Wildfires in Canada: Global Warming or Socialist Forests?

A jogger runs along the shoreline of Lake Michigan with heavy smoke from the Canadian wildfires in the background in Chicago on June 27, 2023. (Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

Thanks to wildfires in eastern Canada, the air quality of New York City and other northeastern cities in the United States has been an utter disaster. The weather in the Big Apple has surpassed, in terms of haze, smog, and general hazardous air quality, perennial disasters such as Delhi, India

Virtually all media talking heads have blamed this occurrence on global warming and temperature change. For example, the BBC asks, “Is climate change fuelling Canada’s wildfires?” It answers, “Climate change is making weather conditions like heat and drought that lead to wildfires more likely.” The BBC quotes Robert Scheller, professor of forestry at North Carolina State University, who says: “The climate signal is very strong. We are seeing both a larger area burned, and more severe fires.”

According to the website Climate Atlas of Canada, in the view of Doug Findlater, mayor of West Kelowna, Canada, “Climate change brings on longer, drier summers, Canadians will have to live with more and more risk of more and more serious wildfires.” And, according to the work of Canadian forest fire researcher Mike Flannigan, “Climate change is predicted to worsen all three ingredients [fuel, ignition, and weather] across most of Canada, making global warming a triple threat to our forests.”

Claims CTV News, “Canada’s ‘unprecedented’ fire season linked to climate change, will be the new normal: scientists.”

The same song is being sung in the United States. President Joe Biden said the Canadian wildfires are a “stark reminder of climate change.” And according to the Washington Post, “‘Unprecedented’ Canadian fires intensified by record heat, climate change.”

But this explanation doesn’t hold much water—pardon the expression in this context. After all, the temperature has been changing since time immemorial, but this experience along the northern U.S. seaboard, to this degree, is entirely a new one. Manhattan has never, ever, looked quite like this before.

Further, and this will be difficult for our friends on the left to believe, the United States is warmer than Canada. And, it follows ineluctably, that Canada is colder than the United States. (Upon at least one occasion, temperatures in the Great White North were lower than on Mars!)

If forest fires were really caused by elevated temperatures, they ought to be taking place in the United States south, not in this relatively semi-frozen country. (I’m now—June 10—located in Vancouver, British Columbia, the Florida of Canada, and I’m freezing. We just had to turn on the heat in the house).

This being the case, let us at least contemplate another possible explanation for this phenomenon. Canada is a socialist country in many ways. Certainly, this includes its forests. No less than 94 percent of Canadian timberlands are owned by the government. Only 6 percent of them are in private hands. In very sharp contrast indeed, capitalists in the United States are proprietors of 56 percent (pdf) of American forests; the central planners in the land of the free, home of the brave, account for only 44 percent of this resource.

What does this have to do with forest fires, with the inundation of smoke in New York City and environs? Simply this. When entrepreneurs own property, they can lose money if they don’t protect it from undue damage. Uncontrolled forest fires rip into the bottom line. In contrast, if proprietors protect their private property, they can earn profits and expand their base of operation. Does this operate under government operation? Hardly. Elections occur only every four years (five or fewer in Canada). When was the last vote that turned on how a government protected its forests? Never, that’s when. Brilliantly states Thomas Sowell, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

I have striven mightily to find data to illustrate this point, but with no success as of yet. I have little doubt that when I do, it will indicate that uncontrolled forest fires (not protective burns) occur disproportionately more frequently, and cover more land, in territory controlled by socialist central planners than under private ownership.

The answer to the problem? Privatize the woodlands, and pretty much everything else for the same reason while you’re at it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.