This
hurried snapshot is destined to become one of
the iconic images of the climate crisis. It
shows member of the Namaygoosisagagun First
Nation fleeing their ancestral home in
northern Ontario, minutes ahead of a wall of
fire that consumed an entire world.
Everything
I’m about to write is fairly obvious. But since
wildfires, and hence smoke, will persist all
summer, and since the hot world we’re creating
produces ever more wildfire and hence an endless
supply of future smoke, I think it’s worth taking
a moment to get all this on the record.
Also,
the flow of smoke down from Canada has produced
a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system,
revealing with unparalleled clarity the
belligerence, ignorance, self-love, and utter
lack of irony that mark the species.
Please
contribute to fire relief for indigenous
communities in the far north; here’s one possibility.
And thank you for keeping this community
strong
To
hit the basics: roughly a thousand wildfires are
currently burning in Canada, many in northern
reaches of the province of Ontario. Much of the
direct fire damage is being borne by members of
Canada’s First Nation communities, whose small
communities are the main inhabitants of these
wild places. People are crowded into Thunder
Bay, Ontario, where every hotel room is filled;
the stories of escapes like the one picture
above are truly harrowing. Alessandra Freitas,
for instance, interviewed
members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in
the northwest part of the province. Here, for
instance, is the account of Miiyah Paavola:
“It
was all very fast-paced. There was not really
much time to think about what was happening,”
Paavola told CNN.
She
grabbed a wet towel before squeezing aboard a
small aluminum boat with five other people,
three dogs and a cat. The isolated community,
also known as Collins First Nation, has no road
access, only a railway line and Collins Lake.
Paavola
couldn’t fully grasp the scope of the danger
until her boat pulled away.
“All
you could see was orange and gray and it was
very dark,” she said. But as they sailed away,
she could finally see just how close they’d been
to the fires. “When I was going across maybe
about the second island, that’s when I watched
it. I could just barely see the flames reach the
shoreline. And it was a very thick wall of smoke
that followed it very quickly.”
“If
we had waited any longer, we would have been
dead.”
As
Johnnie Jae, the founder of Red Pop! News pointed out,
It's
NOT just that people and wildlife are losing
their homes...it's the history that is being
lost for generations to come.
It's
tribal records, artifacts, art, regalia,
ceremonial grounds, things that have been passed
from generation to generation, hidden, protected
and preserved, repatriated and restored.
So,
just to be clear—the most powerful disruption from
these fires is to small bands of people who have
done nothing to cause them, and whose culture has
been endlessly damaged by the larger western
project of settlement and control.
But
flame, of course, is not the only product of fire.
There’s also smoke, which contains high
concentrations of particulates, the solid and
liquid droplets in all forms of air pollution that
are especially dangerous because they can slip
past a body’s natural filters, aggravating asthma
and pulmonary disease and contributing to heart
attacks and smoke. Those clouds of smoke drift on
the prevailing winds, which have been blowing
south towards southern Ontario, where Toronto has
been engulfed in smoke. Here’s a particularly
vivid portrayal of the life in North America’s
fourth-largest city
But
of course the border with the U.S. does not
prevent smoke from spilling across, and some of
the most densely populated parts of America have
been inundated with smoke as well. Last
Thursday, for instance, Detroit had the
most polluted air in the world, as Charles
Ramirez chronicled:
Detroit
had an air quality index, or
AQI, of 724 at one point, the No. 1
spot on IQAir’s ranking of the most polluted
global major cities on Thursday. IQAir makes
air quality monitoring and air cleaning
products. The index is a measure of PM2.5 or
particulate matter, and the index reading
makes the air “hazardous,” according to the
company, which means unhealthy for everyone.
By
5 p.m., Detroit’s index number had fallen to 341
and its ranking to second, behind Chicago’s 402.
Both measures were considered “hazardous.”
Parts
of Ohio were even worse. Toledo, for instance, doubled its old
record for air pollution, and nearby Monroe
recorded AQI values above 800. I’ve been in
Beijing and Delhi on days when you couldn’t see
across the street, and this was worse.
