Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s me again, Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, keeping the post-paternity leave momentum going and feeling refreshed after several three-hour blocks of sleep last night. But that’s not why you’re here. 

No, you’re here to read about politics — so we’re going to talk about science! Today’s edition tackles the Canadian wildfires and what, if anything, governments can do about them. We also have a meaty reader question about suing the military and our roundup of stories we chose not to cover this week, so we’re spanning many categories in today’s 14-minute edition. Get the facts, get the opinions, then I’ll catch you down in my take.

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A new Suspension of the Rules.

This week, Isaac, Kmele, and a fresh-faced Ari reunite to talk election integrity, Bill O’Reilly, a twist in an old Hunter Biden story, and the challenge of separating political rhetoric from reality. Check it out:

Quick hits.

1. President Donald Trump said the U.S. will strike Iranian power plants or bridges as retaliation for any future attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz. (The threat) 
2. The House voted 216–214 to approve a budget plan that included $73 billion in Iran war funding, $12 billion to support farmers, and $10 billion to enforce potential voting restrictions. The plan now heads to the Senate. (The vote) Separately, the House voted 232–198 to pass a bill limiting some Congressional stock trading and adopting photo identification requirements for voting. (The vote)
3. President Trump said he will impose a 100% tariff on imported generic drugs in 2028 unless manufacturers of the drugs move their operations to the United States. Trump said the tariffs will increase to 200% in 2029. (The comments)
4. The Trump administration announced it will spend approximately $5 billion to support the Energy Department’s Genesis Mission, which plans to leverage artificial intelligence to address long-standing scientific challenges. (The announcement)
5. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) referred former special counsel Jack Smith to the Justice Department for prosecution, accusing him of making false statements to Congress about subpoenaing lawmakers’ text messages during his investigations into President Trump. (The referral)

Today’s topic.

The Canadian wildfires. Over the past week, smoke from wildfires in Canada (as well as northern Minnesota) has affected air quality and visibility across the Midwest and East Coast of the United States. As of Monday, air-quality alerts remained in place for a large portion of the country, and experts expect wildfire smoke to remain prevalent through August. The fires have raised concerns about climate-related catalysts of extreme environmental events, as well as scrutiny of Canada’s forest management. 

Back up: Wildfires are a normal yearly occurrence in Canada, which contains approximately one tenth of the world’s total forest area. However, the scale of the blazes has increased in recent years; the country had its biggest wildfire season (by area burned) in 2023, and currently has more active wildfires than at this point in the past two years. Fires in Ontario are primarily responsible for the smoke enveloping the United States over the past week, temporarily causing the air quality in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis to be among the worst in the world. 

897 fires are active in Canada as of Thursday. Meteorologists expect windy and dry conditions will likely cause wildfire smoke to continue blowing across Canada and the U.S. for several weeks. “There will be a couple chances of meaningful rain… this weekend,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Reneé Duff said on Monday. 

Scientists in Canada and the United States say that climate change is contributing to the more extreme fires. “Warmer conditions lead to drier fuels,” Stanford climate scientist Chris Field said. “The warmer it is, the faster things dry, and the drier they are, the faster they burn.” Others contend that increased forest management in the remote areas where many fires originate is not feasible. 

President Donald Trump has blamed Canada’s forest management for exacerbating the wildfires. “We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday. “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.” Separately, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) announced a bill to sanction Canada and Canadian officials over the wildfire smoke.  

Today, we’ll explore perspectives from the left, right, and Canadian writers on the wildfires. Then, Managing Editor Ari Weitzman’s take. 

In the New York Daily News, Daniel Zarin wrote “global climate change is causing NYC’s smokey air.”

“Before 2023, the only comparable smoke events in NYC history were more than 100 years ago, during the Adirondack fires of 1903 and 1908. It’s worth asking why we were blessed with such a long smoke-free interval, and why we now are entering a ‘new normal’ with negative impacts on public health and mortality,” Zarin said. “Our carbon emissions have heated the planet nearly 1.5 degrees Celsius. In Canada, temperature increases have been about twice that global average, and nearly three times as high in northern Canada. 

“The smoke-filled air… [is] a symptom of a global problem,” Zarin wrote. “Although the 2026 Canadian wildfires will likely be linked to the ‘super’ El-Niño we are entering, we are a large part of the problem. American carbon emissions per capita are nearly three times the global average and are increasing following a brief decline. If we continue to burn billions of tons of fossil carbon each year, we shouldn’t expect a different result. Plants took millions of years to remove that carbon from the Earth’s ancient atmosphere. We’re reversing that geological process in the blink of an eye.”

