The Daily - There’s No Escaping Wildfire Smoke

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

Smoke from wildfires in Canada has created a crisis in the American Northeast and beyond, with air pollution in New York reaching its worst level in modern history.David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist for The Times, explains why this happened, and why there is so little we can do to keep it from happening again.Guest: David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: New York City experienced its worst air quality on record. Here’s how to stay safe as the smoke spreads.David Wallace-Well’s column on the smoke that shrouded New York City.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

This is Daily Producer Alex Stern. I'm in the Brewerytown neighborhood of Philadelphia. This is Sydney Helper. I'm in Washington, D.C. This is Claire Tennisgetter out in Brooklyn. And this is the third day of air quality warnings in New York City. So I'm going to talk to people who are outside today. Can I ask you about the air? Yeah. First I noticed it when I was looking up at the sun. It was pretty much orange and stuff like that.

Then I smelled like it was a burning smell. Last time I smelled something like that was when I was in Afghanistan. So it's just from Armando. Yeah. I was smelling some plastics and some other weird toxins, and I don't know. Something was in that air that wasn't agreeing with my nose. I got a big nose as you can see. I can smell anything and everything. But I had to run back in the house. That scared me. I had to get a mask and I had to help and everything.

Yeah? Yeah. Why are you wearing the mask? Because there's Jackie in. I've been sneezing non-stop. I keep sneezing a mask. Because, because there's Jackie. I've been sneezing non-stop. Yeah, I like keep sneezing a lot. It does feel different. I do have a headache. Feel off a little bit. Yeah. I just want to go home. I can feel it in my eyes. I can feel it in my throat. I feel it. It's inside my house. We've had the windows closed, but it's inside my house.

And it's sort of like, is this what our future is going to be like? From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Over the past few days, wildfires in Canada have created a crisis in the American Northeast, where air pollution in New York reached its worst level in modern history. Today, climate columnist David Wallace-Wells explains why it happened, why it's likely to keep happening, and why there's so little we can do to stop it. It's Friday, June 9th. David, welcome to the show.

Thanks. Great to be here. So David, I'm in Washington, D.C., and I walked my dog this morning. And the air had this very bitter burning smell. Even my dog was noticing it. She kept kind of looking back up at me like, are we still walking? What is this? Now it's lunchtime. I just looked at my phone and scrolled for the AQI measure, which now, of course, we all know what that means, air quality index.

And the reading is 175, which my phone tells me is pretty unhealthy. You're in New York. What did it look like out of your window this morning? Things are gray. They're not orange. Yesterday, they were orange. The AQI is, I think, about the same level as you're seeing in D.C. now, which is in the high 100s. But yesterday, it peaked well above 400. Over 400? Yeah. And if you look at both the number of people being exposed and the level of pollution that they're being exposed to, this is the worst event in recorded recent history, going back at least several decades in the U.S. Wow.

And this is not just unprecedented for a place like New York, which has felt very distant from the threat of wildfire in recent years, but it's really close to unprecedented globally. This is not what the most polluted places in the world are dealing with on a regular basis. It is a dramatic, historic spike, and people have become principally preoccupied with it in a way that has reminded a lot of people I know of the first days of COVID in 2020. Okay, so can you just explain simply, why is there so much smoke and where's it coming from? The basic story is that Canada is on fire. And when I say that, it's not much of an exaggeration.

There are out-of-control fires, hundreds of them, all the way from the west coast of Canada, stretching all the way to the east. This is really unusual for this time of year. The last time I checked, the country as a whole had registered 14 times as much burning this year as has been typical in the last decade for Canada. 14 times. And it's compared to the last decade, which was itself an off-the-charts period for Canadian wildfire because as is happening almost everywhere in the world,

fires are getting more intense, more dramatic, in part because of the influence of climate change. And so we're saying even from that totally bonkers baseline of the last decade, this year we are 14 times higher. Now that's not to say that by the end of the year, we're going to end up with a fire season that's been 14 times as bad in Canada as in previous years. It could plateau. It could slow down. But for this time of year, from May into June, we are dealing with something that is completely unprecedented. And the Canadian fire services are totally overwhelmed. They're calling in international support and they're openly saying that something like the majority of the fires

that are burning right now are out of control and indeed beyond their capacity to control. And what does this mean about how long this is going to stick around? I mean, this is horrible air. Well, the fires themselves are going to be burning for quite a while, probably months. What determines where the smoke goes, though, are wind patterns that are a little bit more fickle. In this case, we have wind that's pushing the smoke directly south, basically right into the path of New York City. That's a bit of an unusual wind pattern. Probably it will change quickly if

it hasn't already. But we can't really see all that far into the future, which means we don't know precisely where the smoke will be carried, say, a week or two weeks from now. In the medium term, I don't expect that New York is going to return entirely to clear skies like we had a few weeks ago anytime soon. There's probably going to be some ongoing impact for not just New Yorkers, but people really all around the eastern U.S. So, David, presumably they've had wildfires in the past in Canada, and the smoke hasn't turned our sky orange.

