What are they saying about us?

JB: Nice to have you back to this episode of “What are they saying about us?”
I’m your host, Jessica Brando, in Ottawa, Canada.
And on this podcast, it’s my mission to see how Canadian news plays outside our borders…
…and what that means for what the world thinks of Canada.
Wildfire season started early this year out West.
Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes in Alberta and British Columbia in May.
Experts say above-average temperatures and drought-like conditions could put us on track for another summer of extreme wildfires.
It’s terrifying for people living in the path of the flames.
And it’s unhealthy for everyone who breathes in the massive clouds of smoke produced by tens of thousands of square kilometers of burning forests and brush.
And just like last year, that includes our neighbors south of the border.
-Collage of TV news clips: CBS, ABC, CNN-
That’s just a taste of some of US news coverage at the start of this year’s Canadian wildfire season.
And it’s got Americans worried that the summer of 2023 is going to repeat itself.
When wildfire smoke polluted the air for days.
Parts of our planet are getting hotter and drier, and my guest knows that better than most.
OT: I’m Owen Temby. I'm a professor in the School of Earth Environmental Marine Sciences at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. It's much hotter than usual. Yesterday was 98 degrees. And these days are 13, 14 degrees above normal. Yeah. And we're having a drought. Every day here lately, we have bad air.
He’s studied how air pollution travels between Canada and the US throughout his career.
We’re going to talk about why wildfires are a borderless threat that need a coordinated response.
But first listen to him talk about it from a personal perspective.
OT: I was in Quebec for a period of last year. I've a family there. And we were in Rivière-du-Loup, my family during the wildfires. I have a son who has pulmonary issues. It was terrible. We're seeing places that have never had such bad air, have never had such dangerous air, have this for the first time.
JB: Maybe that's a good place to start. Can you briefly sketch for me how the countries have historically handled this, you know, movement of dangerous particles from one side of the border to the other? Whether it's created north or south of the border. What could you explain about what we've traditionally seen? Historically.
OT: It has been episodic with respect to the region in which occurs, and the current understandings of the problem. There has been no permanent long-term secretariat that has managed air pollution between the countries for the duration of the time, that it's been an issue.
And so, it's difficult to encapsulate it, except to say that it can be defined a bit in terms of the absence of a sustainable regime for dealing with this. And this this may sound counterintuitive to people who think that pollution problems are addressed through government intervention.
That what has lessened pollution in the long haul has been changes in technology. Changes in the kinds of energy we consume, or the way in which electricity is generated or the way in which the pollution that cars emit, and that's partly due to policy interventions, encouraging technology, encouraging alternative fuels. But, one thing we can say is, and that may separate it from distinguish it from the current era of pollution episodes. Is that I think it's fair to say that we're in a new, a new era of pollution. Is that in the previous century we had air pollution problems that were severe that were generated by economic activity.
They were generated by smelters. They were generated by power plants in Michigan. Or power plants in the Ohio River Valley.
Now things are very different. The air has gotten better. The air has gotten better because of the things I just mentioned. And that, in the sense is, is great. Air is cleaner than it used to be. Except that with accompanying climate change and accompanying agricultural production, we're seeing different sources of pollution. And not that much is known about them, surprisingly little. And to have policy. You have to have knowledge. and we're nowhere near a policy response.
JB: You mentioned that last summer was, really out of the ordinary in terms of the effects of the wildfire when you saw the degree to which the Canadian wildfires and their smoke became an international issue last year. What came to mind?
OT: Iceland in? Was it 2010, when there was that volcano? It was sort of Iceland's revenge, after having to pay back all that debt.
JB: The gods must have been angry, and it was spewing all that volcanic ash into the air, and it was disrupting flights everywhere. It. I think it was impacting weather as well. If I'm not mistaken? That, you know, that that level of volcanic ash in the sky. Is that accurate?
OT: I think so, and it's important if you think back to when this happened. And with Iceland in 2010, all that stuff that you just mentioned. Nobody said except a joke, “Damn Iceland! We gotta do something about Iceland.” It was just sort of stuff happens. This wasn't their fault. We can make jokes about it. We can joke about on Twitter. Iceland is getting their revenge.
But that was it. Now I've thought about the same thing with Canada. you can see similar sort of snarky responses on Twitter about Canada. Canadians are considered in America relatively docile to the extent that they thought about at all. Think South Park tapped into that some years ago.
JB: Here’s what you need to know if you’re not a fan of South Park…it’s an animated TV series that’s been running since 1997.
But the franchise also includes a movie from 1999 that features the song “Blame Canada.”
It has nothing to do with wildfires.
But last year on June 8th, when the sky was orange and hazy, the New York Post ran a headline taking up nearly half the front page…What did it say?
Blame Canada! Canuck wildfires plunge NYC into eerie, smoky hell.
