In the past month, areas across Canada, the Midwest, and Northeastern U.S. experienced dangerously poor air quality, stemming from hundreds of wildfires in Ontario, Canada. The fires and air quality effects have been exacerbated by unusually dry, hot weather and a heat dome in the central U.S. trapping pollution close to the ground. President Trump has criticized Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for not controlling the wildfires, and even threatened to place tariffs on Canadian imports as punishment for the air pollution.
Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the role of climate change in creating more extreme weather events and fires is unsurprising given his and his administration’s track record of undermining renewable energy infrastructure projects and championing coal. Carney at least acknowledges the impacts of climate change, but he too has funded fossil fuel infrastructure such as a pipeline in Alberta. These projects will extend Canada’s economic reliance on oil and gas for decades to come!
In reality, Trump and Carney both exist on a spectrum of world leaders who are continually failing to address the problem of climate change to the extent that it requires. We have already reached several tipping points in the climate crisis, and still world governments are incapable of enacting the drastic measures it would actually take to eliminate carbon emissions. How can we all be facing down the end of life on Earth as we know it and continue business as usual?
It’s not that the people in power don’t know what’s going on or what could be done to stop it, it’s that they are beholden to capitalist interests that are deeply invested in the very technologies causing the climate crisis. For example, the U.S. military is one of the largest single sources of CO2 emissions in the world. But it is also a huge section of the U.S. economy and an essential tool in maintaining the capitalist world order the U.S. benefits from. It will never be willingly relinquished. So, as we continue to experience worsening droughts, fires, storms, rising tides, and extinctions, we can’t look to the mechanisms of the ruling order for solutions. It will take ordinary working people making our needs nonnegotiable through mass organizing. That is how we build a different world, one where we can live safe, healthy lives in unity with the natural world, not in opposition to it.
