A group of Republican lawmakers has complained that smoke from Canadian wildfires is ruining summer for Americans, just days after voting for a major bill that will cause more of the planet-heating pollution that is worsening wildfires.
In a letter sent to Canada’s ambassador to the US, six Republican members of Congress wrote that wildfire smoke from Canada has been an issue for several years and recently their voters “have had to deal with suffocating Canadian wildfire smoke filling the air to begin the summer”.
“Our constituents have been limited in their ability to go outside and safely breathe due to the dangerous air quality the wildfire smoke has created,” the group of House of Representative members from Wisconsin and Minnesota wrote on 7 July.
“In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family, and creating new memories, but this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things.”
The lawmakers urged Canada to take “proper action” to reduce the smoke and noted the historic friendship between Canada and America, without mentioning Donald Trump’s repeated demands for Canada to be annexed and become the 51st state of the US. “Our communities shouldn’t suffer because of poor decisions made across the border,” Tom Tiffany, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin and one of the letter’s authors, wrote on X.
However, all of the authors of the letter – Tiffany, Brad Finstad, Tom Emmer, Glenn Grothman, Michelle Fischbach and Pete Stauber – voted for the so-called “big, beautiful” Republican spending bill that, among other things, slashes support for renewable energy and provides new incentives for the production of fossil fuels.
The reconciliation bill, signed by Trump on 4 July, has been called “the most anti-environment bill of all time” by green groups and will result in a surge in greenhouse gas pollution, according to experts. The legislation, combined with the president’s own executive actions, will cause an extra 7bn tonnes of planet-heating gases to be released in just the next five years, analysis of Princeton University data has found.
This pollution will worsen an already escalating climate crisis that is causing wildfires to become longer and fiercer. Scientists have found that extreme fire years are becoming far more common around the world as it heats up, with the amount of area burned in the US west increasing eightfold since the 1980s. Climate crisis caused 15,000 people in the US to die from toxic wildfire smoke just in the 15-year period until 2020, recent research discovered.
More than 100 wildfires are burning in Canada’s Manitoba province, causing smoke to cascade southwards into the US midwest. More than 20 million people in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan have been subjected to air quality alerts telling them to stay inside.
Canada has had a string of major wildfire years, most notably in 2023, and the climate crisis is a major factor in this, according to John Abatzoglou, a climatologist and wildfire expert at University of California, Merced.
“We are seeing a very clear increase in fire risk, we are getting hotter and drier conditions that are elevating the fire danger,” he said. “We have had hot, dry, tinderbox conditions in 2023, 2024 and this year as well.
“These aren’t one-off events, the odds are now stacked for widespread, chronically hot and dry landscapes that will burn. Every year with additional carbon emissions will make it much more challenging for the decades ahead.”
The Republican letter to Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador, mentions “a lack of active forest management” and arson as reasons for the conflagrations but does not mention climate change. The current Canadian fires, however, are centered in remote boreal forests that do not have a long history of human intervention and are usually ignited by lightening rather than arson, Abatzoglou said.
“It’s very hard to suppress fire in these areas,” he said. “I’m not sure how much we can do to manage our way out of this problem, other than ramp down our carbon emissions to address climate change.”
Climate groups were scathing of the letter. “Trump and Republicans in Congress just passed a bill that will increase pollution and put Americans at greater risk from the danger of extreme weather,” said Pete Jones, the rapid response director of Climate Power.
“If the GOP wants to know who’s responsible for the health impacts of climate change in the US, they should take a closer look at their own voting records.”
All of the six Republican letter authors were contacted for comment. A spokesperson for the Canadian embassy said: “Canada takes the prevention, response, and mitigation of wildfires very seriously. We can confirm that the letter has been received by the embassy and has been shared with the relevant Canadian agencies. We will respond in due course.”
