A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

Soaring temperatures in the Pacific Northwest have shattered numerous records this week, killing “as many as 230” people by some estimates (they are linked to 65 deaths in Vancouver alone), and triggering an earthquake thanks to melting glaciers.

That’s before you get to the skyrocketing wildfire risk.

As the Fourth of July approaches, Portland, Oregon, and many other cities have banned personal fireworks for fire safety reasons. On Wednesday morning, before President Biden’s meeting with governors from Western states about the crisis, the White House announced a pay raise for federal firefighters from $13 to $15 per hour plus retention bonuses, along with initiatives to increase early detection and mobilize military members as “surge” firefighters in case of emergency, according to Axios.

None of this comes close to the changes needed to actually address the heat waves and wildfires. The pay hike came after Biden publicly marveled at the “ridiculously low” $13-per-hour rate—but obviously $15 per hour is still pretty low when you consider the risks of the job. Neither federal nor state authorities are spending as much as they need to on preventative measures like fuel reduction and controlled burns, a recent Al Jazeera piece detailed. The Forest Service saw its budget for such measures cut by more than half last year, and while it’s since increased again, it’s not enough. The Forest Service needs to do about 10 times as much fuel reduction as it’s currently doing, Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University, told reporter Hilary Beaumont. Meanwhile, California’s 2022 wildfire budget is $1 billion. But in 2019, wildfire losses totaled more than $30 billion.

The spending doesn’t match the risk—something of a theme in climate policy right now. This week’s heat wave takes place against the backdrop of bipartisan negotiations over the infrastructure package, which the White House originally billed as a vehicle for ambitious climate policy.

As TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote both at the time and last week, the reality is much grimmer: The policies emerging from the negotiations rely a lot on market incentives, enriching investors but with likely relatively little impact on emissions.

Science journalist Maddie Stone pointed out just one example of the irony in this approach: As centrist and conservative politicians insist that climate policy is separate from “infrastructure,” which they argue is about roads and bridges, roads in Washington are cracking from the heat.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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