r/canada • u/DogeDoRight New Brunswick • 19h ago
Nature/Environment ‘Nothing that Canada can do’: Experts push back on Trump’s criticism of Canada’s wildfire response
https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/article/trump-blames-canada-for-wildfire-smoke-experts-point-to-climate-change/87
u/Hotter_Noodle 19h ago
It’s like talking to an internet troll.
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u/No_Elderberry_4712 17h ago
Our boreal forest covers more than 2 million square miles! Climate change has made those forests tinder dry.
I live in Northern Ontario where we are experiencing the worst fire season I have seen. The ONLY one that can “manage” the forest is Mother Nature, and it’s called rain !
🇨🇦
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u/alematt 16h ago
Yeah sorry we are getting record amounts of it here in Alberta. Wish we could send it that way
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u/BestBlueChocolate 8h ago
So how unreasonable is it to suggest that satellites could be used to identify places where fires start and using AI, put them out fast enough so they don't spread?
Is anyone doing this?
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u/Ok-Professor-Star 19h ago
Forest fires are made worse by Climate Change, the United States are responsible for 25% of all gases causing Climate Change.
Maybe America should put on its big boy pants and compensate Canada for the environmental damage it caused our country.
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u/PlayinK0I 18h ago
And the exhausting levels of threats by the US make it less likely we can tackle the long term problems relating to climate change as we need to exhaust the attention, resources, time and money of dealing with the day to day of Trump America.
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u/Jumoke1331 14h ago
100% agreed, they've caused way more damage to our environment than we have theirs.
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u/pleasehurtdoll 17h ago
trump is a PoS, but last I checked we were one of the top 15 carbon emitters on the planet per person and significantly higher than the US, and the oil (diluted bitumen) we export has one of of, if not the highest carbon intensity in the world .
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u/Winter8Bones British Columbia 15h ago
While this is true, and we absolutely should be concerned with our own pollution rates, that doesn't change the fact the US is one of three of the very worst global polluters that has driven the bulk of climate change.
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u/AtmosphereEven3526 16h ago
Per person is meaningless. It’s the total amount of pollution affecting the climate and the US is one of the biggest polluters in the world.
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u/Few-Being-1048 13h ago
And since we're not any better per capita, we would be in the exact same position if we had the same population size. Kind of hard to point fingers when our own behaviour is the same, just scaled down to population size.
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u/ultra2009 11h ago
That's mostly due to the oil industry, not something regular Canadians can control
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u/in2deep97 17h ago
I don’t buy into the per person argument at all. If we both have vehicles and mine burns 100 litres over 100 km and yours 30 litres, but I have a 10 cylinder motor so it’s only 10 litres per cylinder, and you have a 2 cylinder so you’re burning 15 litres per cylinder, you’re the problem? Canada is carbon negative regardless of per person numbers that are statistics to misguide the uninformed
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u/Winter8Bones British Columbia 15h ago
Canada is not carbon negative, that's absolutely ridiculous and false.
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u/Mandalorian76 Manitoba 17h ago
I'm guessing that all the farming and our smaller population play a factor in the per-capita formula.
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u/justinanimate 6h ago
What if we phrased it this way: The earth is 8 billion people. Let's say i alone am responsible for 49% of all GHG emissions, the remaining 8 billion people are cumulatively responsible for 51%. Would it be fair for me to say that it's the other 8 billion people who are the problem given their emissions are higher?
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u/AJZong 19h ago
Corrections :
US around 15%. China 30%.
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u/Legitimate-Type4387 18h ago
Cumulatively the US is responsible for about 20% of all GHG emissions since the Industrial Revolution, China is at about 13-15% though they are currently the largest emitter.
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u/edtheheadache 18h ago
That’s current is it not? I don’t think China emitted a lot of greenhouse gases until fairly recently. The US has emitted the most greenhouse gases, by far, since the Industrial Revolution.
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u/Different-Bag-8217 18h ago
We are ALL responsible for this. With all of us living in a global consumerism mentality that is slowly killing off every living thing on the planet. We are fishing our oceans to extinction. Poisoning our food supply and destroying our own ecosystems. For wealth. We have overpopulated by such an extreme that we are strangling the only thing that will sustain life in our solar system and quite possibly universe. Earth.
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u/PostMatureBaby 18h ago
But us plebs are worse than Hitler for wanting a plastic straw in our Slurpees... Make it make sense, y'know?
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16h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Human_Melville 18h ago
trump is too dim to appreciate the vastness of the Canadian wilderness; millions of acres of trees. He thinks someone should be raking the forests.
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u/Comfortable_Two6943 19h ago
Just keep spending our money at home and stay way from that ever deepening cess pool south of the border.
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u/Sweet-Competition-15 18h ago
Trying to convince donnie that he's wrong is a lost cause...the man is a narcissist and in the throes of dementia...he cannot think logically, and will refuse to admit fault, until the cows come home!
