The fires that have burned up and down the Front Range in the past week have served as yet another reminder of the volatility of our changing climate.

This message is likely most pronounced to the thousands who have been forced into the traumatic experience of evacuation. But for those of us watching the smoke plumes from afar, the fires should also be a reminder of just how important it is to maintain good air quality.

As our planet warms and the threat of wildfires increases, smoke-filled air is likely to become more common. And as smoke becomes a more regular feature along the Front Range, it becomes more important that we do everything in our power to reduce the other pollutants that sully our air and cause our awful ozone days.

In a bit of twisted irony, this editorial was meant to be about the Front Range’s poor air quality even before fire after fire ignited and left our lungs burning with smoke.

It began on Monday when the Alexander Mountain Fire was first reported in the foothills west of Loveland. The blaze spread quickly, and, as of Friday, had consumed more than 9,000 acres with crews managing only 5% containment. Things only got worse: On Tuesday afternoon, the Stone Canyon Fire was reported just north of Lyons in Boulder County. Later that evening, the Quarry Fire was sparked in Jefferson County. On Wednesday, the Lakeshore Fire was reported near Gross Reservoir. Unlike the others, fire crews quickly got it under control. But just hours later the Bucktail Fire in Montrose County was raging.

Fires have always been a part of life in the West. But climate change is having a real and tangible impact on Colorado. Extreme weather events are getting more common. As the planet warms, the High Plains are getting drier. Colorado’s natural areas — more than ever before — are becoming kindling, and the climate is the furnace.

There are, of course, many things that we can and should be doing to do our part to mitigate both the causes and effects of climate change. But it is worth focusing on one specific thing Boulder and Colorado should be doing to offset the effects: reducing air pollution along the Front Range.

The smoke floating down from the foothills has added a visual element to our exceedingly poor air quality, but make no mistake, our air quality is shockingly bad, with or without the smoke. In fact, it was just two weeks ago that news broke that the Front Range had once again failed to meet a federal air quality benchmark.

The benchmark in question is a national air quality standard for ozone that was set in 2015. Under that standard, the region’s 8-hour ozone average was supposed to be lowered to 70 parts per billion by this summer. In light of this failure, the EPA reclassified Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Weld and a number of other Front Range counties as being in serious violation of the air quality standard, according to a notice published last month in the Federal Register.

Everyone is likely familiar with ozone days — days when an environmentally unfriendly fog sits over the Boulder Valley or when the mountains become nearly invisible through the haze. Ground-level ozone is a product of emissions from industry, factories and tailpipes that combine on hot sunny days to form smog.

Not only is air pollution bad for our lungs — especially those with heart and lung diseases — but it is also “associated with oxidative stress and inflammation in human cells, which may lay a foundation for chronic diseases and cancer,” according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. One study put a direct link between fine particulate matter and mortality.

In Colorado, oil and gas activities represent roughly 45% of nitrogen oxide emissions and 41% of volatile organic compounds, making it the largest source of ozone-related emissions in the state. Vehicles come in close behind with more than 30 tons of nitrogen dioxide emissions per day.

Reducing our emissions enough to make an impact on our ozone levels will require both a collective effort to drive less and a willingness to put strict limits on one of our state’s biggest industries.

The first step must be to get emissions from Colorado’s oil and gas industry under control. There are aggressive ideas, such as phasing out the issuing of new drilling permits, that should be considered. But what we need to do today is put reduction benchmarks on the industry with meaningful penalties that will force oil and gas producers to do everything in their power right now to reduce their share of harm. Solutions should include switching to electric engines, shutting down production on hot ozone days and ensuring that all wells are properly plugged.

Similar regulations should also be put in place for other industries to ensure all businesses are doing their part to reduce emissions.

Finally, and most painfully, we have to look in the mirror and assess what role we are playing by getting behind the wheel of a car.

Of course, it is no easy task to ask someone to walk or bike during the hottest months of the year. But this is a cyclical problem. If we keep clogging up our roadways with traffic, we are going to keep making our ozone worse which, in the long run, will contribute to warming our planet.

Maybe it is time for those who are able — who live near public transit or their place of work or the grocery store or wherever they are headed, and who are not physically at risk in the heat — to consider staying out of the car.

On this front, it would also be useful for RTD and the state to once again roll out Free Fare for Better Air, which increased ridership by 10% last year.

It’s time we get serious about combating our ozone issue. We have missed an embarrassing amount of air quality benchmarks — and we are the ones suffering for it.

As our climate changes, fires like the ones already raging are going to become more common. And the smoke that clogs our skies from them will become more common, too. That means we have to do what we can to lower the emissions we can control and make our air quality as good as possible so that we are not suffering twice over.

As we wrote of the Marshall Fire, it’s tempting to say that all these fires were a freak occurrence. The truth, though, is that freak occurrences are getting less and less freakish and becoming more and more normal occurrences.

Gary Garrison for the Editorial Board