Trump blames Canada for wildfires, but scientists point to climate change

Energy & Environment Trump blames Canada for wildfires, but scientists point to climate change Comments: by Rachel Frazin - 07/21/26 4:40 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Rachel Frazin - 07/21/26 4:40 PM ET Comments: Link copied

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President Trump and other Republicans are blaming Canada for wildfires whose smoke has choked parts of the U.S. in recent days. Experts from both countries told The Hill that climate change is the real culprit.

“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 wrote on social media last week.

“This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying,” he added.

On Sunday, the U.S. president again floated tariffs over the fires, saying, “If we can help them, we’ll help them. But maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs.”

He also said that the Canadian fires were “poisoning” U.S. air.

He’s not the only U.S. official to make such statements: Last week, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) announced legislation to sanction Canada over the fires.

“Thanks to Canada’s failed leadership, Ohio’s skies are seeing the worst pollution on record and Ohioans across the state are being subjected to hazardous conditions – we will not tolerate this incompetence,” Moreno said in a written statement. “My bill will declare an emergency, sanction all Canadian officials responsible, and study a victims compensation fund driven by imposing additional tariffs.”

Canadian leaders have pushed back.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford pointed out that Canada helps the U.S. with its own disasters rather than putting blame on its neighbor.

“I find it a shame the administration in the U.S. and Congress people … [are] blaming us. They have a very short, short memory,” he said, pointing to previous Canadian aid.

“That’s what neighbors do, right? You don’t get on and start threatening and criticizing because guess what, one day, it’s going to be your turn,” Ford said.

Meanwhile, wildfire experts from both sides of the border said this week that Canada’s forest management practices are not to blame, and that in reality, climate change is driving conditions that make wildfires more frequent and intense.

Experts described many of the fires as being in a remote, difficult-to-access part of Canada, meaning they go unmanaged, but added that’s not abnormal.

“Most of these forests are in really remote locations. There’s no roads within many miles of these fires, and there’s no practical way that you could have enough boots on the ground and enough of a financial commitment to doing management to make any kind of a real difference,” said Chris Field, director of Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

Mike Flannigan, professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University, agreed that it wouldn’t work to simply “rake” the forest floor, because you’d have to clear all of the vegetation for that to be effective.

“You’d have to remove all organic material,” Flannigan said, adding that fire “will spread as long as there’s organic material to burn,” even if it’s just grass.

“You’re not going to stop fires unless you completely bulldoze the area, and that’s enormous,” he added. “You can do it on a very localized area of high value … and with prescribed burning, you can thin the forest, you can remove material, but fires still occur in those areas, but they’re lower intensity, so fire management can put them out.”

Mark Ashton, professor of silviculture and forest ecology at Yale, said that unmanaged forests are not just a Canadian phenomenon.

“There’s vast stretches of Alaska that have a similar … level of productivity with no roads, small indigenous populations, and they do the same policy,” Ashton said. “They’re not managed. You let things burn.”

“It’s very natural for these forests to go through fire cycles … these forests periodically do burn, but the burning and the fires today are much more severe because these super-annual variations in dryness are much more amplified because of changes in climate,” he added.

The experts said that climate change is making wildfires more intense.

“Warmer conditions lead to drier fuels,” Field said. “The warmer it is, the faster things dry, and the drier they are, the faster they burn.”

As far as climate change is concerned, both the U.S. and Canada are major contributors to the problem, though the U.S. emits more.

Trump has repeatedly denied that climate change is happening, and his administration has rolled back climate regulations and clawed back funding for climate-related projects.

Meanwhile, Lori Daniels, a professor in the department of forest and conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia, noted that the U.S. also has its share of wildfires, including major ones that took place last year in California.

“What should you be doing differently to put out the fires in the United States? How do you manage your forests to stop a natural phenomenon like fire that is burning under extreme weather conditions and exceeding all of our modern technologies and all of our abilities to suppress those fires. When he comes up with that answer, the rest of us are waiting for the answer,” Daniels said.