The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - January 20, 2024


Liberal Environment Minister lies about 2023 wildfires

Topics
climate change wildfires
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Steven Guilbeault New Brunswick Bowness
Donors are fleeing from Trudeau's Liberals (Liberals look broke) Danielle Smith's UCP funds new ＂anti-racism＂ and DEI programs

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

186.21

Word count

2,242

Sentence count

114

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Environment Minister Stephen Gilbeau has a new post about Canada's worst wildfire year ever, and it's not because of climate change, it's because it's actually caused by climate change. In this episode of the podcast, I explain why this is a complete fictionalization of history, and why climate change is making Canada's fires worse than ever.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It annoys me to absolutely no end to continue seeing liberals and other leftists just flat out misrepresent and lie about environmental issues in order to artificially crank up people's anxieties about the climate so that they might give more regulatory and taxation power to the government for things like carbon emissions or things as silly as plastic straws and bags.
00:00:21.720 And no stranger to lying about the environment is our federal environment minister, Stephen Gilbeau, who in a recent ex-post tried to go after the premier of Alberta and the Alberta environment minister because they're supposedly not taking climate change seriously.
00:00:35.760 Don't you know we have a record breaking fires in 2023?
00:00:39.140 I'll quickly read you that post and then I want to get to why this is a complete just, you know, fictionalization of history.
00:00:45.700 Now, Stephen Gilbeau posted,
00:01:15.700 And they have to use a lot of tricks in order to pretend that it's the worst ever.
00:01:20.760 If you if you skew the metrics on how we measure things, every year can have something that is the worst thing ever that year.
00:01:29.200 Anyways, but before I get into that, I just want to quickly plug the fact that I, Wyatt Claypool, I'm running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:01:37.000 So if you live in Calgary, check which riding you live in.
00:01:39.240 If you live in Calgary Signal Hill, buy a Conservative Party membership and vote for me number one on the ballot so that you can have someone who actually pushes back against nonsense like what Stephen Gilbeau is trying to push and make sure you don't end up with some red Tory who doesn't actually want to tackle serious issues seriously.
00:01:54.920 Anyways, getting to the data, I just want to bring up this Wikipedia chart.
00:01:58.660 Wikipedia is not always the best source, but for here, it will absolutely do.
00:02:02.240 And at the top of the chart, in terms of hectares burned, 2023 was definitely a really bad year for Canada.
00:02:08.160 There was 8 million hectares burned in the year 2023.
00:02:12.120 Definitely a bad year.
00:02:12.940 No one is going to argue that, yes, there's some arson, and I know people talk about arsons in the comment section.
00:02:18.940 I generally trust the fact that a lot of the commissions that have investigated the arson, it's been a pretty minor thing.
00:02:25.340 That in terms of the overall hectares burned, arson shouldn't, they should prosecute these people to the fullest extent of the law, but arson is not nearly a large portion of this burning.
00:02:36.220 But, and you're thinking, okay, 8 million hectares, that's crazy.
00:02:39.180 Must be climate change.
00:02:40.360 Climate change is increasing.
00:02:41.360 Well, in 2014, the Northwest Territories had 3,400,000 hectares burned.
00:02:48.500 And you could say, well, it's 2014, climate change must have still caused that.
00:02:52.020 Oh, fair enough.
00:02:53.240 Well, what about 1989 in Manitoba?
00:02:55.960 There was 3,280,000 hectares burned.
00:02:59.060 Was that climate change too?
00:03:00.680 And remember, this is 3,200,000 and 3,400,000 in tighter areas.
00:03:07.260 These are singular provinces and territories.
00:03:09.160 This 2023 fires, it takes into account 10 of the provinces and one of the territories, or I guarantee an American Northwest because they said 11 provinces.
00:03:19.320 I'm not sure if like maybe PEI didn't count and they're including Yukon in the Northwest Territories, but you get my point.
00:03:24.860 Well, if 1989 is still too much for you, well, there was the Great Fire in 1919 in Alberta and Saskatchewan, which burned 2 million hectares.
00:03:34.240 1919.
00:03:35.380 Was that climate change?
00:03:36.960 In 2020, California wildfires, 1,788,000.
00:03:41.200 Okay, that maybe could be climate change.
00:03:43.220 It's very close to the current year.
00:03:45.180 And then we have the 2011 Texas wildfires, 1,623,000 hectares burned.
