I had other plans for this week, but they’ll have to wait because some Republican politicians just offered bait too good to pass up.

Many years ago, climate activists began predicting that as anthropogenic global warming became undeniable, those who had worked so hard to keep the temperature rising would start to blame everyone else – including climate activists – for the problem. I’ve seen one version of that pop up over the last few years, in which someone who recently began to accept reality blamed everyone else for not convincing them sooner. We didn’t push hard enough. We pushed too hard. We were too annoying, or too easy to ignore. We didn’t say it right, and so it’s our fault that they weren’t convinced.

Now we’ve got a new version of that, courtesy of the Republican Party of the USA, and their reliably bizarre understanding of science and politics.

Canada has been dealing with massive wildfires recently, primarily fueled by climate change. They’re not alone in this, of course. The US has the same problem, as do many countries all over the planet. Because the whole planet’s temperature is rising. This might not be a huge issue, of course, if it weren’t for the disrespectfulness of smoke. Smoke doesn’t care about borders or immigration policy, which is why all good national leaders know to control their local smoke, so it doesn’t bother anyone else. From the office of Jack Bergman:

Dear Prime Minister Carney,

We write today as members of Michigan’s congressional delegation to raise our voices on an issue that has already drawn letters from our colleagues in past years: wildfire smoke drifting across the border from Canada into our communities. Additionally, last year, Reps. James and Bergman each wrote letters to your government to raise the alarm about wildfire smoke pouring across our border from Canada into our communities. We write jointly this time because a year has passed, the season has come around again, and nothing has changed except that our patience has run out.

Our constituents in Michigan are once again under air quality alerts. Our hospitals are once again treating children, dialysis patients, and older residents for the effects of smoke that did not originate anywhere near them. This is the third consecutive year we have had to write to Canadian officials about a crisis that Canada has the tools to prevent and has chosen not to.

I might be more persuaded of this letter’s sincerity if Republicans gave a single shit about the health of their constituents at any other time. If Michigan had universal healthcare, and a system funded to ensure that everyone had access, then everyone’s baseline level of health would be higher, and the system would have more capacity for emergencies. The Republican party, on the other hand, seems committed to following the advice of famous eugenicist Thomas Malthus. They are building a country in which the poor are denied access to vaccines, safe food, functional infrastructure, safe workplaces – pretty much everything that has been responsible for the increase in human life expectancy over the past century or so.

We were told last year that this would be treated with urgency. It was not. We were told the causes, chronic under-investment in forest thinning, fuel reduction, and prescribed burns, along with inadequate enforcement against arson, were being addressed. They were not, or not adequately enough to matter to the people we represent. Provincial leaders have offered excuses instead of results, and in some cases have openly dismissed the health of American citizens as an inconvenience to their own summer. That attitude is unacceptable from a neighbor and an ally.

It’s true, this is not the first time they’ve complained like this. Canada is very bad for allowing there to be wildfires, which the US would never do, because God-Emperor Donald Trump personally vacuums every forest by hand, and orders all the trees to stand farther apart.

We are done accepting apologies in place of action. If Canada will not manage its forests to prevent these fires, the United States will look elsewhere, and act on our own, to protect our people. That means our own agencies exploring direct involvement in cross-border fuel reduction and firefighting capacity. It means reconsidering how much benefit of the doubt this relationship continues to earn on an issue where American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year. Sovereignty comes with responsibility, and the responsibility to prevent a foreseeable disaster from crossing into another country’s airspace has not been met.

Sovereignty comes with responsibility, you see, and the responsibility to prevent a foreseeable disaster from crossing into another’s airspace…

I never cease to be astounded by conservatives’ capacity for projection. The United States is a foreseeable disaster crossing into other countries’ airspace. It has been for decades. Its foreign policy is one foreseeable disaster after another, and every one of them is proudly championed by the Republican Party. But hey, let’s ignore the millions murdered in the name of capitalism and the US empire. I’ll even pretend the US armed forces aren’t one of the biggest polluters on the planet.

The US is the biggest single reason for the lack of appropriate action on climate change. The Republican party is the biggest single reason for the lack of appropriate action on climate change within the US.

That’s not to say other countries don’t pollute, or that everyone else is blameless in all this, but the nations to which we’re often compared on emissions, like China and India, not only have triple our population, they will also never reach the per-person greenhouse gas emissions of the United States. China passed the US as the biggest annual emitter a few years back, but they’ve also been ramping up renewable power faster than anyone else, while working hard on mass transit and electric vehicles.

Further, the bulk of historical emissions (because remember this is a cumulative problem) come from the US, and as the world hegemon after WW2, the US has had far more opportunity to change, in terms of available resources and technology. Had the US begun to do so after the first televised warning about global warming, back in 1956, or even after the congressional hearings in the 1980s, the rest of the world would have followed suit, and the US would have been in a position to help them do so. Instead, the Republican Party declared war on the environment and anyone defending it, and the Democrats mainly provided lip service and a list of excuses. That’s not to say they did nothing, but nothing they did was able to do more than slow the increase.

It’s like when politicians tell you that the economy is doing fine because inflation is down, as though that means prices are down, rather than the reality, which is that prices are just rising more slowly.

So.

For 70 years, we’ve known that we were making the planet hotter. For 70 years, we’ve known that the problems caused by that would be planetary. For 70 years, we’ve known that it would affect every nation on the planet, that the US was the biggest single perpetrator, and that other, poorer countries would almost certainly bear huge costs in resources and lives for a problem that they didn’t cause, and couldn’t have stopped.

Batman fans will be familiar with Uncle Picard’s catchphrase: With great power comes great responsibility. If you have the means to stop harm, or to solve a problem, then you have a responsibility to do so.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party is the party of personal responsibility, which means they only acknowledge their responsibility to their own personal needs and desires. Anything like a responsibility to other people, or to humanity as a whole? That’s communism, and they would like to use the Pentagon to murder it please.