Jeff
Masters has the most comprehensive
set of numbers, as per usual
The
award for worst air in the nation on July 16
went to the city that has in the past billed
itself as a climate haven: Duluth, Minnesota.
The city’s 24-hour air quality index, or AQI,
for PM2.5 particle pollution hit 934, over three
times the threshold for “Hazardous” pollution.
This shattered Duluth’s previous all-time AQI
record of 159 set July 20, 2021. EPA pollution
records go back to 1999.
Now,
in a normal world, this scenario would trigger a
compassionate response, as leaders sought to
help the people most at risk. But MAGA is an
almost perfect mirror world, where every impulse
is bad. On Fox, for
instance, the channel’s public health expert
timidly (“I know you’re going to cringe”)
recommended that people at risk wear KN95 masks
to prevent particulates from getting sucked down
your throat. “Not a chance. Not a chance,” said
host Brian Kilmeade.
Meanwhile,
a series of Republican “leaders” started
producing angry denunciations
of Canada, for polluting America’s air with
their thoughtless fires.
Michigan
congressman John James,
whose campaign for state
governor has been endorsed by
President Donald Trump wrote in an X post on
Thursday: “FINAL WARNING TO CANADA: Manage
your forests to prevent these fires. American
lungs are paying the price for Canadian
inaction, year after year.”
Ohio
Senator Bernie Moreno, longtime car dealer, said
he planned to introduce “a bill next week to
sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian
government officials for this atrocity.”
And
of course the ultimate source of all MAGA
craziness weighed in as well. Here’s Donald Trump:
“We
are holding Canada responsible for the fact that
they are not properly maintaining their Forests,
and Brush therein, and the United States is
being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted,
and unhealthy air, the quality of which is
dangerous, and totally unacceptable!”
The
GOP case, such as it is, rests on the idea that
Canada has erred in “managing” its woodlands, an
outgrowth of the idea that he expressed during
one wave of California’s hideous fires that the
state should simply “rake its forests.” Or, as
he expressed it
during its first term, “you gotta clean your
floors.”
Whatever
the use of this prescription in America’s
forests, it doesn’t apply to most of the land
now burning in Canada. That’s because Canada has
never managed these forests in any way,
certainly not to suppress burning the way that
America did across the 20th century. These are
not forests with roads; these are vast,
trackless expanses. Climate analyst Zeke
Hausfather has performed his usual public
service by actually looking at the data.
Here’s
the short version. Canada’s area burned has
surged, and it has surged in step with
warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more
forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for
each 1C increase in fire-season temperature
(with a correlation coefficient of 0.61). This
relationship is robust to a variety of
statistical tests and controlling for
confounding variables. The boreal burns in
rare, high-intensity crown fires on a natural
cycle measured in a century or more,
across enormous remote areas that have never
been logged, thinned, or effectively
suppressed. Only about a fifth of Canada’s
burned area over the past four decades was
even inside forest regions that have ever been
actively managed. You cannot have a
fuel-buildup from forest mismanagement in a
forest you were never managing.
As
he points out, even if the Canadians somehow
decided to go “thin the forest,” it wouldn’t work.
The
boreal is on the order of three million square
kilometers. You are not going to thin or
prescribe-burn your way across it, and the crown
fires that produce the smoke wouldn’t stop at a
fuel break anyway.
So
what is driving the huge increase in Canadian
wildfires? It appears some mysterious force is
raising the temperature of the earth. As Quinn
Gablicki points out,
quoting the University of Michigan climate
scientist Jonathan Overpeck,
As
long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels,
global temperatures will increase, droughts will
worsen, and there will be bigger, more frequent
wildfires and smoke events.
The
haze hanging over much of the United States
today, Dr. Overpeck said, is “the harbinger of
worse times to come.”
Or,
as Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of
emergency management put it on Friday,
“Warmer,
drier weather is becoming more common,
increasing wildfire risk in Canada and around
the world,” she wrote. “Northern Ontario and
Quebec, for example, received less than 40
percent of normal precipitation this June, with
temperatures above historical averages.”
None
of this, of course, is surprising in any way.