00:03:50.380 Okay, well, maybe closer to the, you know, current year.
00:03:53.580 That could have been climate change.
00:03:54.700 Well, what about 1950?
00:03:55.480 That's 1,400,000 hectares burned in British Columbia and Alberta.
00:04:00.860 How about I go all the way down to 1910 in the Great Fire of 1910.
00:04:04.920 1,200,000 hectares burned in Idaho and Montana.
00:04:08.580 A area of land far smaller than the entire territory of Canada or the entire territory included in the 2023 fires.
00:04:16.260 Yes, fires can be bad, but the 2023 fires are not because climate change is making fires so much worse.
00:04:23.520 And this is like eight times more fires than we would have usually gotten.
00:04:27.960 No, maybe the fires were a little bit worse in each individual province.
00:04:32.400 Definitely.
00:04:33.220 But it's worse on aggregate.
00:04:35.500 Yes, if you add all the provinces together, you can get to a number like 8 million hectares and it looks super bad.
00:04:41.000 But I can find you other years where per capita, the burning was way more, but the media just didn't report it as like this is the biggest, this is the worst thing ever.
00:04:50.500 This is climate change making fires worse.
00:04:52.860 Or they might have done that back in like 2014, but not as much.
00:04:56.200 It's more so that there's just a climate change narrative out there that everything must be blamed on climate change.
00:05:02.000 If it's a hotter summer, it's climate change.
00:05:04.020 If it's colder winter, it's climate change.
00:05:05.780 These people need to be more consistent about what is climate change and what is not.
00:05:11.580 And I do not agree with the fact that we should be potentially ruining people's standards of living and quality of life in Canada in order to maybe, maybe contribute to making the earth one tenth of a degree less warm in the next 15 years on average.
00:05:27.380 I don't think that's worth it to make people's lives worse for a very vague and abstract goal that we don't even know if we can really contribute to.
00:05:35.780 Anyways, I want to move on to another one because this one I thought was a good example.
00:05:40.500 I'm trying to find it here.
00:05:42.740 1825, the 1825 Miramachi fire in New Brunswick burned 1,200,000 hectares only in New Brunswick.
00:05:53.020 In 1825, was it climate change or is it because deadwood builds up over time?
00:05:59.040 And one year you're just going to have a crazy bad fire because there's a lot of dry deadwood out there.
00:06:03.700 And in a lot of cases in just North America in general, when we've had really bad fires, it's because we've not allowed logging companies to operate freely.
00:06:14.120 It's because we have restricted massive areas of land where you're not allowed to do any logging and we do not do any forest management.
00:06:20.860 And when all the deadwood builds up over 30, 40 years, you're going to have a massive fire.
00:06:26.680 People don't, like 1825, that's probably not a human error.
00:06:29.960 That probably wasn't climate change.
00:06:31.240 That probably wasn't anything other than the fact that not many people lived in New Brunswick at the time.
00:06:35.660 So there was probably hundreds of years of deadwood built up.
00:06:39.480 So as soon as a spark hit the woods, it was going to burn down everything.
00:06:43.580 1.2 million hectares in a province's smallest New Brunswick is way bigger per capita than the entire 2023 wildfire season.
00:06:53.260 But where we need to build a narrative that it's worse than ever before by just adding,
00:06:58.600 by kind of puzzling together all the different provinces to make it up to 8 million hectares.
00:07:03.760 Definitely is really bad in Nova Scotia, really bad in certain parts of Alberta and Northwest Territories.
00:07:09.020 But if you take each of those provinces individually and you put it on that chart,
00:07:12.760 you'd say, oh, well, okay, this is actually pretty standard in terms of every once in a while,
00:07:17.800 every 30, 40 years, you have a really, really bad wildfire.
00:07:21.100 And we just had some really bad wildfires.
00:07:23.500 Doesn't mean we need more taxes.
00:07:25.200 Doesn't mean we need to ban plastic bags.
00:07:27.300 Doesn't mean we need people to drink their beverages through number two pencil tasting paper straw.
00:07:33.760 That's not the solution to this.
00:07:36.080 Also, if you actually care about reducing emissions, make it cheaper to do R&D so people can make engines
00:07:42.640 and people can make home heating systems and people can make power plants that burn less emissions.
00:07:48.400 Because guess what?
00:07:49.360 The great thing about capitalism is that people are greedy and they want each unit of fuel to go as far as humanly possible.
