A Summer of Megafire

...and Trump’s Non-Rules on Climate Change

Against an infernal backdrop of widespread wildfires, the Administration announced its plan to roll back rules limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants.

The Ranch Fire broke out sometime on the morning of Friday, July 27th, east of Ukiah, California, in Mendocino County. Extreme heat and windy weather made the blaze difficult to fight; by early Sunday, it had spread to thirteen thousand acres, and by the end of the following week it had burned a hundred and fifteen thousand acres. That weekend, it jumped four streams, a major road, and a fire line that had been cut by a bulldozer, and in the process it spread to another hundred thousand acres. By August 12th, it had become the largest wildfire in California’s history, and by the time it was mostly contained, last week, it had charred more than six hundred square miles, an area twice the size of New York City.

A blaze that consumes more than a hundred thousand acres is known as a megafire. It used to be rare for fires to reach this threshold. Now it’s routine. “We seem to have multiple megafires each year,” the Web site Wildfire Today noted recently. While the Ranch Fire raged, three other hundred-thousand-acre-plus fires were “active” in the United States: the Carr Fire, also in Northern California; the South Sugarloaf Fire, in northern Nevada; and the Spring Creek Fire, in southern Colorado. Meanwhile, in Canada, the province of British Columbia declared a state of emergency in response to more than five hundred active blazes. As smoke from these and other conflagrations drifted across the Pacific Northwest, the air quality in Seattle declined to a level considered “unhealthy for all,” and the city’s mayor urged residents to stay indoors.

It was against this infernal backdrop that the Trump Administration recently unveiled its plan to roll back rules limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants. The fires, according to Donald Trump, had nothing to do with global warming, and instead were the result of “bad environmental laws,” which, he claimed, were preventing “readily available water” from being used to fight the blazes. Under the headline “TRUMP TWEETS WHILE CALIFORNIA BURNS,” the Los Angeles Times editorial board dismissed the President’s theory as “wingnut drivel.” Somewhat less colorfully, Newsweek observed that it had “little basis in fact.”

The power-plant rules that Trump wants to scrap have a long and delay-filled history. All the way back in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide qualifies as a pollutant that should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Instead of complying with that ruling, George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency ran out the clock. When Barack Obama took office, he, too, dawdled; it wasn’t until his second term that the E.P.A. finally proposed the so-called Clean Power Plan. The plan, which was supposed to reduce CO₂ emissions from generating stations by roughly a third, was finalized in 2015, but it never went into effect. In early 2016, the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision, took the extraordinary step of blocking its implementation, pending the outcome of a lawsuit brought by two dozen states—almost all of them led by Republicans—along with a host of coal and utility companies. (The states accused the E.P.A. of exceeding its authority.) Two and a half years later, there is still no decision in that suit, because, under President Trump, the E.P.A. has been asking for, and receiving, postponements.

Finally, in June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit indicated that it was tired of the Administration’s stalling. Then, late last month, the E.P.A. published what it calls the Affordable Clean Energy rules, or ACE. The new rules, which would replace the Clean Power Plan, are rules in name only. They’d allow states to set their own standards; these, in many cases, would amount to a carte blanche for utility companies. Compared with the Clean Power Plan, ACE could, over the next few decades, allow hundreds of millions of tons of additional carbon emissions. Meanwhile, by the E.P.A.’s own admission, the new “rules” could result in as many as fourteen hundred premature deaths annually, owing to the increased pollution from coal plants. The non-rule rules still have to be finalized, and then they, too, doubtless will be challenged in court. By the time that challenge is heard, there may be a new Administration in the White House—at least, so it is devoutly to be wished.

As it happens, a few days after the E.P.A.’s announcement of the rules a group of state agencies in Sacramento released a report detailing how climate change will affect California. If emissions are not reined in, by the end of the century maximum daily temperatures could rise by a horrific 8.8 degrees. Two-thirds of Southern California’s beaches could be lost to sea-level rise, and the area burned by wildfires could nearly triple.

The California report points up the essential hazard of delay. Many pollutants dissipate or break down over time. Carbon dioxide hangs around and accumulates. What our power plants put into the air today will still be contributing to warming and melting, fires and floods, more than a hundred years from now. And what’s added tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) will make the situation that much worse.

This fiery summer has given us a glimpse of what climate change will look like. In addition to the blazes in the West, forest fires raged in Sweden above the Arctic Circle. More than ninety people were killed by wildfires that broke out during an extreme heat wave in Greece. In Japan, a heat wave resulted in at least eighty deaths, and in South Korea record-breaking temperatures were blamed for twenty-nine deaths. (Last month, during South Korea’s heat wave, the Prime Minister ordered all work on public construction sites halted during daytime hours.)

But perhaps what’s most scary about this scorching summer is how little concerned Americans seem to be. So far, climate change has barely registered as an issue in the midterm elections, and, where it has, the optics couldn’t be worse: “Trump Digs Coal” was a slogan that appeared on placards at a West Virginia rally with the President, staged on the day that the new power-plant rules were published. As a country, we remain committed to denial and delay, even as the world, in an ever more literal sense, goes up in flames. ♦

Elizabeth Kolbert New Yorker September 10, 2018 Issue