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Blaming Canada For Wildfire Pollution? Republicans Should Look In The Mirror

Blaming Canada For Wildfire Pollution? Republicans Should Look In The Mirror

The Swiss air quality company IQAir called Chicago, the city where I live, the most polluted in the world. Judging from the haze outside my home office window this morning, not much has changed.

The Chicago Tribune reported that PM2.5 pollution (the most dangerous since small particulate matter from wildfires, internal combustion vehicles and industrial pollution easily enters the lungs and bloodstream) tripled the city’s previous high, which was already deemed hazardous to health. Some northern suburbs saw their previous highs quintupled.

Those previous recorded highs were set during the 2023 Canadian wildfire season, the worst until this year. Summer has been cancelled, one headline said, as public health officials warned everyone in the upper Midwest, Northeast and mid-Atlantic states to remain indoors.

Cancelling summer is depressing. Cancelling life is more important.

As of yet, there has been very little reporting about the immediate health effects of the hazardous conditions suffocating central Canada and the north and northeastern third of the U.S. Studies of previous PM2.5 wildfire seasons estimated at least hundreds and probably thousands of people died prematurely from acute asthma and cardiovascular attacks. Longer term, the studies projected thousands more will die prematurely from increased cases of lung and other cancers, heart attacks, and strokes.

On July 17, the Associated Press reported some of the research behind those estimates. To quote from its story:

On average 24,100 people died each year in the Lower 48 states between 2006 and 2020 due to long-term exposure to tiny particles from wildfire smoke, according to a study this year in the journal Science Advances. A Stanford study projects that U.S. wildfire smoke deaths will increase with climate change and by midcentury hit an annual cost of $244 billion in terms of the economic value the government puts on each life.
On a global scale, wildfire smoke particles cause 677,745 deaths annually, with almost 39% of them children under age 5, according to a 2021 study that combined observations, studies on how the body responds to the particles and computer models to calculate the toll.

That AP story arrived just as I was concluding my own brief review of the medical literature. Here are just a few of the studies I found:

  • A Canadian study in Geohealth of the health effects in Canada from wildfires between 2019 through 2023 found immediate deaths increased anywhere from 49 to 400 per year. Increased deaths from chronic exposure ranged anywhere from 660 to 5,400 deaths per year. Canada’s population is one-eighth that of the U.S.
  • A U.S.-led study in Environmental Science & Technology Letters of the effects from the 2023 Canadian blazes found a three-fold increase in attributable deaths from smoke exposure.
  • An Australian study in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology found asthmatic mothers-to-be exposed to at least 10 days of wildfire smoke in the first five months of pregnancy (compared to those with less or no exposure) resulted in four times more low birthweight babies, three times more pre-term babies, and five times more babies requiring neonatal intensive care.

Each of those studies was published earlier this year.

Who deserves the blame?

How has the majority party in Washington responded to this unprecedented outbreak of forest fires in our northern neighbor? They’re blaming Canada for an alleged lack of response.

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) announced last week that he plans to introduce the CANADA FIRE act (Countering Atmospheric Nuisances Arising from Drifting Airborne Foreign Incendiary Residual Emissions Act”). “My bill will declare an emergency, sanction all Canadian officials responsible, and study a victims compensation fund driven by imposing additional tariffs,” he said in a prepared statement.

Blaming political opponents for the increasing devastation from wildfires has become the go-to Republican trope for deflecting attention from the overwhelming consensus that greenhouse gas emission-driven global warming is entirely responsible for the unsurprising escalation in forest fire ferocity. President Trump took the lead last year when he accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s environmental and water management policies for the Palisades and Eaton wildfires, which led to 41 immediate deaths, another 440 health-related deaths, destroyed over 18,000 structures and forced over 200,000 from their homes.

Those charges were immediately debunked on the PolitiFact website. “Regional water reservoirs in Southern California are at historical highs,” the Poynter Institute’s factchecking organization noted. “Hydrants ran dry during recent firefighting because the city’s water infrastructure was not built to respond to fires so large.”

The real culprit

The Atlantic magazine environmental reporter Joshua Partlow offers a brief summary of why this year’s Canadian forest fires are shaping up as the worst ever.

When the boreal forests of Canada catch on fire, no one can do anything about it in many cases. The forests are part of Earth’s largest land biome, a greenbelt of wilderness that encircles the globe, and they’ve been suffering from the planet’s thermostat being jacked up. Wood-boring pests that flourish in milder climates have swept north and east, through tens of millions of acres. Droughts and dwindling snowpack have stressed the trees. They are ready to burn.

Trees are not just innocent victims of global warming. They are our most important allies in the fight against it. Why? Because trees take in carbon dioxide and through the miracle of photosynthesis pump out oxygen.