00:07:56.360 So that's the great thing about car manufacturers over time because consumers want to be able to burn as little fuel as possible while they drive
00:08:04.520 because that's a great benefit that I might only have to fill up every three weeks if this car is efficient enough.
00:08:12.680 Manufacturers, since like the 70s, trucks have fallen like 40% in terms of their like fuel or risen 40% in terms of their fuel efficiency
00:08:22.060 because people demanded trucks that went farther on a single tank of gas.
00:08:26.540 Anyways, a lot of this is really driven in my mind by media and like obviously it's leftist ideology but a lot of this is based also on the idea that I think a lot of media outlets like rip and read stories
00:08:40.540 in terms of all you need to do is say there's a lot of fires and now we have an expert on climate come on and talk about how this is the worst ever for 15 minutes.
00:08:49.180 It's a super easy way of filling time. That's, and I know it's a lot of government powered like expansion that the government uses climate change in order to dig into other areas of your life,
00:09:00.040 tax you more, tell you what you can and can't use to carry your food home, all this other garbage.
00:09:04.640 But in terms of the media, there are a lot of leftists in the media, a lot of environmental climate alarmists in the media, but it's also kind of a great business for the media.
00:09:13.880 One, it helps them get government grants in Canada by constantly talking about the climate in a way that helps the liberal agenda.
00:09:20.920 And two, it's such an easy way of filling time on the air because you just rip, you just, you just pull off the, you just read off how many hectares of burn,
00:09:28.780 show some footage about some, some like places burning down, interview a couple people on the ground saying, hey, your house just burned down.
00:09:35.500 That's like, that's really sad. Obviously it is, but like, and then they can just cut to an expert talking for 20 minutes about how we need to take the climate more seriously.
00:09:42.800 It's, it's the dumbest way of covering an issue. None of these outlets covering it as the worst fire season in history are ever actually going to look at the individual per capita burn areas in these provinces and realize,
00:09:56.480 ah, it's actually a pretty typical year. When I say typical, I mean that it's not out of the ordinary.
00:10:01.820 Every once in a while, a province has a really bad fire year and we just happen to have a few provinces who had a bad fire year at the same time.
00:10:07.920 There has been way worse per capita fire years in history. They just happen to not be in four provinces at the same time.
00:10:15.240 I think what we need is better forest management and we need to stop trying to blame emissions, carbon emissions for everything.
00:10:22.600 Because when you do that, you don't manage your forests properly and you end up, and you end up not prosecuting arsonists as seriously.
00:10:29.720 And you end up not trying to prosecute people for other sorts of human errors starting these fires.
00:10:34.500 Most fires are started by human error. And I think that we need to be far more on top of actually cracking down on the way that people misuse fire when they're camping or arsonists or all this other stuff.
00:10:45.760 It's not the vast majority of the issue, but it's definitely a big expansion of the issue or responsible for the growth of some wildfires.
00:10:54.560 Anyways, that should be it for me today. If you want to donate to my legal fund, the give, send, go links in the description below.
00:11:00.460 We have a billionaire suing us at the National Telegraph for a very stupid accusation of defamation.
00:11:05.740 We are right on the facts and we weren't even the first ones in the last few years to report the thing we did about the guy, but he thought we couldn't pay. 0.85
00:11:13.780 So he's trying to basically bully us into giving fake apologies so he can pretend everything ever said about him is wrong, even though it's all factually true.
00:11:21.780 And then other than that, I'm also, of course, again, running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:11:27.080 So if you live in that riding, buy a membership, get your family and friends who live in the riding to buy a membership.
00:11:31.400 Again, it's this riding right here minus the Green Brar and Bowness areas, because after the new boundary changes before the next election, those are no longer going to be part of the riding.
00:11:44.520 And I believe that we're going to do the nomination based on them not being in the riding, because it'd be weird to get nominated by people in Bowness and then Bowness isn't even in the area anymore.
00:11:54.340 Anyways, that should be it for me today. And I hope everyone has a great rest of their day.
00:11:58.720 Sorry for saying day twice in the same sentence. Oh, goodness.
00:12:01.400 Thank you.