Over 100 million Americans in 23 states suffered a dramatic collapse in their air quality this week. Major cities such as Detroit, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia are still suffocating as of Friday afternoon under the repressive arrival of Canadian wildfire smoke.
The latest episode of Canadian pollution plaguing America is milder than the record-shattering smog that overwhelmed New York in early June. Yet nearly a month has passed since that episode — which America reacted to by immediately sending radical leftist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hundreds of American firefighters and critical fire assets — and Canada appears to have made little progress in solving the problem. Leftist President Joe Biden, who counts Trudeau as a close ideological ally, has said little of the fires since early June and blamed only “climate change” for the damage done.
In reality, the Canadian wildfires, experts agree, are the result of Trudeau’s government — and leftist provincial governments — failing to properly manage their forests by removing flammable brush and allowing smaller, controlled burnings to limit the threat of uncontrollable fires. The Globe and Mail, hardly a conservative outlet, blamed “decades of bad decisions” for an observable deterioration in Canada’s ability to contain the destruction caused by wildfires as early as two years ago, demanding more government action. Once the fires began, the province of Quebec, for example, refused to bring in firefighters from Montreal into the forests to help put out the fires, waiting for countries as distant as France and Chile to fill the gap.
Previous criticisms of Canadian officials have gone largely ignored, and now that the damage is done, Biden seems entirely uninterested in holding the Canadian government accountable for an ongoing assault on Americans’ health.
Watch — BLADE RUNNER NYC: Canadian Wildfire Smog Casts Dystopian Hue over Big Apple
Biden’s response to these fires, which actively affect tens of millions of Americans, differs markedly from his reaction to controlled fires in the Amazon Rainforest, about 3,400 miles from Detroit. In 2020, when Biden was still a presidential candidate, the future president threatened to destroy the economy of Brazil if then-President Jair Bolsonaro, a conservative, did not accept $20 billion (Biden never explained where this number came from) to “stop tearing down the forest.”
Unlike the Canadian wildfires, which are largely the product of lightning strikes, Amazon fires are deliberate; farmers burn down old brush to begin their planting seasons. The smoke from the fire affects “thousands” of people — a situation as lamentable as that in North America, but not comparable in scale to the 100 million Americans currently affected by Canada’s failures today. The Amazon’s climate is inherently extremely humid, a far cry from the bone-dry conditions in Quebec. Yet if Biden was willing to destroy the economy of a top trade partner, presumably with sanctions, over controlled fires thousands of miles away, the lack of a similar warning against a nation America has fought a war against leaves many questions unanswered.
The Amazon fires became a major news topic in 2019 and 2020 after a variety of celebrities — including Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo — took it upon themselves to condemn Bolsonaro for the ongoing fires. French President Emmanuel Macron also aided the campaign against Bolsonaro, first sharing a photo of a fire that the celebrities then circulated to condemn the Brazilian president, omitting that the photo was taken by a photographer who died in 2003. Bolsonaro became president of Brazil in 2019.
The Amazon fire season in 2019 burned worse than any “active fire year…since 2010,” according to NASA. Critics of Bolsonaro regularly omitted the fact that the number of fires between 2003 and 2010 — the years when radical socialist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was president — was far higher than any year in Bolsonaro’s administration.
Biden, too, failed to note this fact when threatening sanctions on Brazil in 2020.
“Brazil, the rainforests of Brazil are being torn down, are being ripped down. More carbon is absorbed in that rainforest than every bit of carbon that’s emitted in the United States,” Biden said during a presidential debate in September of that year, continuing:
Instead of doing something about that, I would be gathering up and making sure we had the countries of the world coming up with $20 billion, and say, “Here’s $20 billion. Stop, stop tearing down the forest. And if you don’t, then you’re going to have significant economic consequences.”
Biden did not clarify if he was referring to the fires, but the most possible origin for the $20 billion number appears to be a bribe of $22 million that Macron offered Bolsonaro to fight the fires. Bolsonaro rejected the money and mocked Macron for failing to prevent the fire that destroyed much of the iconic Notre Dame cathedral. Bolsonaro responded to Biden’s sanctions threat by suggesting he was willing to wage war against the United States.
Lula returned to the presidency in January for his third term, and with him, deforestation spiked in February. As with Trudeau, the threats of sanctions magically disappeared, and Lula was welcomed in the White House with open arms, where he promptly disregarded a request to not allow Iranian warships into his country.
