Jake Callan is a firefighter in California.
In early January, my local crew of firefighters in Northern California said goodbye to the first engines sent south to fight the fires that were beginning to develop around LA. Little did we realize that critical fire weather predicted that week would last nearly the entire month. By the last week of January, new brush fires in San Diego required us to gear up and respond further south to attempt to head off more new fires. We endured multiple all-night fire fights, often in the face of erratic fire behavior typically seen in the middle of summer, not the dead of winter. In winter, we usually get a bit of a break from fire season. With each passing year, this is becoming less true. Today we are increasingly fighting fires all year round. A new reality is creeping over us—as climate change worsens, “fire season” has no end.
Worsening Climate Change Fuels Disaster
In California, the year 2025 began ominously—a significant deficit of rainfall combined with extremely low humidity, high, erratic winds and high temperatures. The stage was set for the explosive outcome that became the Palisades and Eaton fires, which now constitute the second and third most destructive fires in California history. Despite the efforts made before the fire to pre-position significant firefighting resources due to the red flag weather warning, these fires still decimated over ten thousand homes in the middle of winter. The fire’s behavior was observed to be extreme and erratic.
The increase in wildfires is a global phenomenon. North and South Carolina are currently experiencing unprecedented winter wildfires, with over 81 different fires burning as of early March—the largest having torched over 2,000 acres. Japan is currently experiencing a massive winter wildfire in its northeast, with nearly 7,500 acres consumed, the largest the country has experienced in the last 50 years. In a jarring juxtaposition, this firefight has been hampered by heavy snow and rain—truly a troubling sign of the new normal.
The role of the climate crisis in fueling these fires cannot be ignored. Climate change, caused and worsened by big business in their callous pursuit of profit, has increased wildfires around the world. Hot, dry and windy weather conditions are increasing the risk of fires both starting and spreading. We have already surpassed the 1.5 degree Celsius mark that climate scientists have been warning about for years, which has resulted in a situation where the extreme Fire Weather Index (FWI) conditions that drove the LA fires are now expected to occur on average once in 17 years. This is a 35% increase in likelihood compared to pre-industrial levels. In other words, catastrophic off-season fires are now significantly more likely to occur, all thanks to capitalism’s subordination of everything to profitmaking.
Capitalism Started The Fire
Capitalism and its insatiable subordination of human need to the accumulation of profit is the root cause of the climate crisis. We live in a world of chaotic overproduction of goods ordinary people don’t necessarily need, while large amounts of food, consumer goods and raw materials go to waste. At the same time, there’s a criminal underproduction and overpricing of what ordinary people do need, like basic medicines and housing. In this unhinged reality, just 100 major corporations are responsible for 71% of all carbon emissions since 1988. For major corporations, any environmental-related fines they are charged are hardly more than a slap on the wrist. To these parasites, almost any price is worth paying to deliver a higher profit, the result of which has led us to this precipice of climate disaster.
Rather than making even modest steps to provide relief to consumers, industries such as the California for-profit utility company PG&E and the rapacious insurance industry have found no shortage of ways to saddle working people with the ever increasing costs of their profit-making. PG&E increased consumer electrical rates by 12.8% in 2024, while making off with a $2.47 billion annual profit the same year. During a two year period from 2015 to 2017, the Wall Street Journal estimated that PG&E equipment sparked over 1,500 wildfires. The deadliest fire in California history, the Camp Fire, was caused by faulty PG&E equipment. The company was later forced to plead guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter.
Following the billions of dollars of losses in the recent Palisades and Eaton fires, California assessed private insurance companies $1 billion to cover the losses of the state-run FAIR Plan, which provided insurance to a significant portion of the homes destroyed. While it may seem like a good step to force insurance companies to dip into their profits to pay for the climate crimes of capitalism, this system is built to shift the burden onto ordinary people. Baked into the law governing this assessment is a clause that allows these insurers to pass 50% of the $1 billion onto consumers in rate increases, which working-class homeowners simply cannot afford.
The climate crisis was produced by capitalism, and thus cannot be solved by capitalism. There is no formulation in which the powers of capital can turn a profit and also make serious progress on curbing carbon emissions, building cities and communities to be more equipped to defend against extreme weather events, and actually slowing the progression of climate change. The planning and spending required to do so contradicts their primary motivation to accumulate profits. Instead, we see for-profit utilities and insurance companies continue to hoard profits, making money off of human suffering.
The current federal government’s intentions when it comes to the climate couldn’t be clearer. The Trump administration wasted no time pulling out of the already inadequate Paris Climate Accord, as well as reducing or eliminating funding and staff for federal agencies such as NOAA, which carry out important research related to the climate crisis. Clearly, the segment of the ruling class swept into power by Trump’s victory has decided to hoard their billions and retreat behind their golden fences, rather than invest anything in a livable future. The billionaire-in-chief, Donald Trump, will let his friends get richer while shifting the burden for climate-driven disasters onto working class families.
Worse yet, Trump’s nationalist approach is putting pressure on some European countries to roll back the few, still woefully inadequate climate measures they may have put in place, in order to compete economically with the US. This fact, combined with a massive drive towards rearmament and military spending has made it clearer than ever that the capitalist “virtue” of competition is actually causing massive problems for humanity. Instead, we need a global planned economy, to organize the level of cooperation necessary to reduce emissions and prepare for the future in a serious way.
Fight the Fires, Fight the System
As the climate crisis continues, with hurricanes, fires, floods and droughts leaving millions of victims in their wake, we need to build a movement to fight the system that created and now perpetuates this disaster. This means taking to the streets that fight for financial assistance to rebuild and harden communities, ending for-profit insurance, taxing the rich and corporations to fully fund the fire department, and taking the top 500 polluting companies into democratic public ownership. We also need these movements to link with unions prepared to go on strike, including in polluting industries, and developing a massive green jobs program. This fight cannot be fought under the leadership of the Democratic Party— the proven graveyard of popular movements. We need a new political party of the working class, independent of the two billionaire-owned parties and their capitalist system that is responsible for these disasters.
By getting organized, the working class can pave the road towards a real break from climate disaster, to a day when firefighters like myself aren’t overwhelmed by a steadily rising world of escalating wildfires, and towards a better future of safety, resilience and the flourishing of human potential.