Republicans Blaming Canada For Climate Change Have Balls On Them Pete Hegseth Could Only Dream Of
Remember when 'blame Canada' was funny because it was ridiculous?
Smoke from wildfires burning out of control in Canada’s northern forests is causing dangerously bad air quality across much of eastern Canada and the US, which you’ve probably noticed if you’re in that part of North America and have lungs. It’s bad already, even though the fires in Canada — and the smoke reaching the US — haven’t yet reached the terrible scale they did in 2023.
In Detroit, Michigan, the air quality Thursday and Friday was the worst of any major city in the world, according to IQAir, a Swiss air quality technology company. But Chicago, Washington DC, and Toronto didn’t feel left out, since they had, respectively, the second-through-fourth worst air in the world. AirNow, a US government air quality reporting site, forecasts “Very Unhealthy” to “Hazardous” air quality today across the entire state of Michigan. You can check your own area’s forecast here.
As this brief but sobering piece in the Atlantic explains (gift link), the fires in Canada’s boreal forests simply can’t be stopped in many cases. It’s too big a region, too remote from firefighting resources. The entire Canadian boreal zone — between “the treeless tundra of the arctic zone in northern Canada and the temperate zone in southern Canada” is part of a global greenbelt in the northern hemisphere, and it’s yet another region that’s being disastrously affected as the Earth heats up due to humans burning fossil fuels.
Wood-boring pests that flourish in milder climates have swept north and east, through tens of millions of acres. Droughts and dwindling snowpack have stressed the trees. They are ready to burn.
And as this map from Natural Resources Canada indicates, a lot of the zone is burning right now.
The big red dots are fires that are “out of control” and not being contained by firefighting efforts, and the big purple dots are also burning out of control, but they’re just being monitored, without any effort yet to try to contain them, because they’re too remote, and besides, fire is an essential part of the forests’ life cycle.
As University of Calgary environmental science professor Jed Kaplan told the Atlantic, “You can’t control these fires. You cannot put personnel, fire engines, over an area that is the size of the entire American South, or something like that. It’s just way too big of an area.”
It’s also far too large an area to rake, in case any American politicians were wondering.
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In what seems to be turning into an annual ritual of stupidity, a group of Republican members of Congress have sent a very testy letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney demanding “immediate action from the Canadian government” to stop the basically unstoppable wildfires, complaining that “American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year.”
The group of elected representatives from the country responsible for the most carbon emissions in history* complained that “Sovereignty comes with responsibility, and the responsibility to prevent a foreseeable disaster from crossing into another country’s airspace has not been met.”
Yes, that “sovereignty” stuff is a reference to Donald Trump’s weird wet dream of annexing Canada. Needless to say, America’s greenhouse gas emissions have harmed the world beyond our borders, but they don’t count because Republicans don’t think science is real. Besides, you can see smoke, while CO2 is invisible, so it’s not actually pollution.
Last year, another group of Republicans similarly complained to Canada’s ambassador to the US, with similar cluelessness to the effects on other countries caused by American climate pollution. Needless to say, the idiots don’t acknowledge that humans cause climate change, and they also pretend that Canada’s wildfires are the result of “poor forest management” and of course scary antifa arsonists.
Also, here’s MAGA influencer and bestselling idiot Eric Metaxas complaining that air quality advisories are tyranny, because how dare you tell me not to go out and gulp down all the particulates I want to:
Here’s the thing: As the climate warms, we’re going to see more drought, more invasive insects killing trees, and more loss of the snowpack that’s necessary for keeping forests healthy. As the Atlantic piece points out, increasingly common wildfires are themselves becoming a substantial source of carbon emissions, too. The 2023 fires in Canada “generated more emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in all but the three most-polluting countries.”
Wildfire smoke is even darkening North American glaciers, causing them to absorb more sunlight and melt faster, contributing to drought and, yes, more wildfires.
Might be time to switch faster to cleaner energy, which, happily, is becoming cheaper and more plentiful every year. There’s your silver lining, if you can see it through the smoke.
*China now exceeds the US in total annual emissions, but in greenhouse emissions per capita, we’re still Number One.
[Atlantic (gift link) / NBC News / Detroit News / CBS News / The Crucial Years]
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Just updated with a bonus idiot, rightwing influencer Eric Metaxas complaining about the tyranny of air quality advisories, which don't have the force of law but are still infringements on liberty because the government has no business ever telling you what to do.
https://bsky.app/profile/rightwingwatch.bsky.social/post/3mqrwfhyeck2t
Eric Metaxas is an anagram for "at a sex crime".