Why now? Well, the world is becoming more fire-prone because of climate change, which is warming things, baking things, drying things out, and making them more like ready tinder. And one thing that means is that the character of the fires themselves are changing once they burn. They're able to grow faster and larger. They burn at higher temperatures. I had some folks from Cal Fire a couple of years ago tell me they now burn so hot that they can turn the silica in the soil into glass.

They can also burn a lot of other material, pieces of metal, pieces of plastic, pieces of rubber. And in part, as a result of the intensity of these fires and the extra heat, you end up drawing a lot more of the burned material higher up into the atmosphere. It's an effect of just how hot and how intense the fires are, which allows winds to carry it farther afield. And we know that's going to be happening more and more often, in part because we're actually seeing that already play out. Just a few years ago, the Australia bushfires of 2019-2020, which are often called the Black Summer fires in Australia,

was an absolutely off-the-charts wildfire season. Millions of acres burned. Billions of animals died. They had to rescue Australians off the beach. You know, people were floating in the water, hanging off piers to escape the fire that was right on the shore, waiting for a boat or a helicopter to pick them up. And even in Sydney, the smoke was so thick that ferries in the harbor had to cancel their service because they couldn't navigate the harbor. They couldn't see. But the global drift of the Australian smoke is really remarkable to contemplate.

It doesn't just blanket Australia in toxic smoke. That smoke travels eastward with the wind. And when it gets to New Zealand, it's still so thick that Auckland is dealing with the same visual effects and air quality issues that New York has been dealing with the last few days. It is also totally eerie and amber. But the smoke didn't stop there either. It kept going. It went out across the Pacific and traveled all the way across the enormous South Pacific, all the way to South America. And it didn't stop there. It traveled across the continent. And it didn't stop there. It traveled across the continent. And it didn't stop there.

It ended up going across the Atlantic as well. We're seeing smoke like this, smoke events like these, especially from these truly off-the-charts fires, traveling farther and farther and reaching into more and more places, more and more, ultimately, more and more lungs. So, David, looking at all of this together, we're seeing hotter fires with smoke that travels farther. And this means that there's bad air in more and more places, including in places that we haven't seen before.

There's a pattern here, it looks like. Is this the new normal? Well, I don't think that we're going to be seeing many days like we saw in New York this week all that frequently going forward. They're so off the charts. Wednesday's air quality in New York City was by far the worst that had ever been recorded. And I don't think we're going to be living on that baseline going forward. I don't think there are going to be many days when New Yorkers wake up with air quality above 400, but we are moving in that direction. Things are not going to be as safe and stable when it comes to air quality as we've come to assume. That's especially true in the West when for months out of the year, you can have a bad fire event and a bad wind day

and deal with some really horrific impacts already. But it's even true in places that got used to thinking of themselves as living outside of this particular threat, like New York City and Boston, Philadelphia. These are places that, you know, looked at the West over the last couple of years. And, you know, we thought, well, thank God we're not there. Thank God we don't have to deal with that. You know, I often thought, how could you live in California given these threats? I know people who moved from California to the East Coast to escape the fires and to escape the smoke. And now— It's following them.

It's following them. So, you know, not an AQI of 400, as the new normal, you're saying, but, you know, still much less good air. And we'll be dealing with that more and more. And the more that we know about that impact, the worse it looks. You know, it's emerging research. It's developing. The health impacts of pollution

generally is a young science. The health impacts of wildfire pollution in particular is an even younger science. But every new paper revises our estimate in the same direction, which is to say it's worse than we thought and affecting more things about human health and flourishing than we expected.

And so not only are more people dealing with more smoke, but our understanding of what that means for those people is darkening too. We'll be right back. So, David, given that we should expect to see smoke from wildfires continuing to travel great distances, causing bad air and orange skies far from the places that wildfires are actually burning. What's the impact on people? How is this going to affect health? Well, I think the best way of thinking about that is to back up a little from wildfire smoke in particular, because the truth is that the science of those impacts is relatively limited, in particular, because the truth is that the science of those impacts is relatively limited,

in part because people haven't been focused on it very long. And most of what has been revealed in the science that does study wildfire smoke suggests that it's quite comparable to other kinds of air pollution that are grouped together in this category called PM2.5, which has to do with the size of the particular microns in the air. I see. So it's the size of those things that... That you're actually breathing in. Got it. And we actually know quite a lot about what particulate matter does to our health and can essentially assume that almost anything that we know is caused by it will probably also be caused by wildfire smoke.