So these are the people – from the very party most responsible for global instability, global warming and everything that comes with it – who are scolding Canada about their responsibility to other nations. Who are demanding immediate, specific action on an environmental issue.

We are asking for specifics, not sentiment. What funded, measurable steps has your government taken since last summer to reduce fuel loads and wildfire risk in the provinces responsible for the smoke reaching the American Midwest? What accountability exists for provincial leaders who treat this as someone else’s problem? And what will genuinely be different by this time next year, rather than another season of statements followed by the same result?

Here’s one specific: We can strap every Republican down, Clockwork Orange-style, and force them to learn climate science and actual world history.

Here’s an even better one: Take the hundreds of billions spent on war, and instead invest in ending the use of fossil fuels to power our society, not just in the US, but across the planet. Do it because it needs to be done, and because we can, and because we’ve spent generations spreading our poison to the corners of the earth, and making life hell for others.

There is no single country, in the last 70 years, that has done more to pollute, and destabilize the whole planet, than the United States. There is no country on the planet that has violated its “Sovereign” responsibility to others anywhere close to as much as the United States. And, before we finish the letter, I’ll add that that there is no country on the planet, in the last 70 years that has more reliably acted in bad faith, seemingly whenever possible.

We remain ready to work with Canada in good faith, as two nations with a long history of standing together. But that history does not entitle Canada to another year of excuses. Our constituents are breathing the consequences of this failure right now, and they deserve better than to be told, again, that it will be handled

I agree on that. Your constituents deserve far better than anything the GOP has offered in my lifetime.

But I have to ask, what do these bold American leaders propose to do, exactly, when they say the US will “look elsewhere”. For what? The Republicans have already been putting tarrifs on Canadian imports, as a display of machismo and as yet another way to steal from the American people, so… what? Are they threatening to build a bubble over the country, so they can source our air from other places? Maybe they think they can bomb the fires into submission?

I think there is merit in international cooperation on issues of ecosystem maintenance, climate adaptation, and controlling emissions, but the Republican Party is violently opposed to all of that. If anything their version of “cooperation” would be strong-arming Canada into letting American corporations clear-cut Canadian forests.

I don’t think these politicians actually believe there is anything Canada can do about the wildfires. Maybe I’m over-estimating their grasp on reality, but I think this is far more likely to be the same fascist trick the Republicans always use: When a problem comes up, find a scapegoat so they don’t have to do anything. They rant non-stop about responsibility because if they can blame everyone else for all the problems they either created or are responsible for solving, then they can focus on their real priority, which is making themselves and their masters richer. Heck, if we go with the hypothesis that they really are trying to turn the US into a Malthusian nightmare, then stopping the smoke is the last thing they’d want to do.

This letter is funny, in that it is deeply silly, but it’s also further evidence that the Republicans will do literally anything other than actually serving their public.

These fires will continue. They will get worse. The world still has a lot of forests, despite the relentless deforestation. The higher the temperature, the more the forests dry out, and the more fires there will be. This is not a problem that can be solved with forest management. It is also not a problem that can be solved by any one nation.

We have entered an era in which a lot of people are going to die, because of the decisions of the ruling class, across generations now. We’ve gotten good at dealing with natural disasters, but they are going to keep getting worse. The Republicans who wrote that letter were complaining about having done the same last year, and the year before. Next year is almost certainly going to be worse, for everyone.

And we’ve barely started. The speed at which the temperature rises keeps increasing, we’ve got decades of warming already baked into the system, and while there is a lot we can do about it, we’re currently at the mercy of people who seem to think they can bully fires into not starting.

Now, for those who are dealing with wildfire smoke, here are a few tips and resources that might be useful.

The first is to filter your air, as much as you can. Any smoke is harmful to not just your lungs, but your cardiovascular system in general, and even your brain. That combined with keeping doors and windows shut can keep your home air safer. For going outside, if you have to, try to pick up some n-95 masks. Even better, make peace with the fact that you now live in a cyberpunk dystopia, and get a respirator, and make sure to get extra filters. They can provide better protection than a disposable mask, and because they’re not disposable, you can personalize them with LEDs and other stuff to make your aesthetic match the genre we’re all forced to live in.

If you can, get air purifiers for your home. Good ones aren’t cheap, but clean air is priceless (currently)

Keep an eye on local air quality. If you’re in the US, the EPA has a tool that the Republicans don’t seem to have destroyed yet, and the AP just told me about this global air monitor powered by community science. If the air quality is bad, cancel plans if you can, and stay indoors. If your home doesn’t provide protection, or you don’t have a home, maybe look for public facilities that do have air filtration, and see if you can spend some of the day there just to give your system a rest. On that same note, don’t exercise more than you absolutely have to, so long as the air quality is bad. I feel like it should be instinctual, but breathing hard when the air is poisonous isn’t going to make you stronger.

And, most importantly, get involved in politics!

This shit is only going to get worse as the temperature rises, and individual people and families will not be able to protect themselves from a global catastrophe. Individual towns, cities, and even some nations won’t either. We need global cooperation. We need governments to be actively investing in adaptation, as well as reducing emissions. That includes enabling people to stay cool indoors when it’s too hot to survive outside, and it also involves ensuring that people have access to clean air, when bits of the planet are on fire.

See what’s happening around you. If you’re in the US, that might be anti-ICE organizing, it might be the local DSA, it might be community groups, or school boards, or something else. The better-organized everyday people are, the more power they have to force politicians and capitalists to behave, lest the workers shut down the economy.

Or, you know, we can just blame Canada.