The majority of the earth’s arboreal forests lie in the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere. That fact is aptly reflected in the following chart. The downward-sloping portions of the saw-toothed line reflects the decline in atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the northern hemisphere’s spring and summer months.

Bottom line: Climate change’s impact on Canada and Russia matters a lot.

The vast forested lands of those two countries are the largest component of the planet’s lifeline. They are being assaulted daily by the warming temperatures caused by fossil fuel emissions. When they burn, it’s like puncturing a hole in our life preserver.

And who deserves the most blame for those fires when we look around the world? It is the current U.S. government and its environmental policies — not malfeasance by the Canadian government for failing to contain the growing number of forest fires in its 1.4 million square miles of forest land, which is more than twice the size of Alaska and constitutes nine percent of the world’s total.

Let us now review current U.S. policy as pertains to global warming:

  • The current president calls global warming a hoax.
  • His government supports more coal-fired plants and less renewables like wind and solar to produce electricity.
  • His Supreme Court majority in 2022 severely limited the government’s ability to regulate CO2.
  • His Environmental Protection Agency initiated at least 70 actions to roll back rules designed to protect the environment and limit global warming.
  • He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on fighting global warming.
  • His science agencies de-funded research into the causes and effects of global warming.
  • His Interior Department has opened federal lands, including national treasures like the Arctic Wildlife Preserve, to fossil fuel exploration.
  • His State Department has destroyed the Agency for International Development, which provided crucial assistance for less developed countries that wanted to combat their own contributions to global warming.

If Americans want to become part of the fight against the health harms of global warming, the place to start is in Washington, not Ottawa.

Merrill Goozner, the former editor of Modern Healthcare, writes about health care and politics at GoozNews.substack.com, where this column first appeared. Please consider subscribing to support his work.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News

Republicans Push Skimpy, Unaffordable Health Coverage As Costs Keep Rising

Republicans Push Skimpy, Unaffordable Health Coverage As Costs Keep Rising

The median cost of employer-based health insurance this year leaped ahead at nearly twice the rate of the consumer price index, according to the annual Kaiser Family Foundation employer survey released yesterday. Sadly, workers are bearing a larger share of the increased burden through rapidly rising co-premiums.

The press coverage this morning of the closely followed survey emphasized the combined top-line increase of 5.5 percent for a family plan, which now stands at a staggering $26,993 a year or about the price of a new compact car. The cost of an employer-based individual plan rose at the slightly lower rate of 4.6 percent to $9,325 a year.

But a deeper dive into the numbers provides a better understanding of why people are so upset about rising health care costs. Employee co-premiums for a family plan (the amount deducted from paychecks) rose 7.6 percent on average to $6,850. The employer share went up only 4.8 percent. The net effect was a downward shift in the share paid by employers and a corresponding upward shift in the share paid by their employees, which was a half percentage point more or 25.4 percent of the total.

This increased burden on workers comes after an eight-year period when the employer share of premiums rose fairly steadily (with a few years off early in the pandemic). Companies offset some of those increases by funneling more of their workers into plans that raised their out-of-pocket expenses for deductibles and co-pays.

Depending on the plan type (HMO, PPO, high-deductible), the average deductible from employer-based family plans now ranges from $3,118 to $5,095 a year. Fully a third of workers and their families enrolled in high-deductible plans for 2025, up from 28 percent the previous year and the most ever.

Put the two together, and the median family (half pay more, half pay less) now pays anywhere from $9,968 to $11,945 a year for health care or close to $1,000 a month. Given the median household income in 2024 stood at $83,730, that translates into anywhere from 12 percent to 14 percent of a typical family’s income.

Things are about to get a lot worse. Next year’s premiums and co-premiums for employer-based plans, which cover an estimated 154 million people, are set to rise six percent to seven percent, according to a new survey by Mercer, a health care benefits consulting firm. If the split between employers and their employees remains the same, that will exceed wage increases by two to three percentage points. Wage increases have been trending down for the past three years, falling to just 4.1 percent this past August, the last month reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics before the government shutdown.

Source: Atlanta Federal Reserve

No wonder health care costs now ranks as the second most important issue for inflation-weary Americans, just behind the deteriorating state of the overall economy. More than four in five of 1,300 adults surveyed in mid-October by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs said health care issues were extremely or very important to them personally. That was nine percentage points more than crime and 23 percentage points ahead of immigration — the next two biggest concerns.

The impact of ACA/Medicaid cuts on employer plans

The outlook for employer-based plans will also get a lot worse if Democrats fail to restore the Medicaid cuts and the enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans (which provides affordable insurance for tens of millions of low-wage workers, gig workers and sole proprietors). An estimated 7.3 million people who purchased subsidized exchange plans will drop ACA coverage, with more than half becoming uninsured, according to a Commonwealth Fund brief.