In MS NOW, Jarvis Deberry said “Trump demands Canada show more concern for American air quality than he does.”

“Republicans’ concerns about ‘filthy, polluted and unhealthy air’ must come as a surprise to Americans whose health concerns have been utterly disregarded by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency,” Deberry wrote. “In January, for instance, the EPA updated decades of policy that assigned a rough value per human life for cost-benefit analyses of pollution restrictions. The previous number was just under $12 million; Trump’s EPA zeroed it out… Now, all of a sudden, when smoke is wafting in from Canada, Trump says the pollution is costing the U.S. billions of dollars. 

“It is inconceivable that if the situation were reversed, and U.S.-created smoke was blanketing southern parts of Canada, Trump would consider the U.S. culpable,” Deberry said. “If a major fire breaks out during Trump’s term that could have been prevented or mitigated with better forest management, don’t expect Trump or any of the Republicans accusing Canada of mismanagement to feel convicted by their own words. Why would they? They’re not interested in forest management or even in making it easier for Americans to breathe. They’re only interested in saying something outrageous to fire up the base.”

In City Journal, Shawn Regan and Sean Speer described “why America keeps choking on wildfire smoke.”

“When wildfire smoke blankets America’s largest cities, as it has several times in recent years, people look for scapegoats,” Regan and Speer wrote. “Climate change is the reflexive answer. President Trump has a different culprit. In a Truth Social post on Friday, he blamed Canada’s ‘Willful Negligence’ in failing to manage its forests and threatened to add the smoke’s ‘incalculable’ costs to the tariffs Canada already pays. Both diagnoses are incomplete… Climate change certainly plays a role by lengthening fire seasons and drying fuels, but the severity of fires ultimately depends on how landscapes are managed.”

“Targeted fuels treatment — including forest thinning, brush clearance, and prescribed burning — removes the dense vegetation that causes wildfires to spread and intensify. These treatments don’t necessarily keep fires from starting, but they reduce their intensity, restore more natural forest conditions, and give firefighters a better chance to contain blazes once they break out. Canada does far too little of this,” Regan and Speer said. “Both countries know how to make fires smaller and less severe. The question is how many more suffocating summers it will take before their governments figure out that managing forests is better and cheaper than watching them burn.”

In the Daily Signal, Jason Hayes wrote “Canadian wildfires prove that proper forest management beats ‘green’ plans.”

“Blaming wildfires on climate change is a handy distraction from real solutions that could actually help manage the wildfire issue,” Hayes said. “Rather than admitting that their green plans exacerbate wildfire risks by stopping people from using and managing forested areas, environmental activists double down, pretending that if they can ban gasoline and natural gas, wildfires will simply disappear… More reasonable voices must correct the narrative by repeatedly explaining how wildfires have been around for as long as the world has had forests, and that, while warm air can make fires more intense, it does not cause them.” 

“And while wildfires are a normal part of living in and around forests, the reality is that poor forest management practices can make them worse by allowing forests to become dense, overgrown, and overmature. Unmanaged forests are ripe for massive fires, especially when a disease or insect infestation kills portions of them,” Hayes wrote. “The policy takeaway is clear: If we refuse to manage our forests, Mother Nature will do it for us, and we often won’t like the results. Where possible, we should manage forests actively to reduce fuel buildup and wildfire risk. Allowing active harvesting, spacing, thinning, and prescribed fires can reduce these fuels under controlled conditions and lessen the likelihood of wildfires and the intensity of those that do occur.”

In the National Post, Matthew Lau argued “government-funded wildfire ‘facts’ contradict reality.”

“The Canadian Climate Institute, an organization funded to the tune of $34.9 million by the federal government over the past four years, recently published a series of ‘fact sheets’ about how climate change is making heat waves, flooding, droughts and wildfires worse,” Lau wrote. “According to the institute, climate change threatens the safety, wellbeing and prosperity of Canadians, and governments must take drastic action to curtail its effects including by ‘accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels to limit climate heating.’ However, while wildfire smoke, floods and other disasters are real, these fact sheets (again, paid for by the federal government) are much more alarmist than informative.” 

