Alex Connon, Common Dreams

Bolstering the case for meaningful action to address the climate emergency, the out-of-control Bootleg Fire that began on July 6 in southern Oregon has scorched more than 280,000 acres and is only 22% contained. It is the nation's largest wildfire so far this year, and one of 70 large blazes currently torching the U.S. West, which is bracing for yet another heatwave.

To put Bootleg's destructiveness into perspective, the fire—one of 10 burning in Oregon alone—has spread over 25,000 acres per day on average, or more than 1,000 acres every hour. According to CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller, "That's an area larger than the area of Central Park each hour, or a rate of a football field burned every five seconds" for 11 days.

As the Washington Post reported Friday:

The Bootleg Fire's expansion has destroyed 117 outbuildings and 67 residences in Klamath County, said Holly Krake, a spokeswoman for the Bootleg Fire Incident Management Team. The fire is still raging in Lake County, home to a population of more than 7,000 residents, and the damage is being assessed, she said.
As of Friday, Krake said, some 2,000 residents across both counties had been evacuated, with over 5,000 residences threatened by the growing flames.
With an unprecedented wildfire season underway, the American Red Cross has opened four shelters throughout the state, said Chad Carter, the organization's Oregon regional communications director. He said they are prepared to open more if needed.

"We are all planning for this to be a prolonged event this summer," Carter told the Post. "We've got several shelters open right now, and we'll continue to adjust based on the need throughout the summer."

In addition to causing displacement, state officials said the fire has endangered parts of the power grid, specifically transmission lines that carry electricity to California, CNN reported.

Alison Green, public affairs director for the Oregon Office of State Fire Marshals, told the Post that "we are seeing conditions that we usually see in mid-August. It's been extreme fire behavior over the last week that has created conditions that are certainly challenging."

In an online update, Rob Allen, incident commander for the Pacific Northwest Area Incident Management Team 2, noted that "the Bootleg Fire perimeter is more than 200 miles long. That's an enormous amount of line to build and hold."

Given its massive size and quick-moving pace, Ryan Berlin, a Bootleg Fire Zone 1 information officer, told the Post that there's "a pretty good possibility" the Bootleg Fire could merge with the smaller Log Fire, which on Thursday "blew up also."

"My colleagues in Congress have to understand. We don't have 30 years. It's now or never."
—Rep. Jamaal Bowman

While the spark that caused the Bootleg Fire remains under investigation, very dry fuel is abundant in Oregon and throughout the western U.S., where a dozen states are battling 70 active wildfire complexes.

For weeks, the region has suffered from record-high temperatures and a worsening drought. The severely hot and dry weather, which scientists say is inseparable from climatic disruptions driven by the emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, has created the conditions for an especially catastrophic wildfire season that experts warn is far from over.

The deadly heatwave that recently pummeled the Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada—described by a pair of climate scientists as "the most extreme in world weather records"—killed nearly 800 people in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, along with over one billion intertidal animals.

According to a rapid-response analysis conducted by a team of researchers, the dangerously high temperatures that helped make last month the hottest June in North America in recorded history "would have been virtually impossible" in the absence of the past two centuries of extracting and burning coal, oil, and gas—the primary source of growing carbon pollution.

Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA, on Friday said the same thing about the wave of wildfires now ravaging communities and ecosystems throughout the western U.S.

"We wouldn't be seeing this giant ramp up in fire activity as fast as it is happening without climate change," Williams told the New York Times. "There's just no way."

"Drought and high heat," the Times noted Friday, "can kill trees and dry out dead grass, pine needles, and any other material on the bottom of the forest floor that act as kindling when a fire sweeps through a forest."

According to Joe Hessel, an incident commander for the Oregon Department of Forestry, "This fire is going to continue to grow—the extremely dry vegetation and weather are not in our favor."

Hessel's ominous warning came as the U.S. West's fourth heatwave in five weeks got under way in the northern Rockies and High Plains. Axios reported that from Saturday through at least Wednesday, temperatures in the area are expected to hit 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above average.

Experts fear that the impending high-pressure system, known as a "heat dome," could exacerbate existing fires or contribute to the formation of new ones.

According to the Times, parts of Idaho (17 active large fires), Montana (13), Wyoming (2), and Utah (1) could be hit with triple-digit highs over the weekend and into early next week, with temperatures peaking on Monday.

Ironically, one factor that could suppress temperatures slightly is a hazy sky due to smoke from nearby wildfires. CNN reported earlier this week that as a result of the ongoing blazes in the western U.S., most of the country, including states as far away as New York, "could see at least light surface-level wildfire smoke." The news outlet noted that Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Minnesota issued air quality alerts.

