As a weather service in the United States combats mis/disinformation about wildfires in Canada, a Canadian economist is urging provincial and federal leaders to weigh the mounting cost of wildfire smoke and other public health impacts against any benefits, real or imagined, of fast-tracking new fossil fuel infrastructure.

New York’s Hudson Valley Weather service took to social media last week in a bid to counter some of the most common falsehoods about Canadian wildfires being circulated online.

“Want to take a moment to address some of the most frequent questions we have seen in the comment section over the last few days,” Alex Mara, Hudson Valley Weather service president and senior forecaster, wrote at the beginning of his post.

Mara eviscerated a number of myths about Canadian wildfires: that they are the result of poor forest management, that arson is the dominant cause of wildfires, and that Canada is deliberately seeking to destroy air quality in the United States.

He explained that most of the fires are burning in Canada’s boreal forest, a 5.2 million square kilometre swathe of territory virtually empty of humans. The very remoteness and inaccessibility of the fires makes “large-scale forest management and wildfire suppression fundamentally different from managing forests near populated areas in the U.S.”

American climate scientist Zeke Hausfather refuted the “poor forest management” narrative about Canada in his Climate Brink newsletter on Substack, pointing out that “the boreal is a fundamentally different beast” than the dry conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada. As for the claim that most wildfires are caused by arson, “lightning is overwhelmingly the dominant cause of the largest fires” in Canada’s forests, “Mara wrote. Intentional arson comes in very low on his list of supplementary causes of ignition, all rarely seen in remote locations.

Back in Canada, the Canadian Climate Institute released a new report detailing the public health costs of wildfire smoke. The analysis shows the emergence of a “new normal,” with elevated wildfire smoke exposure becoming “the new baseline—and part of summer reality” for most Canadians.

Long-term exposure to wildfire smoke is deadly, implicated in “an estimated 2,500 premature deaths annually in Canada,” the Institute adds.

Translated into economic losses, the impacts of wildfire smoke on public health averaged $19 billion per year between 2014 and 2025.

Report author Dave Sawyer, CCI’s principal economist, says Canadian political leaders must remember their core responsibility to ensure that economic benefits do not accrue at the expense of societal ones.

“The private sector, you know, doesn’t really care too much about human health, as that’s not part of their bottom line,” Sawyer told energy and climate journalist Markham Hislop.

“So governments need to balance out their policy,” he added, citing ongoing pipeline discussions in Canada as an example.

As with speed limits and food safety, so, too, with climate policy. “The government’s job is to reduce the costs on individuals, because there’s a societal benefit there,” Sawyer said.