“The institute highlights the horrific blaze in Jasper in 2024 and suggests that reduced fossil fuel usage could mitigate the harms of such fires. But in reality, the evidence shows government mismanagement — not man-made climate change — was largely to blame… The federal government is responsible for Jasper National Park’s forest management, which includes managing the stock of timber especially in high-risk zones... [but it] simply did not manage this effectively,” Lau said. “Wildfires and wildfire smoke are real problems that should be understood and mitigated. But the reality about climate change is not nearly as alarming as what the government-funded Canadian Climate Institute reports.”

In the Toronto Star, Doris Grinspun and Sue LeBeau said government officials “must help prevent the next wildfire.”

“When communities are threatened by catastrophic fires, governments have a moral obligation to spare no effort or expense to protect lives, provide shelter, support evacuees and help communities recover. That is exactly what governments should do,” Grinspun and LeBeau wrote. “Wildfires have always been part of Ontario’s landscape. But climate change is making them larger, more frequent and more destructive… The tragedy is that this crisis did not emerge in a policy vacuum. It is part of a pattern that has defined the [Premier Doug] Ford government’s approach to environmental policy — one that has consistently moved Ontario backward on responsibility for emissions reduction and climate accountability as climate impacts become more severe.”

“Climate change is not simply an environmental issue. It is a public health emergency,” Grinspun and LeBeau said. “After years of weakening Ontario’s climate response, [Ford] now has an opportunity to match his words with policies that genuinely protect people. That commitment cannot begin only when forests burn. It must start earlier — by tackling the causes of climate change, preparing communities for unavoidable impacts, and putting health at the heart of public policy.”

My Take

Ari Weitzman

Managing Editor

 

• Climate change is directly contributing to the prevalence and intensity of these fires, but they’re not the primary cause. 
• That said, Trump is completely off-base in accusing Canada of mismanaging its forests. 
• Even in a best-case scenario, the best Canada (or the U.S.) can do is mitigate the fires’ impacts.

Reminder: This is where we share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, leave a comment on the website or reply to this email.

I’ll do something abnormal and tell you my conclusion up front: Climate change is creating a higher risk of wildfires, and Canada should undertake policy changes to mitigate that risk. 

That’s it, that’s the take. 

Hotter temperatures don’t increase the risk of fire on their own — the weather has to be not only hot but also dry and windy to qualify as “fire weather,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Western Fire Chiefs Association, the National Park Service, and any climatologist or park ranger you could speak to. Hot and dry air draws moisture out of things in the forest that can burn — trees, grasses, leaves, twigs — turning all that organic material into potential fuel. In those conditions, any spark, like lightning or power lines downed by high winds, can ignite an inferno. High winds then stoke the flames by sending oxygen into the path of fires, and they can expand the area of the burn by blowing embers miles away from the heart of the blaze.

In the summer months, the weather gets hotter and drier — and this summer’s El Niño will likely bring a lot of high-wind days. This isn’t exactly news, and people expect that seasonal change in weather. However, North American summers have been getting hotter and drier over time (and El Niños stronger). The shift in weather patterns over time has a name: climate change. Berkeley Earth physicist Robert Rohde released a compelling visualization in 2018 (I can’t believe that was already eight years ago) that showed how the hottest and driest years in California had all been the most recent ones. 

One of the best climate communicators out there right now is Zeke Hausfather. Recently, Hausfather compiled a similar visualization for mean temperature and precipitation over burnable land in Canada, which isn’t quite as dramatic but paints a very similar and pretty clear picture:

Weather conditions in Canada have been getting hotter and drier. You don’t even have to believe that humans are causing this — I explained the theory of how humans are causing climate change in great detail in Tangle in 2021 (I can’t believe that was already five years ago) — but for now you just have to acknowledge the trend.

On the flip side, that doesn’t mean that climate change is the sole cause of these wildfires, either. These are multifactor occurrences, and flattening the dynamic into “climate change continues to make these disasters worse,” as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) did, misrepresents the dynamic and isn’t convincing anyone who wasn’t already concerned about climate change. Again: climate change will make fire weather more likely and heighten the risk of fires; it is not specifically causing worse wildfires. 

Ultimately, statements like Schumer’s are minor misrepresentations, but the tendency for politicians and the news media to only talk about climate during extreme environmental events and not, say, when the output of climate models changes is a constant frustration of mine. To take again from Hausfather, records aren’t the best measure of trends — you can misrepresent a lot of trends by focusing only on extremes. But I get it, extreme weather events drive the news, and the news drives conversation. It just distorts the way we discuss and understand climate change.

