A study published this week found that Canada’s devastating 2023 wildfire season – which covered some of America’s largest cities with toxic plumes and affected 100 million Americans – resulted in Canada being responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any country on earth except China, India, and the United States.
While responsible for a tremendous increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the past year, the administration of leftist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau largely escaped criticism, particularly from left-wing climate activists, for his poor handling of the fires. Fellow leftist American President Joe Biden offered uncritical aid to the Canadian people in response to the fires, a stark contrast to his threat to destroy to Brazilian economy with sanctions in response to the 2019 Amazon wildfire season, when the country had a conservative president.
While excessively hot and dry weather played a role in the 2023 wildfire season, Canada’s government structure is poorly organized for handling large-scale fires. It has no federal emergency agency – the equivalent of the American Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – and no national fire authority. Trudeau has largely failed to organize efforts to properly manage forests by removing highly flammable underbrush and other measures.
The prime minister squarely blamed “climate change” for the fires and urged Canadians to “adapt to living with fire.”
The study, published in Nature magazine on Wednesday, found that the fires produced 647 megatonnes of carbon emissions, “comparable to the annual fossil fuel emissions of large nations, with only India, China and the USA releasing more carbon per year.” Notably, emissions from fires are not typically included in studies documenting greenhouse gas emissions produced by humans in any given country, so Canada has not formally appeared in the top spots of such lists despite the outsized amount of pollution it was responsible for in the past year. The fires have, instead, become a footnote in such reports.
“Although small compared to the emissions impact from fossil fuels and transportation, wildfires had an unusually large carbon footprint this year,” a year-end review by the University of Exeter and Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability noted in December, “with analysis of satellite records showing Canada’s emissions reached six to eight times the nation’s 20-year average due to an extreme wildfire season. Globally, fires contributed about 6 million tons of carbon dioxide during the first nine months of the year, 7-9% more than average.”
The Nature report noted that the 2023 fires occurred during an unusually, but not unprecedentedly, hot year.
“We find that widespread hot–dry weather was a principal driver of fire spread, with 2023 being the warmest and driest year since at least 1980,” the scientists wrote. “Although temperatures were extreme relative to the historical record, climate projections indicate that these temperatures are likely to be typical during the 2050s, even under a moderate climate mitigation scenario.”
The scientists have advised countries to seek to mitigate the effects of the alleged climate “crisis.”
“If our goal is really to limit the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we need to make adaptations into how much carbon we are allowed to emit through our economy, corresponding to how much carbon is being absorbed or not absorbed by forests,” author, Brendan Byrne, an atmospheric scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Reuters. The Reuters report did not highlight any criticism of Trudeau’s handling of the situation or the minimal anti-fire infrastructure within the Canadian government.
The historic 2023 wildfires were a calamity for Canada but became an international incident as its toxic plumes covered much of the northern half of the continental United States. In June 2023, New York City documented the worst air quality of any city in the world as a result of the Canadian fires. The fires affected 23 states and 100 million Americans, including throughout the Midwest and Northeast.
Trudeau’s government also failed to put them out – the 2023 fires are still technically burning, thanks to the survival of “zombie” fires throughout the winter. As of January 1, 2024, Alberta documented 51 active wildfires, some backed and burning under the snow.
“Forrest Tower of the BC Wildfire Service said that while it’s not uncommon for some fires to burn through the winter, that number usually hovers around a couple dozen, not the 106 that were listed as active on New Year’s Day,” the National Post reported at the time.
Evacuations of communities in Alberta as a result of the now-2024 wildfire season began in May.
While Canada has traditionally experienced wildfires in the summer, experts have criticized the Canadian government for making little effort to mitigate the spread of the fires.
“Canada has failed to fund the proactive management of forest fires sufficiently and is not poised to do better moving forward,” Canadian think-tank Fraser Institute senior fellow Kenneth P. Green wrote in June 2023, at the height of the fire season. “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.”
The criticism preceded the historic 2023 season. In 2021, an article in the Globe and Mail accused Canadian officials of making “decades of bad decisions” on forest management.
“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 newspaper explained, leaving forests “full of deadfall, which is basically kindling.”
The environmental effects of wildfires became a popular celebrity cause in 2019, when Hollywood stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo condemned conservative Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for his alleged role in Amazon fires. Unlike the treatment of the Canadian example, which largely omitted criticism of Trudeau, celebrities shared unrelated photos of fires to condemn Bolsonaro for his alleged failure to contain the fires.
Biden, then a candidate for president, threatened sanctions on Bolsonaro over the fires.
“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 in September 2020. “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.’”
The Brazilian Amazon is facing a massive fire season yet again this summer, but under the administration of socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, celebrity activists and the outgoing American president have offered little commentary on the situation. Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, awoke under a massive smoke cloud, and from January to August 19, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) documented 88,900 fires in the country, the worst since 2010, when Lula was serving his second of three terms.