And the song you’re hearing was also the soundtrack of countless Tiktoks and other social media memes, telling Canadians to take back our wildfire smoke.
Now let’s get back to the interview with Owen Temby, our expert on North American Air Pollution from the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley.
OT: Yeah, blame Canada. It's not clearly human-generated. I thought about this a little bit more and decide to look into where I might find meaningful criticism or bad press for Canada. So, I opened up the Washington Post yesterday and saw an article that was published about a week ago on the fires for this year. And the way I get the pulse of serious people who read serious news is by looking at the comments section. And the comments were critical of climate change deniers. That was the way the people were defining the problem. This is climate change. Don't say that climate change isn't real. It wasn't: We have to do something about Canada. Canada has to change this policy. Canada has to manage its forests differently. And in that sense, this is quite different than the air pollution problems that we saw in the past.
JB: If you were giving advice to the Canadian Government. What would you tell it to do in terms of addressing how the wildfires are affecting people outside its own borders?
OT: I would say, don't worry, that anybody's blaming you. Fund the science, on wildfires. What is the content of this smoke? How does it transport? Under what conditions? And how can it be suppressed? And how can it be suppressed in a way that is going to bring about resilient ecosystems during times that there aren't fires?
Now, this is this is part of why it's so complex. because, any intervention in any ecosystem that may burn is an intervention that has costs and benefits. And every ecoregion is different. Every ecosystem is different. And so, there is a need for more and more knowledge, regional knowledge, local knowledge. On how these ecosystems function. so that the interventions that are likely to suppress fires are more, make them less likely. Given what we know about climate change, or at least what we expect is likely to holistically make the ecosystem more resilient.
It is an extremely complex issue. This is not like the problem of air pollution, acid rain in the 1980s where we knew what was causing it. We knew the solution. We can't do that here. Fires in BC are different than fires in Alberta. There's different species who may be that which may be endangered.
There's different wildlife. There's different plant life. So, funding that science and investigating. That is, is what I would recommend. But of course, I'm a researcher. We always want money.
JB: More more science.
OT: And money.
JB: You know When I hear you talking about the historical problems that have faced Canada and the Us. In terms of air pollution and I think about the acid rain issue, it seems to me like that was easy, you know, but it wasn't easy. It took years and years of meetings and high-high level, you know, President, to Prime Minister, kind of cooperation to move this forward. Do you think that it's realistic to think that we can get that kind of coordination between the Us and Canada again, to mount a response on the scale, that this would require?
OT: I'm not holding out any hope for another Shamrock Summit. Some of your older listeners may recall what I'm talking about. I believe that was it, Reagan and Mulroney?
JB: Reagan and Mulroney. Yeah.
OT: Irish eyes are smiling.
JB: Yes.
OT: In terms of coordination, I don't imagine any…boy, that's not an easy question to answer.
JB: No. And it's it doesn't actually usually have a happy answer either.
OT: I’m trying not to discourage anybody, because climate change doesn't have a happy end. It's the future increases in temperature for our lifetime, already baked in. So, you never know what could happen if there's a binational prioritization of an issue. Through the opening of a spigot for research funds.
But, I'll say, this. These are issues that are less likely to be addressed through some sort of President to Prime Minister prioritization. And more through what we might call the Binational Deep State. The international and binational networks in which we are already embedded, that have their own momentum.
These treaties that we're a part of get signed. They get a secretariat. They sort of develop a life of their own within their own mandate. We signed this, this treaty, the Convention on long range transboundary air pollution in 1979. And it created a permanent Secretariat. The Secretariat is they meet, they discuss emerging issues. they make decisions about amendments to the binding commitments the countries have made. They recognize that we're in a new era of pollution. The main problems are over that we have these diffuse problems, and they've decided to coordinate on researching this. And we in the Us and Canada are a part of this.
JB And I guess the more days of you know, hazy skies being able to see the New York skyline, and so on that creates some political will, then that maybe these secretariats and their findings will actually gain traction with the political leaders.
OT Yeah, that's right. This this is, we have great data as well. You're talking about the public attention. But they have great data as well. They have satellite data that shows the stuff moving around. And now we're seeing this pollution from Canada create very much that situation where the air is, is dirtier than it ever has been, and there's really nothing we can do.
JB: That is a scary premise…all the progress we’ve made in terms of reducing industrial air pollution is being undone by raging wildfires.
And it’s just another thing we need to adapt to as we grapple with climate change.
I’ll say it again, I’d like to thank Owen Temby for walking us through what’s at stake in terms of wildfire air pollution…and how our fires in Canada aren’t just our problem.
He’s a professor at the school of Earth Environmental Marine Sciences at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley…but he’s also a Canadian.
If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you can catch more episodes as they come out.
I’m Jessica Brando…I’ll be back here soon with more answers to the question… “What are they saying about us?”