CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Photograph Source: Gogerr – CC BY-SA 4.0

The morning of June 27, 2021: Lytton, British Columbia, woke up and, without realizing it, set a record it never knew it was in the running for. This is, in the popular imagination, the country of igloos and toques and six unbroken months of snow, a place where the postcard weather report is permanently set to “bundle up”, the last country on earth anyone would picture reaching for sunscreen instead of a parka. By midday it had reached 46.6°C (115.9°F), a new Canadian all-time high. Not to be outdone by itself, it broke that record the next day: 47.9°C (118.2°F). And on June 29, still climbing, alone now on a mountain no one else in the country’s recorded history had ever stood on, it reached 49.6°C — 121.3°F, hotter than has ever been recorded in Las Vegas, a desert city built to expect exactly this kind of heat and mocked, that week, by a rail-and-river town in the Fraser Canyon. Then, on June 30, as though some tribunal of sky-gods had decided a village had no business reaching that high, a wall of fire came down out of the hills and in under twenty minutes, did what fire does. Lytton did not burn partway. Lytton, as a going concern, a post office, a grocery store, a shift at the mill, simply stopped being a sentence with a subject in it.

It was not an act of God. It was an act of atmospheric chemistry, and the chemistry has a return address. A hotter atmosphere holds more moisture, which means longer droughts between longer downpours, which means forests primed like kindling between floods; heat domes that would once have been freak occurrences now arrive with the punctuality of a subscription service. Scientists, who continue to suffer from the professional defect of checking whether things are true before saying them, attributed the 2021 heat dome, without much hedging, to human-caused warming. The kind of warming that does not accumulate evenly, that has a ledger, and the ledger has a name at the top of it.

Since 1750, Lytton’s neighbor to the south has pumped more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation on earth, something on the order of a quarter of everything that has ever gone up, roughly double the historical share of China, the country the world outsourced everything to, now shouldered with the “world’s biggest polluter” label because it finally out-produces America in a single year’s tally. Cumulatively, ounce for ounce, degree for degree, nobody has done more to cook the boreal forest than the country now presenting Canada with an........

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