It also distorts the way we understand the causes of wildfires. Last year, in the United States, California experienced some of the most destructive fires in the state’s history, and those fires have imparted critical lessons about the wildland-urban interface and forest management: larger breaks between dense residential areas and forests, more prescribed burns, and even intentional logging. 

As humans, we want to pull from our mental file of solutions indexed under “WILDFIRES” and apply them here, but it isn’t that simple. First, the recent Canadian wildfires have burned in very remote areas, where there is no urban interface with wildlands and the concerns aren’t about burned structures but smoke swept into the jet stream and blown across thousands of miles. Second, Canada’s boreal forests are different from the coniferous forests in the American West. Not only are they less dry, but they’ve also never been used in any significant way for human development. It’s hard to blame “poor forest management” for fires in areas that were never managed in the first place. 

Imagine you live in West Texas. Imagine the gentle sun-baked desert hills around you aren’t dotted by cactus and the occasional desert willow, but covered by pine, spruce, poplar, and birch. Imagine this forest stretches across the entire state, that the state is now almost totally unpopulated and that much of it hasn’t been so much as visited by humans in decades, if not longer. Now imagine you and a crew the size of your high school class are responsible for responding to wildfires across the whole state — oh, and if you let a fire get too big and the wind is just right, it’ll cause a geopolitical crisis. 

That’s basically what it’s like to be managing Canada’s wildfires right now. Simply put: Canadian forests are just not the same as ours, so the lessons learned from our fires can’t be easily mapped to theirs. I’ll turn to Hausfather again to bring the point home:

The forest-mismanagement explanation is borrowed from the wrong forest. It’s a real problem in the frequent-fire dry forests of the western U.S., but the Canadian boreal is a rare-crown-fire system, mostly unmanaged and unsuppressed, where only about a fifth of the burned area is even on managed land and where the fire scientists themselves say landscape-scale fuel treatments can’t scale or stop the megafires.

And let’s not mince words: If Schumer is out of the strike zone with his rhetoric, President Donald Trump is throwing over the backstop. Accusing Canada of “willful negligence” for “not properly maintaining their forests” betrays a misunderstanding of the problem, and tariffing Canada for smoke that drifted over the United States (when it also ravaged Canada’s largest city) misdiagnoses the solution. Canada is not suffering from a lack of motivation to mitigate these fires, so I don’t think tariffs and online posturing will help. I think we’d do better cooperating with Canada to manage the root causes of our shared air-quality problem, as the Department of the Interior announced it would do in 2023 and as we still do by sharing firefighting equipment; but that’s not the way this administration handles its relationships with our allies. 

But I’d be wrong to say Canada has exhausted all its options, and I could be wrong about President Trump’s tack if he catalyzes more funding and better organization for Canada’s existing mitigation efforts. In 2022, Canada launched the Fighting and Managing Wildfires in a Changing Climate program, devoting $346 million to increasing wildfire preparedness. Then, in 2024, it launched the Wildfire Resilient Futures Initiative to continue and expand this work. The problems with these programs are that they focus more on preventing property damage and localized loss of life, not wildfire smoke, and the efforts they funded aren’t well organized or centralized. Also, from an American perspective, you’d probably expect the funding to be larger by a factor of ten. 

To better mitigate these air-quality events, Canada will need larger, landscape-scale, prescribed burns to reduce fuel load before fire season, and they’ll need much more than the current level of funding to do that. I don’t feel confident saying that approach will definitely help, but I do feel confident saying that the scale of response has not gotten within spitting distance of its theoretical maximum. Maybe Trump’s kick-in-the-pants approach will light a productive fire under the Canadian parliament — that’s the best-case scenario outcome.

Though I need to stress that the best Canada can do, even with a massive, multinational, preventative effort far past a scale they’ve ever considered before, is mitigate the risk. The conditions for wildfires aren’t getting better anytime soon — because Canadian summers aren’t going to get cooler and wetter anytime soon. Climate change isn’t a process that we can easily reverse, even if our government tackles it head on, which it isn’t.

I’ll repeat: Climate change is creating a higher risk of wildfires, and Canada should undertake policy changes to mitigate that risk.  

That’s it, that’s the take.

Take the survey: What’s responsible for Canada’s wildfires? Let us know.

