After law enforcement arrested 37-year-old Aaron Farinacci on suspicion of setting the Old Trails Fire, the crowing from right-of-center pundits became a full chorus.
Former Gov. Jay Inslee, long despised by the right in Washington state, had stoked its fury Sunday when he’d posted on social media that “Climate change isn’t some faraway threat. It’s happening right now, to our neighbors and friends. We have to fight for them.”
To some conservatives, this kind of commentary was wildly insensitive.
“Jay Inslee thinks this is the time to peddle his political talking points from hundreds of miles away,” 6th Legislative District Candidate Isaiah Paine posted. “Sit this one out, Jay. Now is not the time.”
With the news that one of the fires in Spokane may have been caused by an arsonist, mockery of Inslee’s argument reached a fever pitch.
“Ah ha,” wrote Beth Dutton, a pundit on X with over 51,000 followers. So the 65k acre Spokane fire wasn't climate change. We all knew this.”
“Leftists have been blaming "CLIMATE CHANGE" for several days now, but once again, it was ARSON. NOTHING natural about it,” wrote alternative media personality Nick Sortor, who brags in his profile that he is “covering stories MSM won’t.” (“MSM” is conservative, pejorative shorthand for “Main Stream Media.”)
“Climate change. Arson. Same thing. 🙃” right-wing journalist Jonathan Choe sarcastically wrote on Twitter.
“This is the face of the ‘climate change’ which is responsible for the Washington fires,” snarked the Libs of TikTok account, which is maintained by the former real estate agent-turned-right-wing commentator Chaya Raichik, above a picture of Farinacci.
But Inslee’s and others’ argument was never that climate change itself started the fire — no more than climate change causes lightning. The issue, experts say, is that climate change is literally adding fuel to the fire.
“We’re on our fourth year of significant drought, which is obviously having an impact on the health of trees and the health of the natural environment,” said Michael Kelly, communications director with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. “When you’re combining really dangerous weather conditions with a drought that is drying up fuels, it’s a really combustible situation.”
Farinacci, of course, makes a better villain than the collective emissions of greenhouse gasses. He’s a man who killed his father for asking him to do dishes.
By contrast, climate change — as anyone who saw the truly terrible 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow can attest to — makes for a boring villain.
It’s not. It is the accrual of trillions of actions by billions of people over hundreds of years. Instead of coming from simple malice or greed, much of climate change has been caused by people just living their lives, driving to work, eating meat and heating their homes. Climate change, in part, is the result of societies pulling themselves out of poverty, trading starvation for industrialization.
As with any one natural disaster, it’s hard to completely say it wouldn’t have happened if not for climate change. Big fires have happened throughout human history. But researchers have shown that climate change makes many of these disasters more likely and more deadly.
Over a little more than two decades, the number of extreme wildfires fires have doubled. In parts of the Western US, one study found, fire seasons are lasting a month longer than they did 35 years earlier. Hot temperatures, low snowfall and droughts that span years have turned our terrain into a tinder box.
Now add the final factor: dry weather with massive winds and low humidity.
Farinacci, to be clear, has only been accused of starting one of the several fires that have converged to form the Spokane Complex Fires. The disaster can’t just have been caused by one element — even if it’s something as impactful as climate change — because it’s not just one fire.
Complex fires — blazes that come together sparked by multiple and often many origins — tend to be the worst fire disasters not only because they increase the landscape of damage but also because they stretch firefighting capacity thin.
One of the most salient cases of this dynamic in the Inland Northwest took place before climate change was part of the zeitgeist. In 1910, a massive conflagration spread across the entire American Northwest. That combined as many as 3,000 individual fires — including fires started by lightning, campfires and even embers from coal locomotives.
The reason it grew so big is because conditions were very similar to how they were on Saturday: strong winds, a weak snowpack and a long period of drought.
And, thanks in part to greenhouse gases, the conditions every year keep imitating the worst of 1910. The case for climate change’s impact on the frequency and severity of wildfires isn’t about one week of bad weather. It’s about year after year of bad weather.
There are plenty of fights to be had about forest management, homeless encampments and punishing arsonists. But all these debates take place in a different world than they did 20 years ago.
If those scoffing on social media about the notion that climate change is a factor in the Spokane fires had grown up in Spokane, they might strike a different tone. They’d know how rarely summer plans had once been choked out by wildfire smoke, or the air had turned toxic, or the sun had gone red — even 10 years ago. They’d know that what was once extraordinary — like the 1991 firestorm — has practically become rote in the West.
You can’t fix that simply by jailing more arsonists, shutting down more homeless encampments or putting out more Smokey the Bear PSAs. Anybody with malice and a match can start a fire. It takes a lot more to make a blaze what it was this week in Spokane.