According to the Post: "A major concern on Sunday and Monday is the prospect of dry thunderstorms, from the Sierra Nevada mountain range northward through much of northern Nevada, eastern Idaho, and central Montana. These storms could unleash cloud-to-ground lightning that ignites new blazes."

Although he was pointing to this week's devastating flooding in Germany and Belgium, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) could just as easily have been talking about the heatwaves, drought conditions, and fires clobbering the U.S. West when he said Saturday that "we are living through a climate catastrophe."

Last week, climate justice advocates from the Sunrise Movement alluded to several extreme weather events and fossil fuel disasters that have occurred recently in the U.S. and came to the conclusion that "the time for incrementalism is over."

Bowman amplified that message on Saturday, saying: "My colleagues in Congress have to understand. We don't have 30 years. It's now or never."

"We have to redesign our economy to respond to the current crisis and to ensure it doesn't get much, much worse," he added.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is the world's most influential energy forecaster. Providing in-depth policy advice to dozens of national governments, the IEA has long been a friend of fossil fuel executives, regularly encouraging evermore fossil fuel development, even in the face of evermore dire climate warnings. But all that started to change last week.

The IEA released a special report that represents the agency's first attempt at modeling an energy pathway that is compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement.

Perhaps the single most important sentence in the 224-page report is this one: "There is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway." In other words, if we want to curtail global warming to 1.5°C―and thus slow the rate of species extinction and prevent millions of early deaths―we cannot invest a single dollar more in expanding the fossil fuel industry.

Compare this with JPMorgan Chase. In October of last year, Chase, the world's largest funder of fossil fuels, announced that it was going to align its business model with the Paris Agreement. The pledge came only after years of campaigning by activists and was widely welcomed. The most exciting part of the announcement was Chase's promise to release 2030 climate targets.

Well, Chase just released those targets―and they are worse than even the most pessimistic among us feared.

Rather than actually reducing the overall greenhouse gas emissions associated with its lending, Chase has created a convoluted accounting trick known as "carbon intensity", pledging that by 2030, it will achieve a 15% reduction in the "carbon intensity" of the oil and gas firms it finances.

The most important thing to know here is that reductions in "carbon intensity" and reductions in "actual greenhouse gas emissions" are two very different things.

Imagine you are the CEO of an oil firm. Your company owns 1,000 oil wells; it doesn't own any windmills. Now Chase gives you a $10 billion loan. You use that loan to buy 400 new oil wells and 200 windmills. You now own 400 additional oil wells. This means you are digging up and burning more oil than ever before; your overall contributions to climate change have gone up significantly. But because you are now also profiting from wind power, the "carbon intensity" of your company has gone down―an accounting trick that enables your oil company to both expand oil production and meet Chase's callow climate targets.

What it boils down to is this: While the IEA states that there can be no new investment in the expansion of fossil fuels, Chase doesn't plan to reduce its investments in new fossil fuel supply at all within the next decade.

This is concerning (not to mention deeply immoral) for a number of reasons: Chase is the first major US bank to commit to 2030 climate targets; by setting the bar so devastatingly low they have made it easier for other Wall Street banks to engage in similar acts of greenwashing. Just 100 fossil fuel companies are responsible for 71% of all history's climate pollution; if Wall Street is willing to give them a pass, it is basically passing on climate action of any sort.

The fact that the media has largely fallen for Chase's big climate lie is also of concern. "JPMorgan Chase Pledges to Cut Carbon Emissions in Lending Portfolios," read one uncritical Bloomberg headline. Even the normally rigorous Guardian recently fawned about how Wall Street is acting on the climate crisis. After years of the media's failure to accurately report on the climate crisis, it is upsetting to see major media outlets fail like this.

All of this would, of course, be less alarming if the White House understood that companies like JPMorgan are a major part of the problem―and that regulating them is a major part of the solution. But that is far from the case. "No government is going to solve this problem," said US Special Climate Envoy, John Kerry in a recent interview. "The solutions are going to come from the private sector."

Kerry's words are especially alarming. Whether it's sustainable investing funds that are riddled with fossil fuels, insurance companies building coal mines, or banks making empty climate pledges, it's clear that Wall Street cannot be counted on to solve the climate crisis for us.

We need a government that is willing to step in, stop the money pipeline to climate chaos, and force Wall Street to treat global warming like the crisis it is. As the IEA has made abundantly clear that starts with ensuring that not a single dollar more goes toward expanding the fossil fuel industry.

Alec Connon is the coordinator of the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition, a coalition of over 160 organizations working to stop the flow of money from Wall Street to the fossil fuel industry. He is also a writer. His first novel, The Activist, was published in 2016. Follow him on Twitter: @alecconnon