Rolling Stone: "Why Are Canada's Wildfires Choking the US This Time?"
RFF Fellow Matthew Wibbenmeyer shares his thoughts on the emissions created by massive wildfires.
“We are seeing a lot more fires in the western United States and Canada over the last few decades, with a notable increase just in the last few years,” says Matthew Wibbenmeyer, who studies climate and wildfire management as a fellow at Resources for the Future.
It is not a linear trend, since some years are better than others. But the area burned by wildfires has doubled in Canada since the 1970s and quadrupled in the western United States in that same time. Longer, dryer summers have erased the concept of a “fire season” and turned it into a “fire year” in some parts of the arid West.
Meanwhile, the fires themselves are erasing some of our gains in efforts to fight climate change, as carbon dioxide from the fires spews into the atmosphere. In one study, researchers determined emissions from the 2020 wildfires in California could have wiped out the gains the state had made in greenhouse gas reductions since 2003.
“It can be a pretty significant amount of carbon released by these fires and of course that creates a sort of vicious cycle,” says Wibbenmeyer.
