The smoke that blanketed the US Northeast was not incidental but yet another manifestation of accelerating anthropogenic climate change.
In September 2020, West Coast fierce blazes spread smoke that darkened the skies of the East Coast. I provided details regarding the peculiarity for Inside Climate News, an exercise in detachment from the individual stakes of the issue as another New Yorker that permitted me to focus on the bigger picture. However, less than three years later, it seems impossible to remain detached.
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Last week, as hazardous smoke from the Canadian wildfires blanketed the Northeast, I, like many other New Yorkers, obsessively checked the air quality index on my phone’s weather app and live updates from the New York Times. Photographs of the consumed orange sun overwhelmed social media platforms. Politicians quickly voiced their concerns but failed to link the discussion to the global climate crisis.
The out-of-control wildfires in Canada are neither accidental nor unusual: they are an indication of speeding up anthropogenic environmental change. The emergency has prompted reliably record-breaking and dry season, creating heat that makes such wildfires significantly more probable than before. In light of this fact, the current moment offers several important lessons we should remember even after the fog has cleared.
CLIMATE CHANGE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT BORDERS
As the then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon stated in 2015, “Climate change carries no passport and knows no national borders.” Climate change does not care about borders. The spread of smoke from Canadian wildfires makes it abundantly clear that the climate crisis will not be contained to a single nation for anyone who had previously questioned its global nature.
The smoke was just one sign of the growing cross-border effects of the climate crisis, which will affect up to a billion people in the next few decades through forced displacement and subsequent migration.
As a result, climate solutions must also cross borders. Developed, wealthy, and historically polluting nations like the United States must support and finance climate adaptation and mitigation in developing, low-emitting nations and increase climate action within their borders.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS
Canadian wildfire smoke was undeniably something other than an eyesore on a New York City or Philadelphia skyline. The most fundamental principles of public health are threatened by climate change. Even though the air quality in the Northeast of the United States is dangerous for everyone, it is hazardous for people with respiratory, heart, and other health and immune system conditions.
The World Health Organization calls climate change “the biggest health threat facing humanity.” Extreme heat, drought, and flooding are becoming more common as a result of climate change, which can all result in harm or even death; directly harming individuals through intensified disasters; it also drives the spread of irresistible infections, expanding the opportunity for global health crises like the Coronavirus pandemic.
A fundamental human right is health. Throughout the world, dozens of climate-related human rights cases have been litigated in courtrooms.
CLIMATE CHANGE AFFECTS EVERYONE, BUT NOT EQUALLY
For some Americans beyond the West Coast, encountering the impacts of perilously unfortunate air quality this previous week was a generally new encounter. One day, New York City became one of the world’s most polluted cities, passing New Delhi.
However, hazy skies and polluted air are a daily occurrence for residents of New Delhi and many other cities in South Asia. One in every five deaths worldwide is caused by pollution from fossil fuels, which is a significant contributor to this kind of air quality.
The United States climate action must encourage the transition to renewable energy to benefit the global communities most affected by fossil fuel pollution.
It is also essential to acknowledge that the fossil fuel economy also significantly impacts the domestic environment due to the disproportionate exposure of historically marginalized communities to air pollution, which results from environmental racism and climate injustice. People without housing are also particularly vulnerable to such corruption.
THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW
The Yale Program on Climate Change Communications found that many Americans are concerned about the effects of anthropogenic climate change and believe the science behind it. However, these attitudes must be translated into actions at every government level.
Climate action groups in the United States are already taking advantage of the moment to exert pressure on state and national policymakers. Environmental justice groups have urged political leaders to enact climate policies and hold companies accountable for the climate crisis.
In New York, advocates are pushing the state Gathering Assembly to pass a few pieces of legislation that would diminish home pollution, make polluters pay, and support the implementation of state emission-reduction goals.
Greta Thunberg, a famous Swedish teen climate activist, famously told world leaders in 2019 that “our house is on fire.” It is abundantly clear that there is no time to delay, as the Canadian wildfires are still raging and that sentiment rang true for many North Americans last week. The time to act is now.
