American greenhouse gases accumulated across the continent for generations before smoke from climate-amplified Canadian fires moved south across the same atmosphere.
Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
Donald Trump says Canada is poisoning American cities with wildfire smoke. He has told Prime Minister Mark Carney to get the fires under control, demanded compensation and threatened tariffs because smoke from Canadian fires crossed into the United States. The smoke did come from trees burning in Canada. That establishes the immediate source of the pollution, but says very little about the larger causes of the conditions producing fires of this scale.
The border tells us where the forests caught fire. It does not allocate responsibility for the hotter and drier conditions that have made North American wildfire seasons longer, larger and harder to control. Trump is treating the location of the burning trees as though it settles the climate question. It does not.
