How Canadian wildfires are turning Climate Change into a “public health emergency”

How Canadian wildfires are turning Climate Change into a “public health emergency”

Kit Knightly

Canadian wildfires are all over the headlines, but this latest dose of climate-related fear-porn is just another stage in a propaganda campaign aiming to “pivot from covid to climate”.

Now, first things first, let’s discuss the fires themselves.

Forest fires, or wildfires, are a perfectly natural phenomenon and a vital part of the ecosystem, enabling fresh regrowth and putting nutrients into the soil.

They happened for hundreds of millions of years before humans existed, and will continue to happen long after we’ve gone the way of the Dodo.

Are these current fires especially bad? Or especially widespread?

We don’t know. We DO know, from our coverage of the 2019 Amazon “crisis”, that the media has previously relied on manipulated statistics to make wildfires seem worse than they were.

We also know there are efforts to associate yearly forest fires with alleged man-made climate change, even when it is freely admitted that other factors are likely to blame.

We also know this story wouldn’t be on the front pages if it didn’t serve some agenda. So what IS that agenda? What’s the story behind the story?

Well, part of it is the “air quality” narrative.

Do you remember the Gas Stoves palaver from a few months ago? The Blues wanted to ban them and the Reds didn’t, but the real story behind that story was a propaganda push to regulate indoor air quality: I wrote at the time:

I would suggest some new “smart” technology is coming that will monitor air quality and indoor C02 emissions. Like smart electricity and water meters, but for your air.

It turns out I was right…well, actually the tech already existed.

Amazon’s “Smart Air Monitor” is connected to Alexa and sets off alarms if your air quality is poor. Of course, you need Alexa active to use it. Which means you need to agree to Amazon harvesting your data and listening in on your conversations.

In a handy piece of timing, the EU has launched its own air quality monitoring app. And, in just the last few days, many publications are brazenly running ads and “reviews” for “smart air monitors” or HEPA filters.

But that’s likely as much to do with opportunism and corporate greed as anything else.

The real agenda here is climate change – not just the usual spread of panic, or even constructing false evidence of its existence – but rebranding it.

Transforming Climate Change from an environmental issue, into a public health issue.

This is not a new idea, it started almost as soon as Covid arrived and moved onto the front pages when we saw the first “climate change diagnosis” in late 2021. But it has clearly been gaining momentum for the past few months.

In March, the Council on Foreign Relations published an articleon “Managing the Health Risks of Climate Change”, which opens with:

Climate change has risen to the top of the global health agenda, threatening individuals and populations through multiple exposure pathways, across a full spectrum of physical and mental health conditions and social determinants of health.

In April the Guardian ran an opinion piece headlined:

Climate emergency is the biggest health crisis of our time – bigger than Covid

Then, in late May, the World Health Organization – having freshly declared the “emergency phase” of Covid over – made “an impassioned plea for urgent climate action”, with chairman Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus saying [emphasis added]:

The most pressing reasons for urgent climate action are the impacts not in the future, but right now, on health […] The climate crisis is a health crisis, fuelling outbreaks, contributing to higher rates of noncommunicable diseases, and threatening to overwhelm our health workforce and health infrastructure.”

Just last week, the Cairo Review of Global Affairs – a publication of the American University of Cairo – ran an interview with COP27 Youth Envoy Omnia El Omrani, headlined simply “Climate Change: A Global Health Emergency”.

The article uses the word “health” over fifty times, and underlines that we need to “keep health at the core of climate change negotiations”, claims that Climate Change policy is not “[a] response to political or economic incentives, but in anticipation of an evolving health crisis” and, perhaps most tellingly, draws a direct parallel with Covid:

we saw with COVID-19, which was a health emergency, countries were responding and were mobilizing resources and financing for it. Climate change needs to be the same. It is a health emergency.

Meanwhile, and apparently totally coincidentally, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) just published a report on “climate change’s impact on health, warning of dire consequences should the world not act to curb global warming”:

If climate change continues to warm the earth unabated, billions of people could experience “heat stress, infectious diseases, malnutrition, flooding, and mental health problems,”

The press are keen to underline that the fires were caused by climate change, that therefore the bad air is due to climate change, and that the bad air is a massive risk to public health.

People are being encouraged to “mask up” all over the Eastern United States, with New Yorkers being told to stay indoors. This is more than just further normalization of masks and lockdowns, it’s a psychological trick that causes people to associate “climate change” and “covid” in their minds.

As I wrote last year:

Somewhere, some not especially bright public relations executive has decided that the way to push the “pivot from Covid to climate” is to try and turn the long-predicted environmental disaster into a public health issue.

…and that’s what they are doing. Why? Because they need the right kind of fear.

It’s all about taking the vague background anxiety of climate change – which most people have simply started to ignore – and morphing it into the primal fear for the self that washed over the world during the “pandemic”.

The kind of panicked hysteria that saw people pepper-spraying strangers and taping up plastic sheeting all over the house.

That’s the kind of madness they will need in the general population if they’re going to push through the Great Green Reset.