America’s forests are currently on fire too, and
in remarkable fashion. With our no-pack snowpack
year, large fires are burning across the
interior West—and what do you know, lots of the
smoke is drifting north
into Canada, causing bad air quality in British
Columbia.
“As
wildfire activity increases, so has smoke across
many areas of the region. Much of this smoke is
originating from fires south of the Canada-U.S.
border and will have varying impacts over the
coming days,” an update Saturday evening from
the provincial wildfire service said.
This
is far from the smallest irony in this saga. In
fact, “irony” hardly seems an apt word,
suggesting that there is something even slightly
subtle about the idiocy. For instance, as our
leaders complain about Canada, it seems as if it
might be nice if they also noted that our
neighbors to the north have consistently set
firefighters south to help America fight its
great blazes. When Los Angeles caught on fire in
January of 2025, Ontario deployed 150
firefighters to help.
“Our
closest friend and our closest ally needs help,
and we’re going to make sure we’re going to be
there supporting them,” the province’s premier
said.
And
what do you know, last week a Canadian
pilot died fighting one of the vast
conflagrations on the Colorado-Utah border. As
Michele Brunoro reports,
Nicholas Dale left behind a wife and two sons.
“He
was out there doing his best and just so very
sad that we lost a great person and an
experienced person fighting something, a natural
disaster,” said Dale’s long-time friend Adam
Gilliver.
While
we’re on ironies, let’s note in passing that the
smoke pouring out of these great blazes
temporarily diminishes the power of the solar
panels that are our main weapon in slowing the
heating of the earth. Miriam Wasser reports on the
experience of one Massachusetts homeowner.
In
the two days before the first big plume arrived,
Stephen Gordon’s solar array produced about 53
kilowatt-hours of power per day — an amount he
said is typical for a warm summer day, and more
than covers his household needs during daylight
hours.
Then
came Wednesday, when people throughout New
England woke up to gray or even orange-tinted skies.
Gordon’s total output that day was just under
23 kilowatt hours, less than half of what his
panels generated the previous day.
But
of course all of those ironies pale next to the
main one: smoke drifts across borders when
there’s a big fire, but carbon dioxide
constantly drifts across every border every day.
And if you could see carbon dioxide,
and watch its flow over time, the biggest single
cloud has emanated from the United States. China
may catch us someday but we’re the ones who have
produced the current mess.
I’m
sitting listening to David Wallace-Wells lecture
this morning at the Chautauqua Institution, and
he reminds us that the carbon humans have
produced “weighs more than everything we have
ever built on the surface of this planet. It
weighs more than the total mass of life on the
planet. It weighs more than the total mass of
life and buildings combined.”
So—if
there are “damages” to be paid, who should pay
them? Canada, whose forests are burning? Or
America, who set those forests on fire.
This
is not an academic question. Lots of players are
trying to extract damages from the fossil fuel
companies. As the Center for Climate Integrity
documented,
Eleven
U.S. states and dozens of city, county, and
tribal governments collectively representing
more than 1 in 4 Americans are currently taking
major oil and gas companies to court to hold
them accountable for deceiving the public about
the dangers of fossil fuels and make them pay
for the resulting damages.
And
MAGA politicians are doing everything they can
to try and stop those suits from succeeding. As
Abraham Lustgarten reported in
April
Republican-led
state legislatures are passing a slate of laws
that effectively shield oil and gas companies
from legal claims that they are responsible for
the destruction and mounting toll caused by
climate change. Fifteen laws have either been
passed or are currently being debated in 11
states. Together, they threaten to remove
long-standing tools for the public to hold
corporations accountable.
A
ProPublica investigation has found that most
of these bills are part of a coordinated
effort, orchestrated by a constellation of
groups that share staff or have funding ties
to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo,
who is credited with placing conservative
justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. These
groups have drafted state legislation, planned
its dissemination and engaged a well-connected
lobbying firm to get them signed into law.
At
the federal level, the very same politicians
complaining about Canadian wildfires are trying
to moment, this takes the form of the Stop Climate Shakedowns
Act. They’ve drawn support from the
industry that owns them
“We
thank Senator Cruz and Rep. Hageman for
introducing legislation to stop a growing
patchwork of state laws and lawsuits that
threaten American energy and risk raising
costs for consumers,” said American
Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM)
President and CEO Chet Thompson
and American Petroleum Institute
(API) President and CEO Mike Sommers in
a joint statement.
