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Last month, the climate justice movement got itself a new member: Donald Trump.
By mid-July, over 900 wildfires were burning across Canada, sending thick smoke into the Midwest and Northeast and pushing air quality into hazardous territory from Chicago and Detroit to New York and Philadelphia, with officials urging millions of Americans to stay indoors, limit outdoor activity, or wear masks. Roughly 5.9 million acres in Canada had burned this wildfire season by July 16, while the smoke disrupted travel, outdoor events, recreation and daily life across large parts of the U.S. In a July 17 post on TruthSocial, the president complained that Canada’s “filthy, polluted, and unhealthy” air was costing the U.S. billions, and said those costs should be added to tariffs on Canadian goods. Days later, he suggested Canada should “pay us some damages” for the smoke drifting south.
It’s not the first time this concept has been raised. Last summer, Republican lawmakers in Michigan, Iowa, New York, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin demanded Canada implement more forest thinning, prescribed burns, and other wildfire prevention measures and suggested the U.S. make it an issue in tariff negotiations. This time, four Republican Congressmen in Michigan penned a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on July 15 saying “We are done accepting apologies in place of action” and demanding specific, measurable solutions; while Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno introduced a bill on July 17 to sanction Canada for their failure to contain the fires. Senators on both sides of the aisle have pushed back on these ideas in recent weeks.
The wildfire dispute is also unfolding amid a much broader trade fight between the two countries. On July 1, the Trump administration declined to renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement his prior administration negotiated to promote trade between the three countries, which opened the floodgates for a possible tariff war. On Tuesday, the president thankfully paused a new 50% tariff for three days that would have affected roughly $20 billion in imports from Canada after intense last-minute negotiations produced what he called a preliminary deal. Several other tariffs on both sides of the border remain in place, and this wildfire issue remains an open and largely separate question.
By making these requests for Canada to compensate the United States for smoke crossing the border, these Republican lawmakers have ironically borrowed a key piece of logic from the climate justice movement. Climate justice views climate change through a lens of human rights, equity, and historical accountability. If one group causes pollution that disproportionately affects a different group, then an injustice has taken place, and a “just” response must handle this discrepancy via compensation, support, or some other mechanism.
In this case, the argument would be that Canada failed to prevent dangerous wildfire smoke from entering the United States, and therefore must right that wrong. However, if the lawmakers truly followed this climate justice logic through, they’d find a bigger problem. According to a study from World Weather Attribution, human climate change driven by fossil fuel emissions more than doubled the likelihood of the extreme weather that fueled this round of Canadian wildfires. The world’s all-time leader in historical carbon emissions is the United States. As such, Canadians could just as easily make the argument that the United States owes Canada a check for this summer’s wildfire damage.
And if Trump and Republican lawmakers set this precedent for “climate reparations,” it wouldn’t stop with Canada. A study in Nature earlier this year found that U.S. emissions since 1990 have already caused $10.2 trillion in global economic damages, with over $7 trillion of that damage occurring abroad. The study also projected future damages, finding that if those same carbon dioxide molecules emitted from 1990 to today remain in the atmosphere through the end of the century, the damage just from those past emissions could rise to a whopping $64 trillion — about double the entire U.S. annual GDP.
Opening that Pandora’s box just to insist Canada fork over a few loonies would be an idiotic move for American interests, and just as importantly, would do nothing to actually improve the Canadian wildfire issue. Though Canada is hardly ignoring wildfire management, Republicans are correct that more preventative measures can be taken, and these solutions would help even in a rapidly changing climate. That’s why the more productive response isn’t a misguided blame game over climate justice, but cooperation across borders. Cross-border environmental harms require shared responsibility, not competing demands for compensation — and the U.S. and Canada will do far more to prevent the next wildfire disaster by sharing resources and expertise than by arguing over who owes whom.