Denialists Are Blaming Anything but Climate for Canada’s Fires
Arsonists, space lasers, pyrotechnic drones; the global right wing is on the hunt for a culprit responsible for Canada’s raging wildfires. Not on the suspect list: climate change.
Scientists have been warning for years that climate change—not just hotter temperatures, but droughts and more extreme winters—would lead to more intense forest fires. Now that their predictions are coming true, people are grasping for other explanations.
But there’s a fierce, and large, contingent of deniers of anthropogenic climate change, and a little thing like mass wildfires isn’t going to stop them. The main line from the Canadian right is that the burns are the work of criminals and firebugs, and that governments are simply “blaming the fires on ‘climate change’ and on the ‘climate crisis,’” as Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington wrote Wednesday. Others, like former NHL player-turned-conspiracy theorist Theo Fleury, have taken the idea a step further, alleging that progressives are weaponizing the fires to force “climate lockdowns” on the masses. Taking that idea even further, right-wing politician Maxime Bernier accused “green terrorism” for starting the fires.
What’s different this year is the scale and intensity of the fires. In a normal year, about 230,000 hectares of forest in Canada would have burned by the end of May. This year, nearly 2.8 million hectares burned. And it’s only getting worse. The fact that the fires are affecting multiple parts of the country at once means resources are stretched thin.
In 2021, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene caught flack for a Facebook post from a few years earlier, wherein she claimed that “lasers or blue beams of light” were responsible for raging wildfires in California. She singled out Rothchild Inc., a favorite target of QAnon and anti-Semites, as a possible culprit.
Not deterred by the ridicule Greene got for her absurd theory, popular far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters tweeted to his hundreds of thousands of followers that wildfires erupting in different parts of the country was “statistically impossible to happen by accident.” Instead, he argued, “[c]learly our governments are targeting us with Directed Energy Weapons.”
Conspiracy theories tend to feed off each other. In recent years, many believers in COVID-19 conspiracy theories have alleged that governments are lying about the nature of climate change to facilitate the imposition of “climate lockdowns,” as former NHL player Fleury wrote on Twitter. “That’s next up on the agenda.”
Many who ascribe to this idea point to proposals for “15-minute cities” as evidence that governments have a scheme to turn cities into open air prisons.
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro has fed into this idea, telling viewers on Wednesday that “Democrats are pumping up climate hysteria and bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/08/air...smog-fire/
Arsonists, space lasers, pyrotechnic drones; the global right wing is on the hunt for a culprit responsible for Canada’s raging wildfires. Not on the suspect list: climate change.
Scientists have been warning for years that climate change—not just hotter temperatures, but droughts and more extreme winters—would lead to more intense forest fires. Now that their predictions are coming true, people are grasping for other explanations.
But there’s a fierce, and large, contingent of deniers of anthropogenic climate change, and a little thing like mass wildfires isn’t going to stop them. The main line from the Canadian right is that the burns are the work of criminals and firebugs, and that governments are simply “blaming the fires on ‘climate change’ and on the ‘climate crisis,’” as Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington wrote Wednesday. Others, like former NHL player-turned-conspiracy theorist Theo Fleury, have taken the idea a step further, alleging that progressives are weaponizing the fires to force “climate lockdowns” on the masses. Taking that idea even further, right-wing politician Maxime Bernier accused “green terrorism” for starting the fires.
What’s different this year is the scale and intensity of the fires. In a normal year, about 230,000 hectares of forest in Canada would have burned by the end of May. This year, nearly 2.8 million hectares burned. And it’s only getting worse. The fact that the fires are affecting multiple parts of the country at once means resources are stretched thin.
In 2021, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene caught flack for a Facebook post from a few years earlier, wherein she claimed that “lasers or blue beams of light” were responsible for raging wildfires in California. She singled out Rothchild Inc., a favorite target of QAnon and anti-Semites, as a possible culprit.
Not deterred by the ridicule Greene got for her absurd theory, popular far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters tweeted to his hundreds of thousands of followers that wildfires erupting in different parts of the country was “statistically impossible to happen by accident.” Instead, he argued, “[c]learly our governments are targeting us with Directed Energy Weapons.”
Conspiracy theories tend to feed off each other. In recent years, many believers in COVID-19 conspiracy theories have alleged that governments are lying about the nature of climate change to facilitate the imposition of “climate lockdowns,” as former NHL player Fleury wrote on Twitter. “That’s next up on the agenda.”
Many who ascribe to this idea point to proposals for “15-minute cities” as evidence that governments have a scheme to turn cities into open air prisons.
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro has fed into this idea, telling viewers on Wednesday that “Democrats are pumping up climate hysteria and bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/08/air...smog-fire/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
