Canadian Wildfires Prove That Proper Forest Management Beats ‘Green’ Plans

Here is the opening segment of another of my recent pieces on wildfires that was published on the Daily Signal website on July 20.

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JASON HAYES July 20, 2026

It’s the same every fire season: Armchair experts and green campaigners confuse poor forest management with climate change, and then they use that confusion to justify their plans to remake the economy and control your energy use.

Just as they did in 2023, true believers are claiming that the Canadian wildfires that last week darkened the skies over the Eastern Seaboard are “climate change coming home to roost on your roof.” Their solution is to shut down reliable energy and force you to subsidize solar, wind, and electric vehicles again. “Do all this and more now,” they argue, “so that the smoke does not return.”

But blaming wildfires on climate change is a handy distraction from real solutions that could actually help manage the wildfire issue. Rather than admitting that their green plans exacerbate wildfire risks by stopping people from using and managing forested areas, environmental activists double down, pretending that if they can ban gasoline and natural gas, wildfires will simply disappear.

We all know that wildfires existed long before Henry Ford began rolling Flathead V8s off his assembly lines. More reasonable voices must correct the narrative by repeatedly explaining how wildfires have been around for as long as the world has had forests, and that, while warm air can make fires more intense, it does not cause them. For the uninitiated, ignition sources (like arsonists and lightning) do, when they’re united with air and a fuel source.

Faced with ongoing climate claims, more reasonable sources must each year further correct the record by showing that the warm conditions we are experiencing are what people used to call “summer.” In fact, these warm temperatures are not unprecedented; North America has seen hot, dry summers like this before.

Each year, we are informed that climate-driven wildfires are rapidly expanding in both size and number, and that the situation is worse than ever before. But forest managers continue to point out that we have seen much larger fires in the past, and that the most recent reports show that the area burned by wildfires in the Americas this year is still below the average for the past decade.

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You can access the full article on the Daily Signal website.

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