Photo: Hurricane Milton over the Gulf of Mexico. Credit: Flickr/NASA Johnson (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Tina Landis is the author of the book Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism.
No matter where you live on the globe, climate change is becoming increasingly apparent every day. From an unprecedented triple-digit heat wave in California earlier this month, to the back-to-back hurricanes that pummeled the Southeast, to extreme monsoon rains in India and extreme drought in the Amazon basin, climate change is undeniable and rapidly becoming more disastrous.
Analysis from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that climate change caused 50% more rainfall in Georgia and the Carolinas from Hurricane Helene and made the heavy rainfall 20 times more likely. World Weather Attribution analysis showed that the high ocean temperatures that fueled Hurricane Helene were 200 to 500 times more likely to occur due to climate change.
Helene, which has left at least 250 dead with hundreds more still missing, was followed just two weeks later by Hurricane Milton. CoreLogic estimated up to $47.5 billion in damages from wind and flooding across 16 states just from Helene.
Data from Climate Central shows that billion dollar disasters occurred on average around every 82 days in the United States in the 1980s. Between 2017 and 2022, these billion dollar disasters rose to every 18 days.
Profit-driven insurance companies are not only refusing coverage in disaster-prone states like California and Florida, but in the aftermath of recent disasters, they are finding ways to not pay on claims for those who do have coverage, leaving residents with little hope for recovery.
Drivers of climate chaos
It is well understood that higher levels of carbon and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere create warming air and ocean temperatures. But what is the role of deforestation in warming and extreme weather? It may seem far away from the U.S. Gulf Coast, but the weather patterns in the Atlantic are connected to the Amazon rainforest. Put simply, more trees mean less energy to fuel storms, so as deforestation in the Amazon increases, so does the frequency and severity of storms forming in the Atlantic.
Energy needed for storm formation not only draws from warm ocean waters, but new research shows that the power of a storm is determined by the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. The formation and strength of cyclones that form over the ocean require sufficient amounts of water vapor, with expansive, intact forests shown to protect the region from these extreme storms. Large forests, like the Amazon, draw moisture away from the oceans to the land and the atmospheric conditions over a forest absorb energy and slow winds. As forests are cleared, this mechanism weakens as more moisture becomes available over the neighboring ocean, increasing the frequency and strength of storms.
Not only does the Amazon rainforest impact Atlantic storms, but it is also responsible for 80% of the rainfall that occurs over the land of that region. Trees act as a biotic pump, releasing water vapor and microbes that seed cloud formation. As areas are clear cut or burned, these patches of bare earth create drying in the adjacent wooded areas, making the area more vulnerable to fire. Bare soil, unlike vegetative cover, absorbs the heat from the sun adding to atmospheric warming and drying. As tree loss and global air temperatures increase, the likelihood of drought and fires in the Amazon have increased threefold with the Amazon currently experiencing its most severe drought in 40 years.
Although the deforestation rate has actually slowed slightly since 2022, the overall trajectory is still heading in a disastrous direction. Current estimates show that 17% of the Amazon basin has been deforested. A 20-25% forest loss is estimated to be the tipping point for the Amazon that will drive the tropical rainforest toward a grassland ecosystem, which would have catastrophic implications for global heating.
So why is deforestation continuing to occur? What’s driving it? Since the 1990s, the world has lost 1.3 million square kilometers of forest cover, mainly at the hands of 13 transnational corporations, including U.S.-based corporations such as Cargill, Black Rock, Walmart, McDonald’s, Starbucks and Proctor & Gamble.
So far this year, 32 million acres in the Brazilian rainforest and Pantanal wetlands to the south have burned. The majority of these fires were set illegally to clear land for mining, logging and agriculture corporations based in the Global North, and further fueled by the drought, which caused many fires to spread out of control.
Another path forward
Globally, Indigenous-held territories account for 20% of the Earth’s land mass and hold 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. The ecological sustainable practices of indigenous communities are reflected in the lands they hold within the Amazon basin, which integrate the use of prescribed fire and have prevented devastating wildfires from occurring on their lands.
A well-known Indigenous leader in Brazil, Chief Raoni Metuktire, recently stated, “White people are contributing to the destruction of the forest. I’m very concerned with their way of life leading to the destruction of living beings and our planet.” Raoni pointed to illegal extractive industries like mining, logging and cattle ranching as the cause of the degradation of the rainforest that is depleting water resources, drying the land and exacerbating climate change.
You would think that the increasing urgency of the crisis would result in meaningful action from Global North governments, who could seize the assets of these criminal corporations that are driving us to extinction. But instead we see both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates falling over themselves to pledge allegiance to fossil fuel industries by promising to ramp up oil and gas production – at a time when U.S. crude oil production is already at an all-time high.
Trump, of course, completely denies that climate change exists. And Harris has reversed her previous position to fully embrace the fracking industry, known for its extremely harmful extractive methods that use immense amounts of scarce freshwater, as well as releasing large amounts of climate-warming methane in the process. The majority of natural gas that is extracted gets converted into a liquefied form for shipping from the U.S. to Europe and Asia, which is shown to have 33% more planet-heating emissions than coal over a 20-year period.
The lack of action and negligence from the capitalist ruling elite is criminal. Not only are our so-called leaders enabling corporations to continue their plunder of the planet for short term profits, they also do nothing to protect residents and provide little relief when disaster strikes. At the same time that FEMA declared a $9 billion shortfall in funds to help devastated communities in the aftermath of Helene, the Biden administration handed over an additional $8 billion to fuel the war in Ukraine and another $8.7 billion to Israel to fund the genocide of Palestinian people. The corrupt and callous nature of the U.S. capitalist system could not be more clear.
We can’t look to these criminals to save us. There are real solutions to climate change that could be implemented immediately. We must organize ourselves to build a system that prioritizes the needs of the people and planet — that system is socialism. Under a socialist planned economy, we can utilize humanity’s collective knowledge and resources to mitigate climate change, restore ecosystems and protect people in advance of extreme weather. Only a handful of the super rich that prefer self-enrichment over the survival of life on this planet stand in our way. But we are many and they are few and we have the power when we are organized. We cannot become demoralized by the tragedies that we are witnessing, but instead funnel our grief and anger into action and end capitalism before it ends us!
