They are right: it is not climate change

This summer doesn't smell of the sea. It smells of ash, of loss, of destruction. Ask the thousands of people displaced from their homes or those who have lost everything, even a family member. And they are right: it is not climate change. The unbearable temperatures, the deaths from the heatwave, and the thousands of hectares scorched are not the result of climate change. It is us. We have already changed the climate and now we are living in full emergency.

Recognizing it does not mean ignoring that chronic deficient forest management is a determining factor in fires. Rural abandonment and lack of management have turned our forests into powder kegs. However, combined with extreme temperatures and other extreme phenomena accumulated during the rest of the year, it has created an unprecedented breeding ground. The record number of hectares burned and the virulence of the fires are proof of this.

The list of scientific alerts that have been warning us for decades that all this would happen is endless and, unfortunately, useless. Useless because we have not heeded them and because the denialist voices are making so much noise that they have ended up burying common sense. We have buried it so deeply that not only is the evidence questioned, but we are acting in the completely opposite direction. While the planet cries out for help and punishes us with maximum harshness, we respond to it with two cups.

Just two weeks ago, the European Commission presented a proposal to give big companies more time to continue polluting. A example more of rollback in sustainable policies of an increasingly right-leaning Europe vulnerable to foreign pressure. After allowing continue selling combustion engines beyond 2035, now the same is intended with large industrial emissions.

This is a reform of the Emissions Trading System (ETS), the cornerstone of European environmental policy that forces the most polluting companies to pay for each tonne of CO₂ emitted. At the request of countries like Poland, Italy, Germany or the Czech Republic (and against the demands of others like Spain, Portugal or the Nordic countries), Brussels has proposed to give more leeway to those who pollute the most under the economic argument and the lack of industrial competitiveness. Now, the Twenty-seven must negotiate the proposal.

That all this happens precisely now, when Southern Europe is burning and the rest of the continent is boiling, is ironic and demonstrates the consequences of short-term policies.

If we want to talk about the economy, let's talk about it. While we continue to act against scientific indications, the bill keeps rising. We don't just need to think about the money it costs and will cost to put out this summer's fires. A recent report by the think tank Bruegel warns of a "vicious cycle" in which the climate crisis directly erodes the financial health of states, reducing tax revenues and complicating public debt. In fact, the European Environment Agency calculates that a quarter of the 822 billion euros lost due to extreme phenomena in recent decades has been concentrated in the last four years.

It has always been said that it is better to prevent than to cure, a proverb that popular wisdom has passed down from generation to generation. The problem is that we are making it impossible for those who come after us to apply the saying.