The Fires In Canada Are an Ongoing Human and Environmental Disaster

Right at this very moment, outside my window, millions of little bits of Canada are hazing up the sky. It could be bits of Nova Scotia. It could be bits of Quebec. It's probably bits of both, drifting south from the appalling wildfires in both places and causing dangerous air warnings here and all the way down to New York. From the CBC:

Quebec's fire authority says it's unable to bring all 153 fires burning in the province under control. It says it can only attack between 20 to 30 fires at a time until reinforcement arrives. "We took charge of 35 fires today, compared to 21 yesterday. We chose specific fires to protect our critical infrastructures, but above all to protect our population," said Public Security Minister François Bonnardel at a news conference Sunday. "All our resources are concentrated on these fires."

It is an ongoing human and environmental disaster and, at the moment, it's beyond anyone's control.

Yan Boulanger, a research scientist with Natural Resources Canada said that the ground covered by the fires in Quebec's commercial forests in the past four days is massive and estimates that it's equal to what was covered in the past 10 years combined. "It's a really exceptional situation," he said. "To have that number of fires means we had very dry, very warm conditions in the last few days and we also had a thunderstorm on Thursday that ignited those fires." The number of fires has overwhelmed the capacity of the province's forest fire fighting agency, SOPFEU.

I can't help but be grateful in the context of all this that we're keeping Senator Joe Manchin (D-ForTheMoment) happy in his hot monkey man-love for fossil fuels. From USA Today:

Manchin, who also discussed the third-party possibility on NBC's Meet The Press, said voters are tired of Democratic and Republican parties that have become too liberal or too conservative. “You better have Plan B" if "Plan A shows that we’re going to the far reaches of both sides, the far left and the far right," Manchin told Fox News. The West Virginia lawmaker also appeared on CBS' “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

The president is to be commended for keeping the environmental portions of his Inflation Recovery Act relatively intact throughout the extortionate negotiations over the debt-ceiling. But there was the glaring exception of greasing the skids for Manchin's fetish object, the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline. If Plan A is appeasing Manchin and his donor base, then it's failing rather conspicuously. In fact, it's in pieces, millions of them, floating through the upper atmosphere and making the skies far from the fires go red at sunset, like some sort of biblical omen of the end of things, like the descent of hell to earth.

From: Esquire US