Wildfires rage across Canada and the US

The smoke from the fires has reached across New York City (Picture: Earthcam)

An orange-grey haze, blotting out the sun, has spread from Canadian wildfires to envelop large parts of the United States. While the Tories, Labour and most of the media rants about the disruption caused by Just Stop Oil, the repeated evidence of accelerating climate chaos is impossible to ignore.

Fires are burning across the breadth of Canada, blanketing parts of the eastern US with choking smoke. Puerto Rico is under a severe heat alert.

The air quality in Philadelphia, a city of over 1.5 million people, remained dangerous on Wednesday night. The Air Quality Index, which runs from 0 to 500 and measures the density of pollutants, reached 429 near midnight. That’s a level considered “hazardous” to everyone in the city, according to the local department of public health.

Smoke from the wildfires reached as far south as Alabama on Wednesday. More than 115 million people across the US and Canada were under extreme air quality warnings Wednesday. And in some areas workers are taking action.

Crew members at the Trader Joe’s Essex Crossing store in New York walked out on Wednesday, protesting at unsafe working conditions. Their union said, “Air quality in the store is so poor right now that crew are having trouble breathing.”

The workers’ union at the REI campaign and 0utdor clothing stores tweeted, “Update from the smoggy streets of SoHo, NYC: today, our union successfully pressured management to close our store due to the increasingly unsafe air quality in Manhattan.”

On Thursday morning, an exceptionally bad spell of pollution lingered over New York and other major American cities for a third straight day.

Actor Jodie Comer left the stage ten minutes into a matinee of her one-woman Broadway play because she was having trouble breathing. 

Forest fires continued to burn across Canada on Thursday. About 3.8 million hectares—9.4 million acres—have already burned, roughly 15 times the ten-year average.

Some of the worst fires are in the eastern province of Quebec, where more than 11,000 people had to evacuate their homes.

In parts of the Pacific province of British Columbia, which is facing the second-biggest wildfire on record, temperatures were forecast to hit 33 Celsius on Thursday.

The media, concentrated in the richer countries, is reporting the American wildfires, even if it often cloaks the root in human-made climate change. There was much less publicity for the raging forest fires in northern Thailand in March that sent nearly 2 million people to hospitals with respiratory illnesses.

This is what capitalism offers—a burning world, war in Ukraine and other countries, poverty, pandemics and racism.

As Ian Rappel writes on wildfires, “These traumatic events do take on the appearance of ‘wild’, uncontrollable firestorms—the blaze unleashed—but it is a mistake to assign all such events to nature’s untrammelled forces.

“As with patterns of biodiversity and living nature, elemental fire does not act in isolation from humanity’s dominant capitalist social relations. 

“Rather, it expresses itself through the prism of a social system that has altered and enhanced the conditions needed to create these vast and devastating fires.”

“Even where we assign the start of such fires to humans—the individual arsonist or the clumsy barbecue chef—we miss that it is in fact capitalism that generates these wildfires through its own accelerant mix of fuel and flame that fans that potent blend with its climatic chaos.”

The effects of the environmental emergency are not a threat in the far future. They have happened, and are happening now. And they are not confined to the Global South.

When unions such as the GMB oppose even the mildest moves against fossil capital, they are betraying their members—and the whole of humanity.