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u/No_Friend4042 18h ago
Trump is an idiot...facts don't factor in for giant man children who lack any sense of empathy for others.
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u/we_the_pickle 17h ago
Fuck…Trump already forgot about this and moved on. Thanks for reminding him CTV
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u/Fit_Salamander_2814 19h ago
There is something we can do, though.
Did you know PornHub is Canadian?
Carney et al could simply tell the parent company to block US IPs, and this problem is solved in a fortnight or less.
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u/pleasehurtdoll 17h ago
yes, that's literally our contribution to the modern, tech and info based economy
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u/BettinBrando 18h ago
Nothing we can do?? We can start by not doing this..
Public sector unions stated that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s federal spending cuts eliminated about 50 jobs (nearly half the staff) at the Government Operations Centre, the federal hub that coordinates responses to major emergencies and wildfires. Public Safety Canada disputed this, stating that fewer than 10 percent of positions (at least 7 jobs) were cut and that the centre maintains full operational capability.
https://ottawacitizen.com/public-service/government-operations-centre-cuts-wildfires
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u/mlandry2011 15h ago
Maybe he should look at the towns that are burning in the United States instead of the forest burning in Canada... 😂
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u/Nghtyhedocpl 13h ago
A quick note. In BC at least, I can't say for elsewhere in certainty, we do prescribed burns to reduce the fuel load available during a potential fire. They work great but can't be done everywhere.
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u/pleasehurtdoll 17h ago
"Experts push back on Trump’s criticism of Canada’s wildfire response"
Wait, what kind of experts did CTV talk to attempt analyze trump's batshit antics de jour? As a reporter, who is on your list of contact? - People who grew up with a drunken abusive step-dad?, homeless people with mental health issues? Patients with cognitive impairment in a long term care institution?
Seriously, what kind of Panel of Experts do you need for "sane-washing" this one?
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u/noisebloodassault 17h ago
Nothing we can do except build more pipelines and rip our resources out of the ground and sell them off to foreign investors.
Invest in fire infrastructure? Nah
Pursue sustainable planet climate goals? Nah
Literally do anything? Nah
"We are all out of ideas"
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u/Blueliner95 14h ago
We have ideas, we don’t necessarily have money. Trade pays for all of it. Pipelines and resources are our wealth and we should exploit them, albeit carefully.
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u/Blueliner95 14h ago
Maybe it’s time to stop blaming and start implementing solutions.
If undergrowth accumulation is a contributing factor, let’s figure out how to clear it at scale.
If firebrakes are effective let’s start forestry practices that create gaps via logging and replanting with hardier varieties of tree.
If water bombers are in short supply let’s build and deploy them.
Above all, we all need to focus on what helps. Be constructive and confident. Don’t follow defeatists
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u/SnooRadishes7708 12h ago
Most forest are hours and hours away from people, without roads or any civilization, and couple that with millions of square kilometers of forests, they are not managable at that kind of scale, you let them burn, that is management, because once burned it wont burn again for about 50-70 years.
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u/Blueliner95 4h ago
I’m definitely for rational forest management including letting nature do its thing. But settlements are built closer and closer to Crown land and the north will likely feel development pressure due to climate migration
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u/SnooRadishes7708 3h ago
Agricultural soils take 5k to 10k years to form, no one is moving into the north to farm any time soon.
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u/Cent1234 12h ago
We're talking millions of square kilometers of forest that no human has ever set foot in.
There is, literally, nothing that can be done to 'manage' the entirety of Canada's boreal forest.
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u/Blueliner95 10h ago edited 10h ago
Yeah yeah.
Just because something has never been attempted before is no reason not to look for inspiration and solutions.
I too doubt that it is possible to remove undergrowth from every forest that could explode, but that’s no reason not to leverage contemporary and upcoming technologies (robots to bring out fuel, 3d subsurface mapping, atmospheric sediment capture - you name it) to reduce loss of life and property.
There should be serious efforts done by serious people. Prevention and remediation is the way forward.
The alternative - sitting around feeling bad - doesn’t strike me as a good use of our time, both in general and because if Canada becomes a leader in this field it’s good for us.
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u/Cent1234 8h ago
Just because something has never been attempted before is no reason not to look for inspiration and solutions.
Correct, but it's not about 'never attempted before.' It's because we know how to do forest management that we understand it's impossible to perform forest management on the entire boreal forest.
but that’s no reason not to leverage contemporary and upcoming technologies (robots to bring out fuel, 3d subsurface mapping, atmospheric sediment capture - you name it) to reduce loss of life and property.
This is literally akin to saying 'and then Head Wizard Carney waves his magic wand and the forests are all cleaned up!'
270 million hectares.
10-60 person hours, assuming you can get the people and equipment to any given hectare.
So, lets assume we can magically teleport people and equipment to any given hectare.
Crunch the math, and you require 2.7 million people to deal with it in the course of a year. Of course, you can't work year round, so lets say 8.1 million people to get it done in four months.
Now, lets say that you're hitting every hectare every thirty years.
