Everything I’m about to write is fairly obvious. But since wildfires, and hence smoke, will persist all summer, and since the hot world we’re creating produces ever more wildfire and hence an endless supply of future smoke, I think it’s worth taking a moment to get all this on the record.

Also, the flow of smoke down from Canada has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, revealing with unparalleled clarity the belligerence, ignorance, self-love, and utter lack of irony that mark the species.

To hit the basics: Roughly 1,000 wildfires are currently burning in Canada, many in northern reaches of the province of Ontario. Much of the direct fire damage is being borne by members of Canada’s First Nation communities, whose small communities are the main inhabitants of these wild places. People are crowded into Thunder Bay, Ontario, where every hotel room is filled; the stories of escapes like the one pictured above are truly harrowing. Alessandra Freitas, for instance, interviewed members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in the northwest part of the province. Here, for instance, is the account of Miiyah Paavola:

“It was all very fast-paced. There was not really much time to think about what was happening,” Paavola told CNN.She grabbed a wet towel before squeezing aboard a small aluminum boat with five other people, three dogs, and a cat. The isolated community, also known as Collins First Nation, has no road access, only a railway line and Collins Lake.Paavola couldn’t fully grasp the scope of the danger until her boat pulled away.“All you could see was orange and gray and it was very dark,” she said. But as they sailed away, she could finally see just how close they’d been to the fires. “When I was going across maybe about the second island, that’s when I watched it. I could just barely see the flames reach the shoreline. And it was a very thick wall of smoke that followed it very quickly.”“If we had waited any longer, we would have been dead.”

As Johnnie Jae, the founder of Red Pop! News pointed out:

It's NOT just that people and wildlife are losing their homes... it's the history that is being lost for generations to come.It's tribal records, artifacts, art, regalia, ceremonial grounds, things that have been passed from generation to generation, hidden, protected and preserved, repatriated and restored.

So, just to be clear—the most powerful disruption from these fires is to small bands of people who have done nothing to cause them, and whose culture has been endlessly damaged by the larger Western project of settlement and control.

But flame, of course, is not the only product of fire. There’s also smoke, which contains high concentrations of particulates, the solid and liquid droplets in all forms of air pollution that are especially dangerous because they can slip past a body’s natural filters, aggravating asthma and pulmonary disease and contributing to heart attacks and smoke. Those clouds of smoke drift on the prevailing winds, which have been blowing south towards southern Ontario, where Toronto has been engulfed in smoke. Here’s a particularly vivid portrayal of the life in North America’s fourth-largest city.

But of course the border with the US does not prevent smoke from spilling across, and some of the most densely populated parts of America have been inundated with smoke as well. Last Thursday, for instance, Detroit had the most polluted air in the world, as Charles Ramirez chronicled:

Detroit had an air quality index, or AQI, of 724 at one point, the No. 1 spot on IQAir’s ranking of the most polluted global major cities on Thursday. IQAir makes air quality monitoring and air cleaning products. The index is a measure of PM2.5 or particulate matter, and the index reading makes the air “hazardous,” according to the company, which means unhealthy for everyone.By 5:00 pm, Detroit’s index number had fallen to 341 and its ranking to second, behind Chicago’s 402. Both measures were considered “hazardous.”

Parts of Ohio were even worse. Toledo, for instance, doubled its old record for air pollution, and nearby Monroe recorded AQI values above 800. I’ve been in Beijing and Delhi on days when you couldn’t see across the street, and this was worse.

Jeff Masters has the most comprehensive set of numbers, as per usual:

The award for worst air in the nation on July 16 went to the city that has in the past billed itself as a climate haven: Duluth, Minnesota. The city’s 24-hour air quality index, or AQI, for PM2.5 particle pollution hit 934, over three times the threshold for “Hazardous” pollution. This shattered Duluth’s previous all-time AQI record of 159 set July 20, 2021. EPA pollution records go back to 1999.

Now, in a normal world, this scenario would trigger a compassionate response, as leaders sought to help the people most at risk. But MAGA is an almost perfect mirror world, where every impulse is bad. On Fox, for instance, the channel’s public health expert timidly (“I know you’re going to cringe”) recommended that people at risk wear KN95 masks to prevent particulates from getting sucked down your throat. “Not a chance. Not a chance,” said host Brian Kilmeade.

Meanwhile, a series of Republican “leaders” started producing angry denunciations of Canada, for polluting America’s air with their thoughtless fires:

Michigan congressman John James, whose campaign for state governor has been endorsed by President Donald Trump wrote in an X post on Thursday: “FINAL WARNING TO CANADA: Manage your forests to prevent these fires. American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year.”

Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, longtime car dealer, said he planned to introduce “a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”

And of course the ultimate source of all MAGA craziness weighed in as well. Here’s Donald Trump:

We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!

Trump promised tariffs to make up for the costs, and indeed—and remember this—insisted that “maybe they should pay us some damages.”

The GOP case, such as it is, rests on the idea that Canada has erred in “managing” its woodlands, an outgrowth of the idea that he expressed during one wave of California’s hideous fires that the state should simply “rake its forests.” Or, as he expressed it during its first term, “You gotta clean your floors.”

Whatever the use of this prescription in America’s forests, it doesn’t apply to most of the land now burning in Canada. That’s because Canada has never managed these forests in any way, certainly not to suppress burning the way that America did across the 20th century. These are not forests with roads; these are vast, trackless expanses. Climate analyst Zeke Hausfather has performed his usual public service by actually looking at the data:

Here’s the short version. Canada’s area burned has surged, and it has surged in step with warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for each 1°C increase in fire-season temperature (with a correlation coefficient of 0.61). This relationship is robust to a variety of statistical tests and controlling for confounding variables. 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........

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