Read those figures again, and then look at a family standing in the ash of their house.

My people, and communities all around the world, are paying the price of our governments’ inaction. We are losing our homes, our memories, our communities. Our lives and our future are turning to ash. And here is the cruelty inside the catastrophe: our region is left to shoulder the enormous cost of fighting these fires and helping people rebuild, while governments continue to subsidise the very fossil fuel companies driving the crisis.

None of this was inevitable. These fires were made more likely, more frequent, more ferocious by global warming caused largely by burning fossil fuels. How many homes could have been saved, how many lives spared, if our governments had chosen to confront the climate crisis at the speed and the scale the science demands, instead of shrinking climate budgets year after year while the profits of the fossil fuel giants swell?

This is a fast-moving situation, and I don’t know what the next weeks or even the next hours are going to look like. The figures above will keep changing as the fires burn and as full damage assessments are completed. But the direction is not in doubt, and neither is the responsibility. On July 23, the day before I was evacuated, TotalEnergies announced billions in profits. On Tuesday (4 August), BP reported that its quarterly profits more than doubled to £4.27bn.

Not long ago, the idea that fossil fuel companies should contribute directly towards the cost of climate damage was dismissed as activist rhetoric. Today it is reflected in legislation, litigation and mainstream policy debate.

Soraya Fettih is global campaigns coordinator at 350.org. Image: Supplied

Several US states have passed ‘Climate Superfund’ laws requiring major fossil fuel companies to help fund climate adaptation and disaster recovery. Courts are hearing cases seeking compensation for climate harms, while governments across Europe continue to debate the future of windfall taxes on outsized energy profits.

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These developments may appear disconnected, but they reflect a broader shift in public thinking: if societies are paying an ever higher price as our climate warms, should the excessively profitable fossil fuel companies whose products have substantially caused those costs not bear more of the burden of paying for them?

It is high time that governments make fossil fuel companies pay for the damage they profit from causing. That means a permanent, higher tax on fossil fuels, and a climate damages tax on oil and gas profits, with the money directed to emergency response, to recovery, and to the long-term resilience of the communities on the front line of this crisis.

Mark my words: the companies that spent more than 50 years financing climate delay should not, and will not, continue to be allowed to send us the bill for the fires they helped set. I think of the elders who taught me these forests. I think of the children on their own school trips, learning the names of the same trees, trees that may not be standing when they are my age. The choice in front of us is not abstract, and it is not distant. It is written in the black sky over Bordeaux this week.

Our land is not a sacrifice zone. Make the polluters pay.

Soraya Fettih is global campaigns coordinator at 350.org.

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