A single, devastating California fire season wiped out years of efforts to cut emissions.
An 8.4-meter-high wall of flame tore through the hills south of Los Angeles last October. Nearly three months later, the firestorm has left an estimated 60 dead and hundreds injured, burned more than 5,000 homes and displaced 2.3 million people.
Now the devastation is being visited on more than just the victims.
An industry that emits about 14 million metric tons of carbon into the air each year is now the target of activists demanding governments regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Even as the deadliest season in 60 years is over, activists and policymakers are trying to determine how to respond to a new climate change threat of superstorms and drought.
While it is easier to point the finger at fossil fuel companies, the fires also show the need for government action on climate change.
“If we don’t do something about the climate, then you can have this super-long drought, and you can have the extreme fire seasons,” said Jeff Goodell, energy program director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
In the past 100 years, major fires have killed thousands of people, destroyed over 2 million homes and led to tens of billions of dollars in damages. The cost of the largest wildfire in California history, the Thomas fire, is estimated at 1.8 billion dollars.
The world’s most destructive fires took place between 1851 to 1855 and caused an estimated 25 million deaths worldwide, but they also have been replaced with a new threat, the “super-wildfire” that experts say is a natural phenomenon but is becoming more frequent.
In the past three decades, there has been a more than threefold increase in the number of people killed by super-wildfires, according to data from the Insurance Institute for the Research ofion (IIRF), which tracks damages and losses resulting from wildfire.
“The amount of damage is going up,” said IIRF’s Steve Kuntz.
The most recent record of damage was from the 2017 Paradise fire in northern California, which took place after the death of an elderly couple.
“These are the things that worry me,” said Chris Williams, founder of the fire ecology institute at California State University, Sacramento.
These so-