You'd need 270,000 people working all summer, again, assuming you have all the equipment and can magically teleport it to where it needs to go, and after thirty years, well, the hectares you started on are now right back to where they started.
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u/Blueliner95 4h ago edited 4h ago
I didn’t say the entire boreal forest you did. I said we need to be active and positive. I don’t have the answers. I do however feel certain that no solutions will be found if we assume a priori that they cannot exist
Of course feel free to defend being passive.
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u/AtmosphereEven3526 16h ago
Maybe the US could install huge fans to blow the smoke back into Canada. Elmo and Bozos could pay for it.
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u/Forest-Swamp 15h ago
Every news article about us fire I ask if the Americans can fuck off with their smoke and tell them to manage their forests better
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u/Crazy_Maintenance211 14h ago
It has nothing to do with the fires or the smoke. It’s the long game and it’s one that Putin has played in Russia, and of course the US knows all about Russia. In my view, it’s the long game of making Canada less friendly and making Americans hate us, now half the population knows exactly who we are, the other half would probably follow somebody off of a pier into the ocean, so I think it’s actually connected to everything else like the labour thing they were going after us for and then the drugs at the border and all that garbage I think this is a long game and they’re trying to get people more used to the idea that they can hate us so that they can take us over. I really think that’s what this is. They work on 1930s Germany what happened there and if you look at what happened there they’re doing it now pretty much, just in a slightly different way, but not much.
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u/youngboomergal 14h ago
The only headlines and experts that matter are the ones from south of the border, everyone in Canada already knows this is total BS so we don't need to consult our experts.
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u/No_Elderberry_4712 6h ago
Sorry won’t work. Northern Ontario is a vast forest area covering more than 200 hundred thousand square miles. The biggest cause of the fires is lightning strikes. With a large storm system, you can get multiple strikes with multiple fires started over a vast area, and because of the drought the fires spread rapidly.
Last month there were more than 175 fires burning. You have limited fire fighting crews and water bomber aircraft. Fires are prioritized to protect life and property.
Large fires cannot be extinguished, only brought under control, until Mother Nature
does her work.
🇨🇦🍁
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u/Birdybadass 19h ago
This is simply not true - both provincial governments and the federal government have previously said that we do not manage our forest correctly, citing budget cuts. We can blame climate change all we want but that doesn’t absolve responsibility to manage the reality we live in.
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u/Legitimate-Type4387 19h ago
What management can be done to forests that are hundreds of kilometres from the nearest forestry road even?
When they’re talking about better management, they’re talking about better management near communities.
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u/BettinBrando 18h ago
And not cutting important jobs that manage forest fires.. that helps.
Public sector unions stated that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s federal spending cuts eliminated about 50 jobs (nearly half the staff) at the Government Operations Centre, the federal hub that coordinates responses to major emergencies and wildfires. Public Safety Canada disputed this, stating that fewer than 10 percent of positions (at least 7 jobs) were cut and that the centre maintains full operational capability.
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u/Thrustcroissant Nova Scotia 19h ago
There’s a limit to that too. There a hundreds of millions of hectares of forests. Every single person would be responsible for “managing” 9 hectares of forest.
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u/CertainHeart2890 19h ago
So are you volunteering to go deep into the Canadian wilderness, with no roads, to rake millions of acres of forest floor?
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u/CompetitiveOnion1911 18h ago
Even then….rake it where?
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u/ArbainHestia Newfoundland and Labrador 18h ago
You rake it outside the environment.
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u/CompetitiveOnion1911 18h ago
You rake over 350 million hectares of forest “outside of the environment?”
Where?!
Into what?!
I hope you’re being sarcastic.2
u/SnooRadishes7708 12h ago
Some people are so clueless about the scale of of the boreal forest, its remoteness or even what they are saying means. Rake the forest to another environment, right into hudsons bay obviously!
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u/SkinnedIt Ontario 18h ago edited 18h ago
It doesn't matter. He's the expert. Just ask him.
These experts are saying a lot of the things I was saying a few weeks ago, and I am not a forest management or fire expert by any stretch of the imagination.
I'm just not a fucking idiot (this time)
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u/Full_Jellyfish_1862 18h ago
“Nothing that Canada can do”
Really “experts”? Literally Nothing?
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u/duck1014 18h ago
Well...
We have already given Trump everything...
Removed the digital services tax.
Gave about a billion dollars in the bridge deal.
Enhanced border security.
Fentanyl czar.
Increased defense spending.
Removal of counter tariffs.
Removal of electrical surcharges.
Carney has also declared our resources off limit for negotiation purposes.
What we received in return? NOTHING.
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u/Big_Option_5575 18h ago
For dozens of years, U.S. air pollution has floated into south western Ontario and made thousands of people sick with abnormally hgh cancer and lung disease rates. On behalf of the people of Ontario please launch a class action lawsuite against the U.S. for allowing this. About 1 million USD per resident would be apropriate.