America,
though the all-time champion, is not alone in
spewing fossil fuels, of course. One of the
other ironies of the moment is that just as
Canada catches on fire, its prime minister Mark
Carney is announcing a new system of pipelines
from the tar sands of Alberta. As veteran
climate journalist Adam Radwanski wrote in the
Toronto Star, under Toronto’s “dystopian haze”
Canada’s pivot away from climate action is
“impossible to ignore.” In her excellent new newsletter
Patterns, Naomi Klein writes “as the
nation burns, Carney celebrates new fossil fuel
projects as “nation building.”
So
irony drifts back and forth. But responsibility
can never really be shed. MAGA means never having
to say you’re sorry, but that’s simply not true.
+Check
Out SolarPak,
mobilizing Pakistani youth to help extend the
solar revolution there, which has been
concentrated in its middle classes, to the
poorest parts of the country. Its founder Ayaan
Ahmed wrote me
Our
team, all under 18, has electrified 27
communities in Khairpur Mirs, Sindh, and built
an internal research arm, Impact Labs, that
tracks household outcomes over years. A
Carnegie Mellon economist now studies our
results with us weekly.
In other words: the solar revolution is
being extended to its last mile by teenagers,
and we are measuring what happens when it
arrives.
+Jeffrey
Insko has an elegiac essay
about the horrible setbacks in the fight to
block Enbridge’s Line 5, setting it in a deep
historic context
Yesterday,
Governor Whitmer’s Department of Environment,
Great Lakes, and Energy granted Enbridge a key
permit for the foolhardy Line 5 tunnel; the
United States Army Corps of Engineers permit
will surely follow very soon. Although not
surprising, it’s a stunning decision, and not
only— though this is bad enough— because it
gives Enbridge permission to desecrate
Indigenous burial grounds. It’s also in
keeping with the Trump administration’s
campaign to Make America
1953 Again.
+From
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and colleagues, a
close analysis of New
Yorker fiction to see how those short stories
have dealt with climate change over time
We
find that climate change exists in just 10.1% of
these stories and freshwater pollution, marine
pollution, air pollution, deforestation, species
extinction / biodiversity loss, or toxic waste
exists in 15.6%. When present, these
environmental problems are mostly marginalized
and minimized; structural culprits –
governments, corporations, and the wealthy – are
rarely assigned responsibility; and
pro-environmental actions and behaviors are
rarely modeled.
I’m
not sure this is precisely what story writers
are called to do, but what do I know—I’ve only
written one novel, and it was mostly funny.
+European
coal mines are insisting they’re cutting methane
emissions. Petra Sorge’s reporting shows
that instead those mines are figuring out novel
and absurd ways to measure methane emissions,
In
Germany, open-pit mine operators all took a
common tack, according to reports seen by
Bloomberg and submitted to the country’s
environmental agency. Soil samples were
collected “from the freshly exposed coal
embankment” and then crushed into small
particles, while the methane emitted during this
process was captured and quantified.
That
makes no sense, said Necki, who compared
measuring ground-level coal emissions to shaking
and opening a soda bottle, then trying to
measure the remaining carbon dioxide inside.
“You will not get a valid result,” he said,
“because the gas has already disappeared into
the atmosphere.”
+Oliver
Millman writes that the
U.S. may soon be the “Cuba of gas cars,” a
showroom of the automotive past.
China’s
growing dominance in EVs came into sharper focus
earlier this year, when Shenzhen-based BYD—short
for Build Your Dreams—overtook Tesla to become
the world’s largest EV seller. Its cars are
already on the streets in Mexico and, following
a recent trade deal, to a limited extent in
Canada. The U.S. increasingly finds itself
surrounded by a world going electric, and often
doing so cheaply. In China, BYD’s Seagull model
sells for $7,800, albeit heavily subsidized. In
the U.S., the cheapest EV on the market, the
Chevy Bolt, starts at around $29,000.
+Davide
Castelvecchi, writing in
Nature, has a truly comprehensive update on the
rapid move towards sodium replacing lithium in
batteries.
