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.
00:00:00.000It 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.
00:00:21.720And 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.
00:00:35.760Don't you know we have a record breaking fires in 2023?
00:00:39.140I'll quickly read you that post and then I want to get to why this is a complete just, you know, fictionalization of history.
00:01:15.700And they have to use a lot of tricks in order to pretend that it's the worst ever.
00:01:20.760If you if you skew the metrics on how we measure things, every year can have something that is the worst thing ever that year.
00:01:29.200Anyways, 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.
00:01:37.000So if you live in Calgary, check which riding you live in.
00:01:39.240If 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.
00:01:54.920Anyways, getting to the data, I just want to bring up this Wikipedia chart.
00:01:58.660Wikipedia is not always the best source, but for here, it will absolutely do.
00:02:02.240And at the top of the chart, in terms of hectares burned, 2023 was definitely a really bad year for Canada.
00:02:08.160There was 8 million hectares burned in the year 2023.
00:02:12.940No one is going to argue that, yes, there's some arson, and I know people talk about arsons in the comment section.
00:02:18.940I generally trust the fact that a lot of the commissions that have investigated the arson, it's been a pretty minor thing.
00:02:25.340That 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.
00:02:36.220But, and you're thinking, okay, 8 million hectares, that's crazy.
00:03:00.680And remember, this is 3,200,000 and 3,400,000 in tighter areas.
00:03:07.260These are singular provinces and territories.
00:03:09.160This 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.
00:03:19.320I'm not sure if like maybe PEI didn't count and they're including Yukon in the Northwest Territories, but you get my point.
00:03:24.860Well, 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.
00:04:35.500Yes, if you add all the provinces together, you can get to a number like 8 million hectares and it looks super bad.
00:04:41.000But 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.
00:04:50.500This is climate change making fires worse.
00:04:52.860Or they might have done that back in like 2014, but not as much.
00:04:56.200It's more so that there's just a climate change narrative out there that everything must be blamed on climate change.
00:05:02.000If it's a hotter summer, it's climate change.
00:05:05.780These people need to be more consistent about what is climate change and what is not.
00:05:11.580And 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.
00:05:27.380I 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.
00:05:35.780Anyways, I want to move on to another one because this one I thought was a good example.
00:05:42.7401825, the 1825 Miramachi fire in New Brunswick burned 1,200,000 hectares only in New Brunswick.
00:05:53.020In 1825, was it climate change or is it because deadwood builds up over time?
00:05:59.040And one year you're just going to have a crazy bad fire because there's a lot of dry deadwood out there.
00:06:03.700And 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.
00:06:14.120It'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.
00:06:20.860And when all the deadwood builds up over 30, 40 years, you're going to have a massive fire.
00:06:26.680People don't, like 1825, that's probably not a human error.
00:07:49.360The great thing about capitalism is that people are greedy and they want each unit of fuel to go as far as humanly possible.
00:07:56.360So 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
00:08:04.520because that's a great benefit that I might only have to fill up every three weeks if this car is efficient enough.
00:08:12.680Manufacturers, since like the 70s, trucks have fallen like 40% in terms of their like fuel or risen 40% in terms of their fuel efficiency
00:08:22.060because people demanded trucks that went farther on a single tank of gas.
00:08:26.540Anyways, 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
00:08:40.540in 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.
00:08:49.180It'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,
00:09:00.040tax you more, tell you what you can and can't use to carry your food home, all this other garbage.
00:09:04.640But 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.
00:09:13.880One, it helps them get government grants in Canada by constantly talking about the climate in a way that helps the liberal agenda.
00:09:20.920And 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,
00:09:28.780show some footage about some, some like places burning down, interview a couple people on the ground saying, hey, your house just burned down.
00:09:35.500That'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.
00:09:42.800It'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,
00:09:56.480ah, it's actually a pretty typical year. When I say typical, I mean that it's not out of the ordinary.
00:10:01.820Every 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.
00:10:07.920There has been way worse per capita fire years in history. They just happen to not be in four provinces at the same time.
00:10:15.240I think what we need is better forest management and we need to stop trying to blame emissions, carbon emissions for everything.
00:10:22.600Because when you do that, you don't manage your forests properly and you end up, and you end up not prosecuting arsonists as seriously.
00:10:29.720And you end up not trying to prosecute people for other sorts of human errors starting these fires.
00:10:34.500Most 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.
00:10:45.760It'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.
00:10:54.560Anyways, 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.
00:11:00.460We have a billionaire suing us at the National Telegraph for a very stupid accusation of defamation.
00:11:05.740We 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.
00:11:13.780So 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.
00:11:21.780And then other than that, I'm also, of course, again, running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:11:27.080So if you live in that riding, buy a membership, get your family and friends who live in the riding to buy a membership.
00:11:31.400Again, 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.
00:11:44.520And 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.
00:11:54.340Anyways, that should be it for me today. And I hope everyone has a great rest of their day.
00:11:58.720Sorry for saying day twice in the same sentence. Oh, goodness.