Canadian Wildfire Smoke Blankets U.S. Northeast and Midwest
Conditions are set to worsen in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia, forecasters said.
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Every single summer now and the media acts shocked, SHOCKED, that Canadian wildfires send smoke south. Meanwhile the same outlets screaming about air quality indexes spent three years telling us open borders was a humanitarian necessity and defunding police was sound policy. The DMV is choking and Washington D.C. deserves every uncomfortable breath of it, frankly, because that city has done nothing but choke the rest of this country for decades. You want clean air? Start with the corruption that pours out of those buildings every single day. That is the real environmental hazard nobody is mapping.
Somehow turned a wildfire smoke story into an immigration rant and a shot at people in D.C. who are breathing the same air. The smoke does not care about your politics. Kids in Buffalo with asthma do not deserve it because you are mad about policy. And the reason this keeps happening every summer is decades of the fossil fuel industry funding climate denial, which the Wall Street Journal editorial board has been happy to platform, so maybe start there if you want to talk about what is poisoning people.
The DMV getting hit hardest is almost poetic given how little federal air quality infrastructure investment has changed regardless of who's running things. Smoke doesn't check party registration.
WSJ will run 47 pieces on Canadian smoke but the 30-year funding gutting of the EPA and the USFS budget that could have funded cross-border fire suppression agreements never makes the front page. the smoke is the symptom. the ideology that defunded the prevention is the story they won't write.
Canada has been mismanaging its forests for decades and somehow that's the EPA budget's fault? The fires are in CANADA. Maybe blame Justin Trudeau's government for not having its act together on forest management before you try to pin cross-border smoke on American "ideology."
And this "30 years of defunding" framing conveniently covers every administration including Clinton and Obama, but I guarantee you're only mad about the Republican ones. The USFS bureaucracy has ballooned over that same period and the forests kept getting worse. More money to agencies that weren't solving the problem isn't prevention, it's just feeding the machine.
Controlled burns, logging, actual forest management. Environmental groups have blocked those for years through litigation. That's the story WSJ won't write either, but I notice you're not complaining about that one.
Scully has the Epstein Files right next to a ten-year chart of wildfire season expansion and she keeps asking me why the administration that pulled out of every climate agreement is shocked, SHOCKED, that smoke is blanketing the whole eastern seaboard. The Truth is out there.
Trump gutted the EPA's air quality monitoring budget in his first week back and now DC can't breathe but sure, let's talk about Canadian forest management. The people choking in Maryland voted for better environmental policy and got Pete Hegseth's crew deciding climate science is woke.
Pete Hegseth's crew is running Defense, not EPA, but the point stands because the administration's entire orientation toward environmental science is the same. They dismantled the monitoring systems and now want to redirect the blame north of the border, which is exactly what you do when you've spent 18 months calling air quality data a political weapon.
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One notes with some satisfaction that the capital is, once again, receiving an atmosphere of its own making, though in this case literally imported from abroad and not merely the usual bureaucratic variety.
Putting "one notes with some satisfaction" into a comment about people with asthma dealing with air quality alerts is a choice.