One article I’ve saved- sorry for being late in getting it posted- Neither tax or tariffs will prevent these fires
Bob Gray, a Chilliwack, B.C.-based certified wildfire ecologist, said the U.S. complaints sidestep the fact that wildfire smoke routinely crosses the border in both directions.
“We trade smoke back and forth across the border all the time,” said Gray, who started his career decades ago as an elite wildland firefighter in the U.S.
He pointed to 2020, when smoke from fires in the western U.S. choked Vancouver’s harbour. In 2023, a fast-moving wildfire roared across the border from Washington state into Osoyoos, B.C. and nearly wiped out several subdivisions.And blazes in Minnesota crossed the border into Ontario earlier this year.
Mr. Gray said given the extreme conditions under which the Ontario fires exploded, there was never a real prospect of putting them out.
The majority of the fires were ignited around July 12 by a lightning storm across the region. The Fire Weather Index, a numerical rating of potential fire intensity, was off the charts. Forest fuels were so dry that virtually everything would have been available to burn. Another indicator measuring the expected severity reached the top of existing scales, making it far too dangerous to put firefighters on the ground.
“You can’t fight those fires,” Mr. Gray said.
High wind speeds pushing the fires across largely flat boreal forest meant that even air assets like water bombers and helicopters would likely not have worked, Mr. Gray said.
Canadian fire crews battle wildfires using roughly the same tactics and strategies of their U.S. counterparts, Mr. Gray said.
In recent years, Canada has moved away from aggressively suppressing all wildfires, instead choosing what’s called a “modified response” in some cases where conditions indicate fires can be safely left to burn, which is also similar to the U.S.
American accusations that Canada has not done enough to reduce forest fuel loading across the country, which is leading to larger and more destructive wildfires, has some truth to it, Mr. Gray said. But the solution is much more nuanced than Mr. Trump’s argument suggests.
I’m not touching the man made climate change aspect, because climates change- THE END
The other significant factor is the “fire debt” that North Americans created across fire prone landscapes through 100 years of obsessively trying to extinguish all wildfires, letting forests grow unnaturally dense. Now when they burn, they burn hotter and more intensely.
Canadian provinces lag behind some U.S. states when it comes to the use of prescribed fire to reduce fuel loads. The state of New Jersey, which is 43 times smaller than B.C., uses prescribed burning on almost five times as much land per year as B.C. does.
We “could be doing more prescribed burning and cultural burning,” Mr. Gray said.
However, more forest thinning wouldn’t have stopped the current Ontario wildfires. Those forests are too remote to be reasonable targets for fuel thinning with no roads to access them, Mr. Gray said.
And if Canada did more prescribed burning, where possible.. Americans would complain about the smoke
In order to make fuels thinning economically viable, there needs to be a market for all the wood fibre that must be removed from Canadian forests. But Americans’ tariff policies undermine any viable market for that fibre, Mr. Gray said.
Trump’s Terrible Temper Tantrum Regarding Tariffs for Smoke are Tiresome
American’s are awfully quiet about all the smoke and environmental damage their endless war making for empire has caused so many people the world over-