Analyse. Laudable as they are, the headlines on climate change – the “megaheadlines”, one might say –, unsheathed as soon as a few acres catch fire, have the disadvantage of obscuring an important element of the debate on the fires. : the economic dimension. In the short term, preventing and fighting fires is above all a matter of big money. There would be a way to limit the impact of the fires on the condition of paying the price.
In the long term, it is clear that rising temperatures are responsible for the intensification of fires and the appearance of megafires, these blazes which devastate more than 10,000 hectares and are beyond the control of firefighters. You don’t need to be a climatologist to understand that the drier the wood, the more easily it ignites.
Even in the United States, most of the media have unambiguously put climate change at the forefront of the responsibility for the last fire in California, the “Oak Fire”, which appeared on July 22 near Yosemite Park. A relatively modest focus (8,000 hectares), compared to what has become the norm in the Golden State, but which, having coincided with an exceptional heat wave on the East Coast – where the main television stations are located -, was seen like the manifestation of a country on fire.
95% human causes
Once the role of the climate has been established, it is perhaps useful to recall that fires also have very immediate causes which are due to economic forces. In California, for example. According to Cal Fire, the Californian firefighting agency, 95% of fire starts are of human origin. The electric company PG&E alone has been found guilty of several fires since 2015: the most deadly, the “Camp Fire” of 2018, which reduced the town of Paradise to ashes, resulting in the death of 85 people, to the gigantic “Dixie Fire”, of 2021, which devastated 405,000 hectares. Each time, sparks under poorly maintained lines caused the fire to start (in the case of the “Dixie Fire”, a dead tree fell on a pylon; the investigation showed that it should have been cleared thirteen years ago year).
Justice condemned PG&E on several occasions to clear. The company is dragging its feet to save its profit margin. Why are the lines not buried as is the case in Europe? It would have cost the capitalists of the electrification era too much…
PG&E started to bury a few lines. For two years, the company has also deployed an unstoppable strategy, which costs nothing: it cuts off power to subscribers when the winds are too violent. This did not prevent it in 2021 from charging a “climate change” supplement to consumers to finance the compensation it was forced to pay to the victims of the fires it had caused. The climate is good…
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