Maui Fire. How Much More Proof Do We Need? Climate Change is Real

Lahaina Maui Fire. Source: Bloomberg

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

 

There is nothing like a natural disaster for exposing the inefficient and exploitative nature of class society and the conflagration that has engulfed the Hawaiian island of Maui is yet another example of it. One difference though, is that this fire is not a natural disaster any more than the recent toxic chemical spill in Palestine Ohio was, or the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, was. The poisoning of the  The Elk River in Virginia  by a local chemical company in 2014 was no accident either. These are all market driven failures; they are systemic, a feature of the capitalist system, and yes, we actually live in a system of production.

 

First and foremost, this is yet another confirmation of climate change and the catastrophic consequences of it. Constant drought coupled with high winds and hurricane like storms added fuel to the fire that at one point was declared contained only to flare up again. What the climate change skeptics like to argue (those that don’t directly profit from the fossil fuel industry) is that the earth has had previous periods of warming. That’s true, but in today’s case, this development is due directly to human activity and in particular industrial production and the capitalist system’s rapacious quest for surplus value and extraction of profit regardless of the consequences. 

 

I struggled for days trying to write an article about the Maui fire but I became overwhelmed at the devastation and horrific consequences of it. The fire that destroyed the old Capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii before it was officially absorbed by US capitalism is not the first tragedy that visited the archipelago. Long before, after the British mercantile explorer Captain Cook became the first European to visit the Island, traders, whalers and the so called free market descended on this beautiful place and by the late 1900’s the indigenous population declined from between 300,000 and one million to less than 40,000.  Throughout the history of capitalist development, of which colonialism is a feature, we see this destruction of the natural world and the indigenous people and communities dependent on it.

 

Some estimates put the number of indigenous deaths in the western hemisphere as a result of colonialism to be anywhere between fifty and one hundred million. It is referred to as the Indigenous Holocaust. It is impossible to gauge the level of destruction and devastation globally as a result of capitalist expansion. There are similar figures with the African slave trade.  Human communities and the natural world as we know it, are closer than ever to being wiped out by the so-called free market.

 

I won’t include them here, as the reader need only turn to the Internet to discover for themselves the details of the destruction the Maui fire caused and all the reasons the mass media chooses to focus on that caused it. What is absent is a critique of the so-called free market system in which we live, the way society is organized and how we must change it to survive.

 

Australia: Fish dying as water temperature rises

The evidence of this looming catastrophe, is all around us. Alongside Maui, we have the catastrophe in Canada as that country is experiencing some of the worst fires in its history. Fires have been raging in Tenerife, China and we have had them in Europe. There were massive fires in Australia a couple of years ago. The temperatures in rivers have increased, killing fish. Native people in the Northern Hemisphere have pointed to the changes in the snow pack and how glaciers are receding at rapid levels. We are not stupid; it’s not rocket science as they say. Climate Change is the beginning of the end game for human civilization.

 

As with all of these market driven disasters, including wars, not all people are affected in the same way; investors in US arms manufacturers, for example, are having a field day with the Ukraine/Russia conflict.

 

Social disasters provide great opportunity for the parasites that work (it’s not work as we know it) on Wall Street, the hedge fund managers, private equity barons and the billionaires that the Wall Street Journal referred to as the Masters of the Universe quoting Tom Wolfe. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, commented after the 2008 financial crash: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” and the barbarians are at the gate after the Maui disaster ready to snap up the homes of those that lost them in the fire.

 

“It’s hard to be a Hawaiian in Hawaii.”

Home prices are bad enough for local people and some victims are saying they are already receiving calls to sell. “’We’ve already been priced out of a lot of these homes and had three to four families working multiple jobs just to stay,’ Peneku said, shaking his head. ‘So now I can see how the pressure is probably at the breaking point but – do not sell your property,’ he implored his working-class neighbors. ‘Do not run away. Please. Just hang on as long as you can,’he said with a sigh and shrugged.”

 

“One of the struggles we will see in this community, is the big land buyers are going to buy us out. And you know what happens if that happens? We’re gone. The people who lived here a very, very long time are going to get offers to leave. We need to find solutions to guarantee that they don’t have to come back to ground zero and pay for building their homes from the bottom up.”

 CNN: 8-15-23

 

As is always the case in the aftermath of these events, lawsuits are being filed “to prevent future tragedies” as one reports states. “Hawaiian Electric is not just responsible and they weren’t just negligent,” said Mikal Watts, a lead attorney on the case. “They were grossly negligent by making conscious decisions to delay grid modernization projects that would have prevented this very tragedy.” NBC News 8-16-23

 

But as I pointed out in a previous post, lawsuits don’t stop these things from happening, they are not anomaly’s, they are a natural occurrence of a decaying social system.

 

In all honesty, I believe most workers know this. We are not idiots. We experience events like these all the time, and ever more recently. We are told by the bureaucratic clique in Congress, that US society can’t afford a national health system, or decent housing as homelessness explodes, or repair its crumbling infrastructure. Yet we see the wealth of a tiny section of society increase beyond unheard of limits. The largest landlords in society are capital management companies. President “worker” Joe Biden, the most pro worker president ever we are told, who just smashed a potential rail strike, talks of staying to the end to bring democracy and freedom to Ukraine as our infrastructure, bridges, dams, railway, is collapsing. This is a lie and most of us know it.

 

These are all major crises but it’s all moot if climate change is not addressed and capitalism cannot address it. The US military which enables this situation to continue is the largest consumer of fossil fuels and the world’s largest polluter. Some right-wing news reports applaud angry motorists running over climate protesters or dragging them from the streets by their hair. I may not agree with their approach necessarily but their cause is just and if we do not address it then those grandchildren you love to see on weekends will not see the end of this century; us older folks need to step in to the shoes of our youth sometimes. I feel strongly about this simply because the evidence is there.

 

Labor has the power to change this

I wrote in a previous blog that this summer some 650,000 US workers are on strike or threatening to strike, most of them in the same national federation. In a couple of weeks, the contract the once mighty United Auto Workers (UAW) has with the big three auto manufacturers is up and the new UAW leadership has drawn a line in the sand at least through public statements.  I won’t repeat the conclusions from that article, click on the included link to read it, but I think it’s important to stress that all union struggles against the bosses have to include some reference to climate change. This is particularly so with the likes of auto which is really the mass transportation industry, as well as the oil, chemical and energy sectors that are a threat to human existence.

 

It’s not enough to just raise regaining previously lost ground or even significant reforms, no reforms will suffice with the planet on fire or cities falling in to the sea or entire regions becoming inhabitable. No reforms are permanent, and in these times, if possible at all, less permanent than ever. Those reforms that advance our ability to transform a system of production from one based on profit to one based on need and in harmony with nature are the only real gains.

 

The transportation industry which produces mostly inefficient or environmentally destructive automobiles or military hardware, should be taken in to public ownership and re-tooled to produce mass transportation; Roosevelt did this during WW2 to increase military production. In the immediate term this is a necessary step and it’s what the UAW leadership should also be raising.

 

I do not believe we are at the point of no return, we are at the tipping point. But that doesn’t mean that we are not heading very rapidly in that direction.