A severe heatwave is ongoing in Europe. Temperature records broken in France, Switzerland, Germany and Spain.
On 11 July 2023, the Land Surface Temperature (LST) in some areas of Extremadura (Spain) exceeded 60°C, as highlighted in this data visualisation derived from measurements from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) instrument. The ongoing heatwave in Spain this week is resulting in a total of 13 autonomous communities, being at extreme risk (red alert), significant risk (orange alert), and risk (yellow alert) due to maximum temperatures that, in some cases, will exceed 40°C and reach a maximum of 43°C.
For reference, “in areas where vegetation is dense, the land surface temperature never rises above 35°C. The hottest land surface temperatures on Earth are in plant-free desert landscapes.”
I’ve spent last August sitting in the shade listening to the music from the village parties mixed with the sound of the airplane engines flying over a nearby forest fire. It was bizarre. But then, what is one to do really? People who live around here aren’t really the ones to blame. Can’t really blame them for still wanting to have their village party. While I, who does give a shit, do little more than eating local and avoiding consumerism. Eating the rich might me more efficient, but there’s none around here, we just have grapes and potato.
The people with the real power to do anything are the people who will suffer the least. We’re going off the rails on a crazy train.
‘Crazy train’ describes well the feeling I had last summer. Like the ‘this is fine’ meme. And this summer will be the same. You hide, keep your garden watered, and hope the fires won’t get you this year. All while the officials keep advising to plant more Eucalyptus for profit and organic matter is blamed for the problem and burned for biofuel or on people’s fields - instead of reincorporated into the landscape as it should be. Here in Portugal, for animal bedding, most buy straw bales from the overheated because desertified Extremadura instead of cutting the Giesta (broom) as people used to do. Why are the Spanish straw bales cheaper? Because fossil fuels and the big scale agriculture attached to them create a fake price for the straw (I’m not an economist and don’t know the right terms, but it’s like the prices for fossil fuels and their derivates don’t contain the environmental damage caused by its use). And the Giestais, unused, grow and spread the wildfires.
In Economic terms, it’s Negative Externalities not being reflected in the price.
Negative Externalities are negative effects of an economic activity which are dispersed in their effect and thus affect everbody but just a little each (while the positives are all gains for the people doing that activity). These are things like Polution, destruction of Ecological Systems, emission of Global Warming gases and so on - there are quite a lot of things that are like that.
Mathematically (and in practice) the Free Market will never compensate for those (quite the contrary: it makes them more likely), which is why some kind of legislation which is actually enforced is needed to control such things.
This being Portugal, there is no political will to control most of those things (rivers are only clean nowadays because the EU forced it) so either there is no legislation, there is but it’s toothless, there is but the fines are way less than the profits from law-breaking or there is but those supposed to uphold the law are activelly hindered in their work, have no real power to do so or are starved of funds so can’t in practice do the job (just notice how the Comission for Transparency of Income of Politicians in Public Office has been for years waiting for approval for the location of their HQ)
The country might as well change its name to Cronyist Crookland.
That’s it, negative externalities. Thanks for reminding me of the word. Which group would I support if I wanted to change something in Portugal? I have found a lot of middle class ‘feel good activism’ (planting trees which then die, talking endlessly about what to do, pass the same old advice to fellow citizens …), but that doesn’t really cut it. The country is a beautiful banana republic and has a few nice valleys to hide in, and I have been living here long enough to want to help protect these places. How can we hold accountable the industries who want to come here to destroy and extract?