Many will look for cheaper, non-ACA compliant plans that don’t quality for listing on the exchanges because they provide skimpier benefits, are not required to provide free preventive care, can discriminate based on prior medical conditions, and often carry extremely high deductibles and co-pays. This summer, the Trump administration announced it wouldn’t enforce the rule approved by the Biden administration in mid-2024 that limited such plans to three months duration.

“Those who sell non-ACA plans … will absolutely see the coming open enrollment as an opportunity to push their plans as more affordable alternatives, without sharing full information with consumers about the limits of those plans,” said JoAnn Volk, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

What happens when people who previously had Obamacare buy skimpy plans or become uninsured? They postpone care until their conditions require emergency room treatment — the most expensive place to obtain health care. When struck by serious illnesses like cancer, heart attacks and strokes, they often fail to pay their uncovered bills, or resort to Go Fund Me campaigns to pay off their high deductibles. Some will negotiate long-payoff periods and live the rest of their lives burdened by medical debt. Some will declare bankruptcy.

Hospitals and physicians, in turn, will raise their prices to cover the cost of uncompensated care, which will cause private insurance rates to rise even more. Rising prices, rising insurance premiums, and rising uninsured rates is an accurate description of what existed in the U.S. before passage of the ACA.

These health care economic fundamentals are of little interest to the modern-day Republican Party, which invariably includes some variation of bare-bones insurance as one of their answers to the affordability crisis. Early in the shutdown, they floated ideas like instituting new income caps on Obamacare subsidies, establishing minimum co-pays, and cutting off subsidies for new enrollees, none of which they would agree to negotiate until the government is reopened.

Then, last week, Politico reported they are also willing to beef up tax credits for investing in health savings accounts, which could be used to buy skimpy plans. Lower-income workers generally avoid HSAs since they can’t afford the voluntary deductions needed to fund them.

I can’t predict when or how the shutdown crisis will end. But I am pretty confident that I know what will happen to health care costs in the next few years given Republican control of Washington. They’re going up, up, and up.

Merrill Goozner, the former editor of Modern Healthcare, writes about health care and politics at GoozNews.substack.com, where this column first appeared. Please consider subscribing to support his work.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News

Charlie Kirk

Is The Other Party Truly The Enemy -- Or Do We Exaggerate Political Polarization?

Just after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a New York Times/Siena poll found that Americans believe polarization is the second most serious challenge facing the nation. (The economy came in first.) As recently as one year ago, fewer than one percent of registered voters cited polarization as a national problem; this year, 13 percent said it was the most important problem facing the nation. Additionally, strong majorities agree that "America's political system ... is too politically divided to solve its problems."

Not only do Americans believe we're bitterly polarized; they worry that we're condoning political violence and that we cannot agree on basic facts. When Republicans were asked to name the nation's biggest problem, their first choice was the economy but their second was "Democrats." When Democrats were asked the same question, they put the economy second and named "Trump/Republicans" first.

Nations are not eternal, and domestic divisions often lead to destruction — especially when exploited by foreign enemies. So it's important to pay attention to these red flags, but it's equally important not to misinterpret them.

When we consider how much of our discourse is mediated through partisan sources and the fact that the governing political party is dominated by incendiary extremists, it's surprising we aren't even more polarized. A reservoir of moderation persists in the nation. It's shrinking but still present.

Research by More in Common (where I serve on the board) has found that time spent online is highly correlated with support for political violence. A 2024 survey conducted by the group found that 14 percent of American adults agreed with the statement "I feel that violence is sometimes needed to advance political causes in the U.S. today." That number jumped to 22 percent among those who spent five or more hours on social media daily and dropped to six percent among those who devoted a half-hour or less to social media each day.

Surveys showing support for political violence are disturbing, particularly in the wake of assassination attempts on Trump, arson at the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the assassinations of Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk, and other politically motivated attacks. But those surveys can also be misleading. As More in Common explains, vaguely worded questions — that, say, fail to define violence or to distinguish between attacks on people and attacks on property — can lead to inflated responses. When Americans are asked, for example, whether it is justified to commit violence against supporters of the other party's presidential candidate, nearly 100 percent say no.

And yet, Americans have a distorted impression of how their political opposites feel about violence. The same More in Common survey from 2024 (conducted after the assassination attempt on Trump) found that Democrats and independents vastly overestimated how Republicans would react. Democrats guessed that 47 percent of Republicans would agree with the statement "Violence against Democrats is now justified." The actual number of Republicans who agreed with the statement was 13 percent. Independents estimated that 38 percent of Republicans would endorse the statement.