Trudeau has received similar friendly treatment. Biden used “climate change” as a catch-all excuse for the Canadian situation in early June, the last time he bothered to address the crisis.
“This morning, millions of Americans are experiencing the effects of smoke resulting from devastating wildfires burning in Canada, another stark reminder of the impacts of climate change,” Biden said in a statement on June 8.
Watch: THOSE AREN’T CLOUDS! Smoke from Wildfires BLACKENS the Sky over Yankee Stadium
@Majorleaguemadd/SPORTS REPORT+ /TMXHe continued, “Yesterday I spoke with Prime Minister Trudeau and offered any additional help Canada needs to rapidly accelerate the effort to put out these fires, particularly those in Quebec, where the fires are having the most direct impacts on American communities.”
Biden sent Trudeau over 600 American firefighters and critical firefighting assets, according to a White House fact sheet on the matter. The fact sheet again emphasized that “climate change” was to blame, therefore absolving government officials of any wrongdoing.
The White House fact sheet read:
These latest events are another stark reminder of how the climate crisis is disrupting communities across the country. That’s why from day one President Biden recognized climate change as one of the four crises facing our nation, and why he made historic investments to tackle the climate crisis and strengthen community resilience.
Nowhere in Biden’s statement or in the fact sheet did the U.S. condemn the Trudeau administration or the provincial Canadian governments that deliberately cut firefighting budgets for years. Biden has yet to make any other major statement about the situation at press time.
In reality, fire prevention experts and Canadian observers have documented failures by the Trudeau administration and provincial governments on the issue for years.
“Research on forests in British Columbia shows that in centuries past, small- to moderate-size fires were common every several decades. Underbrush and deadfall on the forest floor would burn away, but many trees would survive,” the editorial board of the Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper of record, explained in 2021, continuing:
Fire contributed to a forest’s overall health. Canada’s forests have not been in a natural state for a long time. Fire suppression has led to forests full of deadfall, which is basically kindling. The trees are mostly from a short list of human-planted varieties – spruce, pine, fir – that are valuable for lumber, yet vulnerable to fire. The result is forests susceptible to massive blazes.
The newspaper noted that “decades of bad decisions,” in particular a lack of use of “prescribed burns” to do away with the deadfall in a controlled manner, had left Canada especially vulnerable to disaster.
Watch: MASSIVE Smoke Cloud BLOTS OUT THE SUN as Thousands Evacuate over Nova Scotia Wildfire
@bigmacdaddy_eth via StoryfulFollowing the June fires, similar complaints have resurfaced, even among those who accept “climate change” dogma.
Writing for the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank, Kenneth P. Green noted this month that, while “the climate is indeed warming,” climate issues were not driving the worsening fire situation, citing a 2020 study that found the number of fires in Canada falling even as the severity increases. The study, from the journal Progress in Disaster Science, lamented political incompetence as a core concern in fire management.
“Despite the increasing occurrence of wildfire disasters in Canada, funding to support wildfire prevention, mitigation and preparedness have not kept pace with the increasing need to mitigate the impacts from wildfires, and be better prepared when they do arrive,” the study read.
Green concluded, “Canada has failed to fund the proactive management of forest fires sufficiently and is not poised to do better moving forward.”
Former American Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke similarly explained in an interview with the Daily Mail this month how Canada failed. He blamed anti-climate change activists who pressure governments — with success, in Canada — to not allow the controlled burns.
“There are extremists who believe that the only way to protect forests is to limit public access and let it manage itself, let nature take its course. Now that’s fine in the terms of eons of history,” Zinke said, continuing:
But as far as human experience goes, I want my children to see the same healthy forest as I did. The shared goal is healthy forests but some extremists’ view of how to arrive there is that it should be nature without interference or human presence. It’s nuts.
Zinke said he was “absolutely not satisfied” with how America had responded to the situation, calling for “much more actively” managing forests to prevent uncontrollable fires.
As of this week, Canadian authorities documented 480 active fires nationwide, designating 251 of them as “out of control.” The fires have burned nearly 20 million acres of land. Quebec, which has experienced the worst of the fires, continues to lead the provinces in total number of fires: 71 active fires as of Friday, 26 of them “high-priority.”
“The fight against the forest fires will last several more weeks,” the Quebec government warns on its website.
Watch: A LONELY FIGURE — Statue of Liberty Shrouded in Wildfire Smoke
Paul Dousset via Storyful
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