find shelter not only for themselves but for their livestock as well. The Oregon State Fairgrounds is currently housing 500 animals and 1,500 families.

The National Interagency Fire Center reported on Sunday that over 30,000 firefighters and support personnel were deployed to fires across the US. While the majority of the fires are along the West Coast, firefighters are combatting blazes in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

While 30,000 may seem like a large number, the firefighting teams are overwhelmed and understaffed for the complex task of managing the infernos. Angeles National Forest Fire Chief Robert Garcia told CNN on Saturday that his department is fighting the 32,000-acre Bobcat Fire with “500 personnel, when it usually has 1,000 to 1,500” and that “some firefighters are working more than 24 hours in a shift.”

Adding to the risks posed to the lives and health of West Coast residents is the giant smoke plume that is currently resting on the densely populated western half of California, Oregon, and Washington. The smoke has created very hazardous air conditions which began last week and are expected to last for weeks in California.

Scientists use the Air Quality Index (AQI) to monitor air pollution throughout the world, measuring the parts of fine particulate matter within a cubic meter of air. The AQI measurements were created for a scale of 0 to 500, ranging from healthy air quality to dangerous air quality.

The entire West Coast has had AQI over 100, which is considered unhealthy for at-risk groups with lung conditions and asthma. Many cities have recorded far higher levels, surpassing 300 AQI that is “unhealthy for all groups.” Air quality index measurements between 500 and 820 were recorded in Southern and Central Oregon, the northeastern outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Central Valley in California.

Portland, Oregon has been placed under a State of Emergency due to the combination of hazardous air quality as well as the threat of fires creeping towards its suburbs. On Sunday morning, Portland’s air quality index value averaged about 516, becoming the number one major city with the worst air quality in the world. The recent events strike parallels with modern records of 755 AQI in Beijing, China in 2011 and over 1,200 in New Delhi, India last November, where urban pollution reached obscene heights.

The number of tiny particles of hazardous smoke entering residents’ lungs and bloodstreams can cause serious health consequences, straining their respiratory and cardiovascular systems. This can cause irritated throats, burning eye sensations, compromised immunity, asthma attacks, bronchitis, lung failure, heart attacks, cardiac arrest, and other severe conditions.

These health risks have caused an uptick in immediate hospitalizations, while also making the population more susceptible to the COVID-19 virus, the symptoms of which become more severe for those with compromised respiratory and immune systems.

“There’s that aspect that people who are sick with COVID, but maybe not sick enough to notice or go to the hospital. But then when you add smoke on top of it, it could kick them into an extra-bad respiratory response,” Jeffrey Pierce, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, explained to Oregon Public Broadcasting.

These hazardous conditions have affected well over 20 million people, taking into account the most populous metro areas in the region: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

The combination of little to no preparation by the ruling class for disasters and the extreme weather conditions fueled by climate change has made it possible for these annual fires to become such devastating experiences for millions.

As with all natural disasters, the brunt of the damage will fall to the working class and the most vulnerable in society. Thousands of “essential” workers are forced to labor in toxic air and become more susceptible to the coronavirus, the elderly and those with chronic health conditions confront life-threatening conditions from the smoke, the homeless are not sheltered in the countless empty housing units that could be utilized, and many of those who have lost their homes will be left with nothing.