What
has surprised many observers is how rapidly
companies claim to have improved on sodium-ion’s
flaws. Auke Hoekstra, an energy analyst at
Eindhoven University of Technology in the
Netherlands, says he has been taken aback by the
pace of advancement. “I honestly did not expect
it to go that fast — and I am usually the guy
who is seen as an optimist,” he says.
Hoekstra
is known for his bullish predictions about
renewable energy, which have often been correct.
Now he is bullish on sodium-ion. Although other
analysts and researchers are unsure how strongly
the technology can compete with lithium-ion
devices, he sees it as an innovation that will
enable the price of batteries to keep falling,
thus speeding up the electrification of the
world’s economy. “For the future of energy, this
really would be a game-changer,” he says.
Sodium
for batteries can be extracted easily from the
industrial chemical soda ash (or sodium
carbonate), which is plentiful and more
straightforward to mine than are most forms of
lithium. “Sodium is an almost inexhaustible
resource,” says Zhang Yizhi, a spokesperson for
CATL. It is more than 1,000 times as abundant as
lithium in Earth’s crust, and up to 60,000 times
as plentiful in the ocean. Last month,
industrial-grade sodium carbonate cost only
US$200–280 per tonne, compared with
$20,000–25,000 per tonne for battery-grade
lithium carbonate, Zhang adds.
+George
Monbiot has some sage advice for
new UK prime minister Andy Burnham: shut down
the ruinously expensive and laughably
ineffective carbon capture and sequestration
projects of his predecessors and save British
taxpayers a few billion pounds.
The
great majority of CCS will be attached to new
fossil fuel-burning power stations,
wood-burning power stations and hydrogen
production from fossil gas. In fact, almost
all the projects in the government’s first
tranche are for fossil fuel-based
schemes. But there are abundant
alternatives to these highly destructive
plans. Given the speed at which battery technology is
evolving, enabling a balanced and
reliable electricity supply without any use of
fossil fuels, the committee’s claim is bunkum.
+Protestors
hounded
Microsoft’s sustainability chief at a conference
this week, pointing out that the company is
breaking all its emission reduction pledges in
pursuit of more “compute” for its AI program. As
Katie Brigham reports
“How
does signing a 20-year deal with Chevron help
you reach your clean energy goals?,” one
protestor asked, referring to Microsoft’s recently announced
power purchase agreement with Chevron for
nearly 2.7 gigawatts of natural gas-fired
power to supply a West Texas data center. The
project represents one of the largest
gas-powered artificial intelligence
developments in the U.S., and Stiffler
acknowledged that she had been planning to ask
about it, herself.
Microsoft’s
Melanie Nakagawa answered the question. at least
in part, saying “that project with Chevron is
initially using natural gas and it’s a natural
gas contract,” before emphasizing that the
company has built “over 4.5 gigawatts of clean
energy already today,” and remains committed to
balancing speed-to-power with its clean energy
goals. She added that, “with this deal in
particular, we’re looking at a range of tools in
our toolbox to ensure that we can continue to
grow our power, but also do so in a way that is
responsible and sustainable.” She stopped short,
however, of making any commitments to
transitioning the project to renewable energy
over time.
Meanwhile,
kudos to many activists including my Third Act
colleagues for persuading the
city of Boulder ,Nevada to fight a new data
center, which the Trump administration wants to
situate on nearby Bureau of Land Management land
“Even
if the project is now on adjacent BLM land, the
impact does not stop at a property line,” one
resident said. “My biggest concern are our water
supply and our electrical infrastructure.”
Another
resident said, “Although the facility may be
located outside of the city limits, the impacts
of supplying utilities, expanding
infrastructures, and supporting a project of
this magnitude would directly impact Boulder
City and its residents.”
+Finally,
Maine’s first solar-powered ice-cream shop has
come on line in South Portland. Willard’s is pioneering what
it calls a “Sun to Scoop” model, to complement
its “Garbage to Garden” waste reduction
partnership. Would you like a picture of some
solar panel installers eating ice cream? I am
here to provide it
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all good communities, this one runs on the
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