Nightmarish fires are raging in Spain and France. Journalist and author John Vaillant, appearing on Democracy Now!, described flames rising higher than a 30-story building. Vaillant said the fires were so hot that French pilots reported massive loads of water evaporated before reaching the flames. Across the two countries, more than 330,000 people have fled homes. Smoke turned daytime skies orange and made the air hazardous to breathe.

The Gironde fire in France has burned approximately 162 square miles, making it one of the country’s largest wildfires since World War II. In Spain, the Ávila fire has consumed almost 200 square miles, making it the largest single wildfire recorded in the country. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed.

Rocío Domínguez, 35, described fleeing her home in Spain: “It was madness with cars going up and down, traffic jams in the village streets as people tried to get out. It looked like the apocalypse. You couldn’t see anything. Everything was covered in ash. You could see all the burned animals.”

These fires are not simply natural disasters. They have been intensified by a capitalist-imperialist system that depends on the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Greenhouse gases are heating Europe faster than any other continent. They are making heat waves more severe, drying vegetation and creating conditions in which fires spread faster, burn more intensely, and overwhelm those fighting them.

The fires follow a European heat wave that shattered records and pushed temperatures over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Estimates say the heat wave was associated with 14,000 to 18,000 deaths. The international research group World Weather Attribution found that heat waves like this were “tens to hundreds of times more likely since only 2003 and virtually impossible just 50 years ago.”

The places where we live, the air we breathe, the natural world on which all life depends can no longer be taken for granted. A system driven by relentless competition for profit and growth is colliding with the natural systems that make life possible. The fires in France and Spain offer a terrifying picture of what that collision increasingly looks like.

Major fires also rage elsewhere. As of July 29, there are 89 large uncontrolled fires in Oregon and Washington. Canada reported 926 active wildfires, including 82 classified as out of control. In Tunisia, where temperature rose above 120 degrees, officials reported more than 900 fires. Significant wildfires have also broken out in England and Greece.

Some progress has been made toward containing the fires in Spain and France. But dangerous conditions persist and another heat wave threatens to drive temperatures above 104 degrees and intensify the blazes.

21st-Century Fires

Wildfire is natural and plays an important role in the life of forests. It recycles nutrients, clears dead undergrowth, causes seeds to sprout, and helps sustain habitats for wildlife. But global heating has created what John Vaillant in his book, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, calls “21st-century fires.” These fires burn faster and more intensely, are far harder to control, can generate their own weather, and cause extraordinary destruction.

Extreme fires release almost unimaginable amounts of energy. At its peak, the 2016 Fort McMurray fire in Canada, that Vaillant writes about in his book, released heat at a rate calculated to equal four Hiroshima bombs every minute. No comparable calculation has been published for the fires in France and Spain. But their destructive power shows they belong to this emerging class of extreme fire.

Spanish firefighter Raúl Guerrero, told the Associated Press that he had seen nothing like the fire in his 20 years of experience. He said the fire was “beyond the capacity of extinction… so virulent and has such power that no matter what you do, you can’t put it out.”

The Gironde fire produced a pyrocumulonimbus, or pyroCb—a thunderstorm generated by the fire itself. Intense heat drove smoke 30,000 to 40,000 feet into the atmosphere. “Once it forms, the cloud becomes its own weather system, sitting on top of the fire and making it harder to predict,” a fire meteorologist at the National Observatory of Athens told the Associated Press. Such a cloud can worsen the fire by producing lightning that starts new fires, strong downdrafts and erratic winds that redirect the flames and carry embers beyond fire lines.

A Criminally, Monstrously Absurd—and Completely Outmoded System

As the heat wave raged and the fires began, the European Union released a proposal to loosen regulations and allow companies to put MORE planet-heating gases into the atmosphere, saying that this was necessary to keep European industry competitive. This is the insane “logic” of the system.

Emissions from individual countries or regions do not determine how much the climate will be affected there. There are no national borders in the planet’s shared atmosphere. Despite decades of climate disasters and increasingly urgent warnings, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels reached another record in 2025. The United States is the top producer and exporter of oil and gas and was responsible for about one-third of the 2025 increase. This is criminal.

The only way to have a chance to keep the planet livable is to keep the oil in the ground and to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. This is something that the capitalist-imperialist system will not do! The website revcom.us has analyzed how capitalism’s underlying dynamics drive and intensify environmental destruction. That analysis is available on the Resource Page "Capitalism-Imperialism Is Destroying the Planet... Only Revolution Gives Humanity a Real Chance to Save It."

Humanity is heading toward disaster. France’s weather and climate service has painted an apocalyptic picture. By 2050, heat waves could be five times more frequent, while temperatures could hit 118 degrees Fahrenheit. 

In his recent major talk, HUMANITY ON THE BRINK: A Forced March Into the Abyss, or Forging a Way Forward Out of the Madness?, the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian says that the destruction of humanity as a whole “is a real and terrible prospect, as a result of the confinement of humanity within the awful relations and dynamics of the system dominating the world...” 

There is another way:

We are now at the point where it is more and more urgently necessary to move beyond this whole monstrous system—beyond a situation where people are forced to struggle just for individual survival, with everyone compelled to be in competition and conflict with others, and the masses of people everywhere are chained down by outmoded oppressive relations, while the future, and the very existence, of humanity is increasingly endangered.

 And it is possible now to move beyond all this.

A whole different way of living is possible: a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people and an uplifting culture—all of this oriented to meeting the basic needs and fulfilling the highest interests of the masses of people. 

—From HUMANITY ON THE BRINK: A Forced March Into the Abyss, 
or Forging a Way Forward Out of the Madness? by Bob Avakian