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Your questions, answered.

Q: With the recent deaths of U.S. soldiers related to the Iran conflict, is it plausible that family members of the deceased might choose to sue the U.S. government for wrongful death, using the rationale that the president did not receive congressional approval for this war, and that their deaths resulted from illegal involvement? This seems like it might be a way for citizens to challenge the way in which the U.S. has become involved and stayed involved in this conflict.

— David from Atlanta, GA

Tangle: Based on current Supreme Court precedent, no, military family members cannot sue the government for wrongful deaths caused in the act of military service. However, that could theoretically change.

At the base level, the legal principle of sovereign immunity states that private citizens cannot sue the government without its consent. That principle was explicitly limited in 1946, when Congress passed the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) authorizing plaintiffs to obtain compensation from the United States for harms suffered — or torts — due to negligence by government employees. However, Section 2680 of the FTCA carved out several broad exceptions, granting the government immunity against lawsuits for “any claim arising in a foreign country” and “any claim arising out of the combatant activities of the military or naval forces, or the Coast Guard, during time of war.”

While that language could permit a lawsuit against the military for torts outside of an official war, that’s not how the Supreme Court has interpreted the statute. In 1950, several plaintiffs attempted to sue the military for negligence or wrongful death in Feres v. United States, including one servicemember who said a surgeon left an 18x30-inch towel in his abdomen. The Court dismissed the claims, establishing the Feres doctrine — basically, that the military cannot be sued for any tort suffered during active duty. A diverse array of justices have rebuked this precedent, including Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas, but the Court has affirmed it repeatedly, and as recently as 2018 it denied a request to hear a challenge to the doctrine.

In his dissent to that 2018 denial, Justice Thomas wrote that he thought the Feres doctrine was wrongfully established and urged Congress to limit it. Then, as hard as it is to imagine, Congress passed the Stayskal Act in 2019 to do exactly that: allow claims against the military for malpractice or wrongful death at military medical facilities. 

Obviously, that doesn’t say anything about military actions that are found to be taken outside the president’s authority, but it does show that the Feres standard is not set in stone. Theoretically, a Supreme Court open to revisiting shaky precedents could revisit Feres — but realistically, that would be highly unlikely. Given how hard even these moderate carveouts have been to achieve, it’s borderline fanciful to imagine either Congress or the Court expanding military torts broadly enough to allow for this kind of legal action.

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The road not taken.

The biggest story that we wanted to cover this week — but didn’t — was New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s (D) announcement that the state had discovered roughly 6,600 noncitizens who were registered to vote in 2023 and 2024 due to a Motor Vehicle Commission system error. After a deep dive turned up insufficient commentary on the story from the left and right on Wednesday afternoon, we put the issue on hold for next week. 

We also considered a piece on the U.S. servicemember casualties in Iran, but opted to answer a reader question about war in today’s edition instead, with a mind toward a broader Iran edition in the coming weeks. Finally, we discussed covering New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D) comments about arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; ultimately, we felt the story was A) less relevant after Mamdani acknowledged he didn’t have the authority to do so, and B) would have created a New York-heavy week after we had already covered the state’s one-year pause on data center construction.

The extras.

• One year ago today we covered Tulsi Gabbard’s report on “Russiagate.”
• The most clicked link in our last regular newsletter was again our new video on the fight over Alaska’s election system.
• Nothing to do with politics: This “train influencer” captures the experience of witnessing “Big Boy.”
• Our last survey: 2,418 readers responded to our survey on familial appointments to Congress, with 46% saying they strongly oppose the practice. “Just another tradition in government that is long overdue for an overhaul,” one respondent said. “The onus rests on the electorate to make better choices,” said another.

Have a nice day.

Even the best radiologists regularly miss CT scan abnormalities that can be the difference between life and death for patients. Complicating matters, researchers have found that radiologists subconsciously detect abnormalities that their conscious brains don’t always process. Gregory DiGirolamo decided to explore how to patch those gaps in detection. His team turned to pigeons. DiGirolamo and researchers at the College of the Holy Cross trained six pigeons to watch CT scan videos and indicate whether they showed lung nodules that could signal cancer. With a little motivation (food) for accurate detections, the birds became remarkably successful, even applying their visual powers to other kinds of scans. Now, DiGirolamo is working on translating his findings to new medical technology to assist radiologists. Popular Science has the story.