Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, and President Donald Trump proclaimed themselves furious that smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed much of the Northeast and Midwest last week. How dare Canada be on fire and let its smoke waft across the border, when making it harder for Americans to breathe is a domestic responsibility?! This country has plenty of polluters ready and willing to burn our nostrils, eyes and throats. Americans should be choking on smoke made in the USA.
Last week, I was in northeastern Ohio, where the disturbingly hot weather was exacerbated by a smoky haze. Canadian smoke also diminished visibility when my family drove into Cleveland three summers ago. But here’s the thing: Some Ohioans report that there have been instances of sight-clouding pollution for much longer. Indeed, Mark Naymik, an editor at Signal Cleveland, wrote Thursday on X, “I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of the wildfire smoke, but I will to sound very Cleveland. A slightly more cynical colleague remarked, ‘This is what Cleveland looked like every day in 1977. And smelled worse.’”
How dare Canada let its smoke waft across the border when making it harder for Americans to breathe is a domestic responsibility?!
About 90 minutes later, Moreno responded to Naymik, in some of his first comments about the smoke.
“I’ll be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity,” he said.
Slow down, senator. Atrocity? Let’s reserve that term for large-scale acts of wickedness, not disputes among neighbors regarding accusations of poor forest management.
The president further ramped up the senator’s hyperbole on Friday on his social media site. Trump wrote that “the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” After accusing Canada of “Willful Negligence,” he said that the smoke has cost the United States billions of dollars and that that cost “must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”
After Trump’s social media post, Michigan’s Republican delegation sent a letter to Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. complaining of what they called “noxious wildland fire smoke that has been especially dangerous for Michiganders who are sensitive to air pollutants or those with underlying health conditions.”
Republicans’ concerns about “filthy, polluted and unhealthy air” must come as a surprise to Americans whose health concerns have been utterly disregarded by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. In January, for instance, the EPA updated decades of policy that assigned a rough value per human life for cost-benefit analyses of pollution restrictions. The previous number was just under $12 million; Trump’s EPA zeroed it out.
“The Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life,” Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford University, told The New York Times. “If your kid breathes in air pollution from a power plant or industrial source, E.P.A. is saying that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost the emitter.”
Rob Verchick, a Loyola New Orleans law professor who was a deputy associate administrator at the EPA during the Obama administration, told NOLA.com columnist Bob Marshall in February that assigning zero value to human lives during such analyses is “departing from what has been the norm at the EPA in both Republican and Democratic administrations going back to Ronald Reagan where it began.”
Now, all of a sudden, when smoke is wafting in from Canada, Trump says the pollution is costing the U.S. billions of dollars. It is inconceivable that if the situation were reversed, and U.S.-created smoke was blanketing southern parts of Canada, Trump would consider the U.S. culpable.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Saturday pointed out that the U.S. indeed has a recent history of wildfires — there are multiple wildfires burning across the country now — and that Canada has responded with compassion, not condemnation.
“They have a very short memory,” Ford said Saturday of the grandstanding Republicans. “We had the water bombers, everyone ready going over to California. It was last year. We sent down hydro linemen down to the Carolinas and Georgia to help out. That’s what neighbors do, right?”
They have a very short memory. We had the water bombers, everyone ready going over to California. It was last year. We sent down hydro linemen down to the Carolinas and Georgia to help out.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford on republican complaints of canadian wildfires
Ford continued: “You don’t get on and start threatening and criticizing because, guess what? One day it’s going to be your turn, and we’re going to be down there without hesitation to support our neighbors, which we should be.”
Not only is it gauche for the Trump administration to accuse Canada of poor forest management, it’s also hypocritical. Multiple experts have complained that Trump’s reckless Department of Government Efficiency initiative (which let go people who could be called into fight fires) and his equally thoughtless attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (which have halted grants to states with policies deemed “woke”) have made Americans more vulnerable to out-of-control fires and the pollution they cause. On top of that, a former Forest Service firefighter told NPR that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s policies regarding forest management are “in defiance of all that we have learned, decades of fire ecology research” and “all that indigenous people have shared with us.”
If a major fire breaks out during Trump’s term that could have been prevented or mitigated with better forest management, don’t expect Trump or any of the Republicans accusing Canada of mismanagement to feel convicted by their own words. Why would they? They’re not interested in forest management or even in making it easier for Americans to breathe. They’re only interested in saying something outrageous to fire up the base. The burning eyes and the sooty smell are aggravating, but all these Republicans are doing is blowing smoke.
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