Alexander Hurst: Europe wildfire evacuations collide with Trump climate rollback

Alexander Hurst argues in the Guardian that Europe’s current fire season is no longer a southern problem with a few bad weeks attached, but a continent-wide emergency that has already produced what he describes as France’s largest peacetime evacuations. He points to fires in western Spain’s Galicia in mid-June, blazes near Paris that reached into the Fontainebleau forest, and fast-moving fronts threatening cities such as Bordeaux and Madrid. In France’s Gironde region around Bordeaux, he writes, tens of thousands of hectares have burned, with local officials likening the event to a “thunderstorm of fire” and dozens of firefighters injured.

The column’s core move is not to dispute the physics of heat, drought and wind, but to ask why cross-border damage still meets a largely domestic political response. Smoke from Canadian fires drifted into US cities, Hurst notes, while some US politicians responded by floating tariffs or sanctions against Canada—an inversion of the practical reality that Canada has routinely sent firefighting help to US states. In Europe, the politics are similarly shaped by budgeting and blame: French opposition figures, he reports, attacked the government for delaying the purchase of additional water-bombing aircraft, while the government accused critics of opportunism. The incentives are plain enough: procurement choices that would be scrutinised in normal years become easier to postpone until the moment they are needed, when the cost of delay is paid in evacuations, injuries and scorched land.

Hurst then widens the aperture to the transatlantic relationship. Carbon emissions do not respect borders, but the tools available to governments remain mostly national: subsidies, regulation, and public spending at home; diplomacy and trade abroad. The United States, he argues, carries a large share of historical responsibility—more than one-fifth of cumulative emissions, by his account—and remains among the highest per-capita major emitters alongside Saudi Arabia. Yet the political cycle in Washington can still swing between climate commitments and reversals, with Hurst citing past US withdrawals and policy shifts that helped stall international action.

That makes Europe’s leverage question unavoidable. If European leaders treat the climate as a security issue—fires displacing populations, damaging infrastructure, and consuming emergency capacity—then the absence of economic consequences for backsliding abroad starts to look like a policy choice rather than an inevitability. Hurst points to China’s rapid build-out of renewables and dominance in green industries as evidence that industrial policy can move quickly when it is tied to national advantage, not moral exhortation. Europe’s own debates, by contrast, are still routed through short-term fiscal fights and the search for someone to blame when the wind changes.

In Hurst’s account, the summer’s defining numbers are not abstract temperature records but people moved, aircraft not bought, and hectares burned. The fires near Bordeaux and Madrid are described as among the most extreme Europe has seen; the political arguments are still about who said what on television while the evacuation orders go out.