John James

John James and several other Republicans, not surprisingly including the president, are either ignorant, or merely cynically pandering to ignorance with their witless demand that Canada "must be held accountable" for the smoke from its wildfires.

I imagine a scene from "The Simpsons," with climate-change deniers shaking their fists and screaming at the sky about … the effects of climate change. The forces of nature, though, will not comply with MAGA’s demands.

And that’s what’s at play here: The mighty power of nature across Canada’s roughly 2 million square miles of boreal forest – the largest intact forest on Earth.

It might seem like I’m picking on James, a U.S. Representative who is running for governor of Michigan – he’s just one of several Republicans spouting this nonsense after a swath of the northern U.S. was shrouded with smoke this month. Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall says he'll bring Canada to its knees with legislative hearings. Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio wants to impose sanctions on Canada, and revoke the visas of officials deemed complicit. Donald Trump, of course imposed tariffs on Canada immediately after complaining about the smoke. All silly and damaging.

James, though, wants to lead a border state, and economic partnerships with Canada are baked into that job, with trade between Michigan and Ontario representing about 8% of total U.S.-Canada trade. James, too, has been a leader in tilting at the smoke windmill, calling in 2025 for Canada to “reform the policies, practices, and technologies that allowed this crisis to repeat.”

This year, he wrote a letter with fellow Michigan Republican U.S. Reps. Jack Bergman, Lisa McClain and John Moolenaar criticizing Canada’s “chronic under-investment in forest thinning, fuel reduction and prescribed burns, along with inadequate enforcement against arson.”

This from the party that is slashing U.S. Forest Service funds, including shutting down wildfire research labs, and has killed measures to combat climate change. Their letter also notes, “We write jointly this time because a year has passed, the season has come around again, and nothing has changed except that our patience has run out." The gentle congresspeople ignore a whole lot of reality here, not least of which is their assertion that Canada should have solved in a year a problem that has been more a century in the making.

A few inconvenient truths about wildfires, in Canada and elsewhere

In 2024, following up on Canada’s record fire season the previous year that choked the skies of Detroit and many other U.S. cities, Free Press journalists Keith Matheny and Eric Seals, supported by a Pulitzer Center grant, traveled across Canada to understand the challenges and examine solutions.

I was Keith’s editor on the project, a topic of high interest to me, having worked previously in Idaho and Colorado, where wildland fires and their all-American smoke are part of every summer.

Keith reported:

The conditions leading up to 2023's cross-country inferno have been building in Canada for more than a century. Two key factors are involved … experts say:

● Human-driven climate change has caused temperatures to rise and soil moisture to decrease, and has intensified extreme weather that helps whip up fires.

● Generations of putting out wildfires to protect cities and industries has broken the natural cycles of fire in the forest, leading to much denser tree populations and accumulated dry, dead materials on the forest floor that act as fuel.

James and the other Republican wildfire experts are right that prescribed burns and thinning out fuel are important, but they imply that they are easier and greater in impact than they are in fact. They are mitigation techniques that can help protect populated areas. They cannot touch areas deep in the wilderness, nor do they stop lightning from striking there. Lightning-sparked wildfires account for up to 90% of acreage burned in Canada, and thus most of the smoke everyone hates.

Everyone with a connection to reality agrees on the causes of wildfires

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather explains:

“The fire-deficit story is a genuine phenomenon in the dry conifer forests of the western United States. But most of what’s burning in Canada is boreal forest, and the boreal is a fundamentally different beast. 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."

Again, it is not physically possible to groom vast tracts of unpopulated wilderness.

Wildland fire has increased in Canada not because of mismanagement but because of climate change. Everyone without a political reason to deny reality agrees on this point.

Hausfather explains:

"Canadian fire seasons (May through September) have warmed about 2.2C on average since 1959. Canada warms at roughly twice the global rate, and its north at roughly three times. That warming matters for fire through a well-understood mechanism: warmer air is exponentially 'thirstier' ... so it pulls moisture out of live vegetation and dead fuels alike, priming the landscape to burn. It’s the same fuel-drying pathway that (researchers) found in 2016 had roughly doubled cumulative forest area burned in the western U.S."

Wait. Does MAGA know the United States doesn't have fire solved? In fact, the U.S. is having a miserable fire year. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, the number of wildfires and acreage burned are trending 130% above the 10-year average. Through July 21, about 41,000 wildfires had burned nearly 4 million acres, an area larger than Connecticut. Nebraska this spring shattered its annual wildfire record, with 800,000 acres burned by March. Utah is in the midst of what may be its worst fire season. It’s not just North America. Asia, Australia, Russia and Europe are setting records.

It’s worth noting here that Canada routinely helps fight our wildfires, including Los Angeles’ devastating fires last year, and we help with theirs under an agreement reached in 1982. What has MAGA done? Cut the Forest Service budget and our efforts to combat climate change.

The neighbor’s house is on fire. The world is on fire. Threats won’t stop any of that.