As devastating wildfires and hazardous air become the “new normal,” inequality is on display.

There was a time, not so long ago, when one of the challenges faced by environmental activists was making the threat of climate change concrete. How do you convince the public that small changes in the atmosphere can have catastrophic consequences? The threat was real, but it was a threat that needed to be taught, a threat that required explanation, a threat that most people, in their daily lives, couldn’t feel or see.

In California, those days are over. The Camp Fire in Butte County has become the most destructive wildfire in state history, largely erasing the town of Paradise, population 26,000. As of press time, the death toll from the fire had risen to 71, with more than 1,000 people missing. (California’s second-most-deadly fire, the Griffith Park Fire in 1993, killed 29 people.) Down south, in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, the Woolsey Fire has consumed nearly 100,000 acres, destroyed more than 600 structures, and killed three people. The impact of the fires has spread well beyond the areas devastated by flames, with the sky turning a sickly gray from Sacramento to Los Angeles. School closures resulted in the cancellation of classes for 1.1 million students, 18 percent of the state’s public-school enrollment. Also closed were a number of colleges, including Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State and San Jose State University.

Many people, myself included, have gotten into the habit of checking each morning the EPA’s air-quality site. I live in Oakland, and watched over the past week as the colors on the map went from orange to red to purple – defined as “very unhealthy” – spreading blob-like across the Bay Area. By Thursday, as air-pollution levels soared, many people made plans to get out for a few days. “Need an escape?” asked a headline in SF Gate, noting that Lake Tahoe’s air was pristine. I heard from people who were heading to Tahoe, Monterey, San Luis Obispo and Reno, finding hotels or staying in vacation homes, desperate for the chance to breathe air that didn’t taste like exhaust.

Yet not everybody can leave, a fact climate scientists have warned us about: The people who will bear the brunt of climate change will be the poor. The low-wage workers who keep the Bay Area humming aren’t usually afforded the luxury of working from home, or of taking days off, or of having the disposable income needed to drive hundreds of miles away and pay for a motel when the air becomes hazardous.

The “new normal” is the phrase endlessly batted about when the topic turns to climate change. What the term misses is that not everyone’s new normal will be the same, especially in regions defined as much as anything by stark inequality. When the skies turn toxic, those with the means to do so will depart, turning those vacation homes into shelters from the smoke. Those without the means will stay. We all breathe air, but the air we breathe won’t be the same.

GABRIEL THOMPSON is a journalist and author in Oakland. His most recent book is Chasing the Harvest, an oral history collection from California’s fields.