By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
Residents of the Southern Interior woke this morning to a blanket of smoke courtesy of wildfires burning out of control in Washington State. Southerly winds are blowing the smoke north filling the valley’s from the Similkameen and Okanagan eastwards with the pall of wildfire smoke.
More than a dozen wildfires are burning in northern Washington State with the largest – Kaiser Canyon – estimated at 651.87 acres (263.8 ha).
Current smoke conditions on the morning of Friday, July 17 showing smoke blowing north from the US. Map image from firesmoke.ca, a publicly accessible, government-funded research portal primarily operated by the Weather Forecast Research Team at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in collaboration with various Canadian environmental and forestry agencies.
The smoke from US wildfires, comes only days after Republican politicians in the eastern US complained in letters to Canadian provincial and federal officials about smoke from massive wildfires in northern Ontario. Although far less severe than the smoke generated by the northern Ontario wildfires it nonetheless provides a clear reminder of the transnational nature of wildfire smoke.
Canadian officials and environmental groups have pointed out the hypocrisy for US politicians to demand action on wildfire smoke while simultaneously ignoring or denying the underlying driver of worsening wildfires: global climate change driven by fossil fuel consumption.
The US remains the largest single contributor to global climate change, responsible for approximately 20 per cent of all cumulative global greenhouse gases emitted since 1850. On an annual basis it is now the second largest contributor after China but climate experts say this may change as US President Donald Trump continues to dismantle and downscale many of the environmental protection agencies and mechanisms in the country.
It’s also clear that the US struggles to control and mitigate its own wildfires, and has often been assisted by Canadian wildland firefighters, making demands for Canada to “manage” its wildfires nothing more than political subterfuge. Many of these US wildfires historically and as in the current situation have sent smoke north into Canada.
