Dear Americans-who-blame-us-for-the-smoke:

“If Canada can’t get these wildfires under control, they need to face real consequences … We won’t sit back while our air becomes a health hazard.”

So says Rep. Calvin Callahan from Wisconsin and others from Iowa, Minnesota, New York, and North Dakota who filed a formal complaint. Against Canada.

Excuse me? EXCUSE ME??

You’re blaming US for the SMOKE? We should be blaming YOU for the FIRES!!

We’re ALREADY facing real consequences. Of YOUR behavior. And YOU apparently expect US to sit back while our climate becomes a health hazard!

Your complaints sound like something we might see from a third-world country that cannot educate its kids, not a country with the likes of Harvard and Yale. Do you really not know about climate change/global warming (better called, now, global heating)?

Who the fuck do you think is RESPONSIBLE for the fires? Not only here in Canada, but in Portugal, Spain, France, Greece, Australia … oh, and, the U.S. (so far this year, you’ve had over 43,000 fires; https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/nfn).

I guess you don’t teach Science in your schools anymore, so let me explain the basics:

1. Engines that use oil (or coal or natural gas) exhaust carbon dioxide.

2. Carbon dioxide is a ‘greenhouse gas’, which means that just as glass keeps the heat inside the greenhouse, carbon dioxide keeps the heat inside our atmosphere.

3. When conditions are hot and dry, vegetation more easily ignites.

4. And fires are harder to extinguish.

5. Especially when there is no road access or firefighting infrastructure. (Have you even seen a map of northern Canada? The boreal forests? I guess you don’t teach Geography in your schools either. Canada is the second-largest country in the world, but almost half of that is remote and inaccessible forest.)

And although emissions from the U.S. have declined a bit, you are second only to China in terms of how much carbon you’re spewing into the world’s air.

Which is why THE FIRES ARE VERY MUCH YOUR FAULT.

(The two of you are competing for world domination, in the process destroying the world you hope to dominate. Imagine standing on a scorched earth with no water, no food, no nothing, fist in the air shouting “WE WON!” You are fucking insane, both of you.)

And as for the smoke …

6. Fires cause smoke.

7. Smoke is carried by wind.

8. Neither you nor I can control the wind.

9. As smoke travels, it sinks … more and more of it reaching breathing height.

These are facts. Not as in ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’. But as in ‘gravity makes things fall down, not up.’

But I get it. You don’t accept the facts. Because so many Americans lie. It’s the norm in businesss: almost every ad lies, and CEOs say whatever will maintain or increase profit. It’s the norm for politicians: consider your current president (who is, as we speak, destroying the evidence of global heating). It’s the norm online: ‘fake news’, ‘misinformation’, ‘a photoshopped image’ on social media—let’s call it what it is: lies. It’s all just lies.

And maybe that’s why you don’t accept the fact of global heating. But consider the list above. Do you really not believe that engines exhaust carbon dioxide? Get an air quality tester and see for yourself. Do you honestly not believe that things ignite more easily when they’re hot and dry? Do an experiment: in your bath tub, put two piles of leaves, one dry, one wet, and then drop a not-quite-extinguished cigarette onto each pile. Do you seriously not think that fires are harder extinguish when there’s no road access, no water access? As for carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas, okay, that one takes more knowledge about molecular structure than you or I have, but look online for scientists’ reports dating to the 1970s and 1980s, when such reports were more trustworthy. Because we’ve known this since then.

Furthermore, don’t you even trust your own experience? Or what people over 50 tell you? The summers ARE hotter; there ARE more heat waves. The droughts ARE longer. The storms ARE more severe. And there ARE more of them. It’s not ‘just the weather’. You dismiss it all as anomalies, but at some point (a point we’ve passed), anomalies become trends.

Okay, so, now that I’ve explained it, you know.

Now you can’t say “I didn’t know”.

You know now. You fucking know now what you’re doing, what you’ve done.

Every time you get into your car (transportation, 28% of emissions), every time you use electricity (25%), every time you buy shit you don’t need (industry, 23%), you turn up the heat. FOR ALL OF US.

It’s too late to make amends. (The damage has been done, and it’s irreversible.) But I doubt you’ll even apologize. You’re just not that mature.

Prove me wrong.

Watching the weather network, with the ads: the fires in Turkey brought to you by Mitsubishi’s new crossover SUV, the Outlander. Literally brought to you by.

It’s exactly like an ad for guns showing right after news of a school shooting. See the problem?

How can they, the people behind the weather network, can be so fucking clueless? Why would they agree to advertise the very product that causes the disasters they cover?

Because the disasters depend on those products, and their website depends on disasters. Disasters are exciting. People click on disasters. People stay on disasters. And so the website gets more money for the ads.

Somewhere along the line, the horse got put before the cart: it’s not that ads enable websites anymore; now, websites enable ads.

And, ho-hum, in the U.S., money trumps morality. So I waste my time suggesting that ads for harmful products should be banned. Seriously. And fossil-fueled cars, and guns, are so much worse than, say, cigarettes—given that the harm done goes waaaaaaay beyond that to the person who voluntarily chooses to use said products.