The government response to this season’s wildfires has been dismal.

Mark Carney is not only abandoning the carbon tax, but also promising to use emergency powers to speed up pipeline construction. This decision perfectly illustrates the real priorities of the Canadian ruling class: when the needs of Capital demand it, all impediments to profit must be removed.

A few days after the town was ravaged by wildfire, Conservative Premier Danielle Smith held a press conference where she waxed lyrical about the “magic of Jasper” in between suppressed sobs. But she has no right to cry over a tragedy, when she defends the system that caused it.

The catastrophe of climate change is upon us. It is a potentially existential crisis, if not for our species as a whole, certainly for human civilization and life on Earth as we know it. The facts are as sobering as they are undeniable.

A new United Nations report, released before the COP28 climate summit, says Canada is not on track to meet its commitments on climate change. Canada is among a group of top fossil-fuel-producing countries on pace to extract more oil and gas than would be consistent with its emissions targets. Far from decreasing oil and gas extraction, Canada is on track to actually increase production of oil and gas! In the same week, Canada’s commissioner of the environment and sustainable development revealed that Canada is the only G7 country that has not achieved any emissions reductions since 1990. These reports show once again the total inability of capitalism to meaningfully address the climate crisis.

“We recognize that our communication in the past has not met communities’ expectations and we are working with communities to improve our communications.” This is the response from Imperial Oil’s spokeswoman Lisa Schmidt to the revelation that Imperial Oil has been hiding toxic leaks from the public; not for nine months as was previously reported, but for years—as early as 2019.

The massive forest fires sweeping across Canada this summer continue to wreak havoc, and have now forced the evacuation of a first (territorial) capital, Yellowknife. It seems that one plague after another is befalling humankind. Except that, unlike the ten plagues of Egypt, this destruction is not the work of God, but of mere mortals: the capitalists.

A recent report from the Auditor General of Ontario on Doug Ford’s Greenbelt Project has revealed that Ford and his ministers were making decisions entirely directed by housing developers. While it was already clear to everybody that the plan was a handout to Ford’s developer buddies, this is a level of collusion beyond what anyone suspected. 

The Hawaiian island of Maui has been devastated by wildfires, leaving at least 80 dead at the time of writing. The inferno has been described as the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the state of Hawaii. But in fact, there was little natural about this tragedy. It was an accident waiting to happen, facilitated by the capitalism-created climate crisis, and disproportionately affecting poorer neighborhoods on an island treated as a luxurious plaything by the wealthy.

An unprecedented number of wildfires have set Europe alight in the past month. Nine Mediterranean countries have been hit, leading to many people losing their homes and even their lives. These are the deadly consequences of capitalism’s climate catastrophe.