Misperceptions abound on other topics as well. A June 2025 survey found that 85 percent of Republicans and 89 percent of Democrats believe freedom of speech to be "unconditional." Yet Republicans estimated that only 52 percent of Democrats believed that, and Democrats guessed that only 57 percent of Republicans would say so.

Similarly, 80 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans say it's important to respect those with whom you disagree. Democrats think only 39 percent of Republicans assent to this, and Republicans estimate that only 36 percent of Democrats would say the same.

Vast swaths of Americans of all political persuasions would like to see a more united country, yet on this question as well, the perception gap is large. When Republicans were asked in January 2025 what qualities Democrats would want to see in the country 10 years into the future, they guessed "green" or "tolerant." Republicans estimated that only about 14 percent of Democrats would say "united," but in fact, 44% percent of Democrats chose united, more than any other quality. And while 47 percent of Republicans offered that they wanted to see a united country, Democrats supposed that this would be true of only 13 percent of the GOP.

There is no sugarcoating the trend toward authoritarianism among the very online and a growing share of Republicans. While only one percent of Democrats say they endorse non-democratic government in the United States, fully 10 percent of Republicans now say as much. On the other hand, Democrats might be surprised to learn that 13 percent of Republicans believe that Donald Trump's presidency poses a greater threat to democracy than the courts or bureaucracy. Of course, if that 13 percent includes the 10% who like autocracy, it's a less encouraging finding.

Surveys can't capture everything. And even in a nation where large majorities disfavor violence or extremism, we can't kid ourselves. A small number of dedicated revolutionaries have overcome widespread indifference before. Still, the research on perception gaps is a useful corrective to pervasive beliefs about our divisions. The gaps are wide but perhaps not as deep as we fear, and there remain opportunities for leaders to appeal to unity and mutual respect.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.

Reprinted with permission from Creators

Vought's 'Aggressive' Gutting Of Government Enrages GOP Senators

Vought's 'Aggressive' Gutting Of Government Enrages GOP Senators

Republican lawmakers are criticizing Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought for taking what they call an overly “aggressive” approach to the ongoing government shutdown, warning that his hardline tactics could backfire on the party.

“Russ is less politically in tune than the president,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) a member of the Senate’s DOGE (Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency) Caucus.

“We, as Republicans, have never had so much moral high ground on a government funding bill in our lives ... I just don’t see why we would squander it, which I think is the risk of being aggressive with executive power in this moment,” he told Semafor, according to a report published Wednesday.

The report noted that just one day into the shutdown, tensions are flaring within the GOP over how President Donald Trump's administration is handling the crisis.

Vought, seen as a loyal enforcer of Trump’s budget-slashing agenda, has already halted $18 billion in infrastructure projects in New York — the home state of Democratic congressional leaders — and frozen $8 billion in clean energy initiatives across 16 mostly Democratic-led states.

Critics, including Republican allies, worry Vought is pushing too far, too fast.

“That is totally unacceptable,” said Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-ME), referring to the delay of critical New York infrastructure projects, including the Hudson Tunnel.

“I’ve actually seen the damage that was done by the hurricane, and it is serious,” she told the outlet.

The report cited sources familiar with a private House GOP call, who said Vought told lawmakers that federal employee layoffs could begin within days. That statement drew concern from Republicans representing districts with large numbers of government workers.

Democrats argue that Vought is using the shutdown as cover to impose sweeping cuts that would have happened anyway.

According to the report, Collins acknowledged that the lapse in funding gave Vought increased authority to declare employees "non-essential" and begin layoffs: “No doubt about that.”

The controversy mirrors the earlier backlash over tech billionaire Elon Musk’s now-dormant Department of Government Efficiency, a Trump administration initiative aimed at shrinking the federal bureaucracy.

While popular with some conservative voters, polls showed most Americans disapproved of Musk’s handling of the program, leaving Republicans to defend politically damaging cuts.

Now, with Vought picking up where Musk left off, frustration is again boiling over.

“The administration and the agencies have no boundaries; that they are, in an illegitimate way, taking money that has been appropriated,” said Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), per the report.

“The fingerprints are everywhere — and they will continue whether Elon Musk is here or not," she added.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), told Semafor she expects New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, to pursue legal action over the halted projects, while unions have already filed lawsuits against OMB over the layoff threats.

With Vought’s aggressive strategy in full swing, lawmakers on both sides are growing increasingly pessimistic about the chances of reaching a bipartisan deal to reopen the government.

“We don’t have true negotiating partners; they just want to make this difficult. They’ve been cheering this on for months,” said House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA), per the report.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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