The Price of Liberty

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The Blaze featured an article over the weekend reporting that US solar power production (of electricity) plunged by 50% over the long period smoke has been drifting from the massive Prairie Province wildfires plaguing both Canada and the States.

Here in the Black Hills, Wyoming, and Colorado, we’ve been very aware of the smoke being blown south and east from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and nearby areas for more than a month. Here in the Black Hills and Four Corners, we take periodic episodes of smoke for granted (due to frequent grass and forest fires in the dry lands of the Amercan West, both the Rockies and the Great Plains), California similarly has almost annual experience with dealing with smoke. But the Canadian fires have created conditions that have Easterners freaking out. Earlier in the week it was the Northwest – those powers that be in Manhattan and Boston and DC. Now (a news report as I write this) it is the Great Lakes States. They are “suffering” and there are warnings to “stay indoors” because of the “worst air quality” in the nation.

To Westerners, I admit it is hard to feel as much sympathy as we probably should.

But it does raise some serious questions. Forest fires and grassland fires and the smoke they produce are NOT caused by “manmade global climate change” or “manmade global warming.” We have seen massive forest and grass fires (especially in North America) for thousands of years. Many are the result of human activities, but not because of more CO2 or methane or CFCs in the atmosphere.