00:00:00.040Today on the Matt Walsh Show, governments across the Western world are putting all kinds of policies in place to supposedly fight climate change and stop carbon emissions.
00:00:08.180But the biggest climate crusader, Canada, is now emitting more carbon than ever. How did that happen?
00:00:12.620We'll discuss also the FBI claims that the motive of Trump's would-be assassin is still somehow unclear.
00:00:18.180Kamala Harris allegedly commits her own version of stolen valor, and Kamala brags about one of her greatest achievements,
00:00:23.620which is to make lynching illegal, even though it already was.
00:00:27.180We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
00:01:00.000You'll get uncensored, unfiltered, ad-free shows, real-time breaking news alerts, and more.
00:01:04.920But most importantly, you get the truth that the mainstream media doesn't want you to hear.
00:01:08.700One of the most basic assumptions about climate change that you're told to accept is that if you give the government enough power and make enough personal sacrifices, you can help change the weather.
00:01:19.840You can make natural disasters less likely.
00:01:22.660You can save beaches and endangered species.
00:01:24.820Even entire countries, the entire world, you can save.
00:01:27.960And all you need to do is pay more in taxes to fund more government bureaucracy and give up your car and your gas stove and airline travel and plastic straws and maybe your entire livelihood, and then everything will be fine.
00:01:41.380Now, there's no other country on Earth that's internalized this way of thinking more than our neighbor to the north, Canada.
00:01:47.860They've declared a national climate change emergency.
00:01:51.000They have a constantly increasing national tax on carbon, which raises the cost of living for pretty much every household in the country.
00:01:58.440They've shut down oil and gas permits off their Pacific coast.
00:02:01.000If you're an insomniac and you pull up a video of a debate in the Canadian parliament to help you sleep, there's a good chance that they'll be debating climate change in some way or another.
00:02:11.020So how's all that working out for Canada exactly?
00:02:15.160What have all of these taxes and regulations accomplished aside from hamstringing Canada's economy for the past decade?
00:02:21.460Shortly, we can assume that at the very least, Canada's carbon emissions are much lower as a result of all of this government bureaucracy.
00:02:27.640After all, Canada's not even a top 20 country by population.
00:02:33.900Shouldn't be hard for them to rank relatively low on the list of global carbon emitters, especially since they've been trying so hard and punishing their citizens so much.
00:02:43.100But as it turns out, Canada is currently one of the biggest carbon emitters on the planet.
00:02:48.420They're setting new records in the wrong direction.
00:02:51.240They're adding more of that dreaded carbon into the atmosphere than countries three times their size.
00:02:56.660And it's all because of a series of wildfires last year that the Canadian government clearly could not control.
00:03:04.160New research has found last year's wildfire season in Canada released more carbon emissions than all but three nations on Earth.
00:03:11.740The study published in the journal Nature says Canadian wildfires put out 647 megatons of carbon in 2023.
00:03:19.480That's higher than the total amount of emissions released by seven of the world's 10 largest emitters in 2022, including Russia, Japan and Germany.
00:03:29.660Only China, the U.S. and India released more.
00:03:33.160The study says although Canadian forests do pull carbon out of the atmosphere, increasing fire activity could reduce their effectiveness.
00:03:40.060Now, all told, the wildfires in 2023 contributed more than four times as much carbon into the atmosphere as everything else that Canada did last year combined.
00:03:49.120So the plastic straw bans and the taxes and industry crushing regulations were completely undone four times over by these wildfires.
00:03:57.700Now, if you check in with the experts, of course, they'll tell you that the wildfires were only so severe because of climate change.
00:04:03.720Supposedly, the one degree rise and reverted rather reported global average temperature from 2022 to 2023 could be the reason that the wildfires burned more of Canada than any other wildfire season in recorded history.
00:04:18.400And therefore, we need to redouble our efforts to ban fossil fuels and so on.
00:04:24.340As MIT Technology Review put it, quote, fires are part of natural, healthy ecosystems and burn on their own don't necessarily represent a disaster for climate change.
00:04:35.600After a typical fire season, a forest begins to regrow, capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it does so.
00:04:41.900This continues a cycle in which carbon moves around the planet.
00:04:44.620While climate change doesn't directly spark any one fire, researchers have traced hot, dry conditions that worsen fires to the effects of human-caused climate change.
00:04:55.120The extreme fire conditions in eastern Canada were over twice as likely because of climate change.
00:05:01.100The MIT Technology Review concludes with this.
00:05:04.040It was already clear that we need to stop emissions from power plants, vehicles, and a huge range of other clearly human activities to address climate change.
00:05:11.780Last year's wildfires should increase the urgency of that action.
00:05:16.220Now, what's striking about explanations like this is that they conveniently absolve the government of all responsibility for managing the forests,
00:05:24.720which is the single most direct way to prevent wildfires from spreading out of control like they did last year.
00:05:30.360And even the Canadian government admits that.
00:05:33.180I went on the website of Canada's Natural Resources Department and found that in addition to blaming fossil fuels,
00:05:38.240they acknowledged that they could do more to prevent wildfires from spreading.
00:05:43.680As wildfire risks will continue to intensify as the climate warms, Canada needs to adapt fire management and mitigation strategies.
00:05:50.580There are different ways to manage wildfire risk, including controlled burns, revised forestry guidelines,
00:05:55.600and procedures to manage fuel around communities and infrastructure.
00:05:59.000It's a balance of these techniques that can help deal with future challenges.
00:06:03.760Now, one scientist with the Canadian Forest Service put it this way,
00:06:06.680A change of climate means a proactive approach must be taken.
00:06:11.180Studies like this can offer important lessons to be better prepared for the next time a devastating event like this occurs.
00:06:18.140Now, they don't mention that, you know, preventing arson is another way to stop these fires, even though that's true as well.
00:06:25.460While the majority of these fires were apparently caused by lightning or some other natural events,
00:06:29.720there was at least one guy who pleaded guilty to arson for setting more than a dozen separate fires in Canada last year.
00:06:34.800But even if you set that aside, there's a glaringly obvious solution here, which Canada's government acknowledges.
00:06:40.960And that solution is for the Canadian government to do a better job preventing and containing wildfires by improving their management capabilities.
00:06:48.840And that brings me to the broader lesson from this disaster in Canada,
00:06:52.180which is that the government, in general, should focus on doing basic things competently.
00:07:00.420They shouldn't set out to save the planet with complicated carbon cap schemes and climate emergencies,