Seth Klein: Wildfires Demand Wartime Fossil Fuel Response
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- France and Spain battle historic wildfires that Macron called "the most difficult situation since the second world war"; the AP described the evacuations as "one of the continent's biggest… since World War II"
- Nearly a thousand wildfires are currently burning across Canada, the author's home country, where leaders have been "decidedly less" willing than Macron or Sánchez to link the fires to the climate emergency
- Australia during its early-2020 fires was forced to deploy the most military assets since WWII; the US, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Chile, Russia, Turkey, and Indonesia have all suffered similar escalating impacts
- Seth Klein outlines five markers of genuine emergency mobilization — telling the truth about severity, spending what it takes, creating new economic institutions, shifting from voluntary to mandatory measures, and committing to leave no one behind
- Current government responses are "purely defensive, rearguard actions" that fight fires but fail to expedite the transition off oil, gas, and coal, leaving the underlying climate driver untouched
- European leaders including Macron and Pedro Sánchez have publicly linked the fires to the climate emergency, while Canadian and US leaders have largely avoided that framing
Why it matters: Klein reframes the wildfire crisis from a series of natural disasters into a fossil-fuel-driven emergency requiring full-economy mobilization on the scale of WWII. If governments adopted his five-point wartime framework — mandatory measures, new public institutions, unconditional spending — it would represent a categorical break from today's incentive-based climate policy toward treating continued oil, gas, and coal dependence as the existential threat he argues it already is.