What that says is really quite grim. 10 million people are dying a year from air pollution globally. And the estimates vary from source to source, but it's in that ballpark. And even the really low ball estimates are still in the millions. And that number is growing over time, not because the damage is getting worse, but because the more we look, the more impact we see. But like, how do people die? I mean, how does actually this kind of small, particulate matter, as we're all going to have to get used to saying the lingo, right? How does it affect our bodies? Well, unfortunately, in almost every way imaginable. I mean, there are the intuitive

ways. You can imagine why breathing really dirty air might exacerbate your asthma condition or even trigger an asthma attack. You can imagine how it could worsen other respiratory diseases, you know, COPD, for instance. But the pollution can also affect you in a lot of other less intuitive ways, some of which we only understand partially, but we do know that the pollution can get into the bloodstream. It can cross the blood-brain barrier. And almost every aspect of human health that you can imagine is therefore affected by it because this becomes a circulating, pervasive problem for the body. So that means it's not just respiratory diseases. It's also coronary diseases.

It raises rates of cancers of all kinds. It has all kinds of unfortunate and distressing effects on the brain. So it raises rates of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and dementia. And it changes your risks for schizophrenia and ADHD and autism, depression, suicide. Admissions to mental hospitals go up when there's bad air out. Additionally, it affects your cognitive performance. It changes rates of premature birth and low birth weight. And it even affects the health of babies in the womb and in the placenta. And there have been studies showing that you can find particulate matter on the inside of placentas extracted from mothers who have just given birth.

And in fact, when you look from a different perspective, statistically, you can see the impact on the health and wellbeing and indeed other measures of flourishing of those children across their lifespan. So you can see the impact, for instance, on their lifetime earnings. And those effects are not gargantuan. It's not like it means that you're going to go from being a billionaire to being impoverished because, you know, your mother walked through one cloud of smoke when she was giving birth to you. But at the population level, you see some really notable and statistically strong correlations that are horrifying, really, especially when you think you may be living in a place that's dealing with more wildfire smoke in the decades to come. Right. I mean, you're saying, you know, clearly the impact of air pollution is bad, but the level of exposure does really matter when we're talking about this, right? Like being exposed to this bad air for a

few days, like we were in New York, is very different than, you know, being exposed for extended periods of time. Yeah, the duration matters a lot. The intensity matters a lot. The truth is we don't know precisely how exposure to the air of New York over the last few days is going to compare to, say, someone who spent two years in Delhi breathing in its famously toxic air. But the chances are that the impact will be significant, especially at the population level. And in some pieces I've written in the past, I've called this the sort of law of small numbers in a big world, which is to say, if there's a public health impact that raises a population's risk of this or that disease by two or 3%, and you're dealing with a population of 330 million people, you know, that can be quite large. We learned that through COVID.

These are not especially high death rates. And yet when you see it play out over the course of the country, it's an absolutely brutal toll. And, you know, the effect of fire and wildfire smoke is quite similar. There was a big study published in The Lancet last year that found that living within 30 miles of just a single fire, so within 30 miles of one fire, meant that over the course of 20 years, your risk of a couple of different kinds of cancer were elevated by 5 to 10 percent. And that was like one fire? And that was just absolutely conclusive? Like, that seems kind of shocking. Well, like a lot of these studies, you don't want to take any one fire and that was just absolutely conclusive? Like, that seems kind of shocking. Well, like a lot of these studies, you don't want to take any one finding and say,

this is absolutely true. The results are often correlative rather than causal. What you want to do is aggregate the whole body of literature and say, there's probably some error here. Some things are overstating things. Some things are understating the findings. But when you look at the whole mass of the literature, you see, wow, air pollution is having an absolutely catastrophic impact on global health. It's larger now than the impact of smoking, which was the main story of the last half century in global health.

And David, how much is smoke from fires affecting the overall air pollution picture? Well, the question is different in different parts of the world. In the U.S., we have relatively clean air. We've cleaned up quite a lot of the air pollution that we used to see regularly because of fossil fuel burning, you know, cars with worse emission standards or, you know, no emission standards for a very long time. And so our air is a lot cleaner than it used to be. It's enviably clear by global standards. Nevertheless, we still see about 350,000 Americans dying every year from air pollution. But wildfire is playing a larger and larger role. So we have this longer term trend in which we're drawing down fossil fuel use. We're especially giving up on coal. That's true globally, but it's

especially true in the U.S. And for all these reasons, we're breathing cleaner air and suffering less as a result. But wildfires are, at the same time, getting worse, producing more particulate pollution, which is spreading throughout the country and, at the very least, clouding that picture and, to some degree, reversing the gains of the Clean Air Act. Depending on where you are in the country, we may have lost as much as 20% or 30% of those gains already.

Most scientists don't believe we'll be getting anywhere to a total reversal of those gains anytime soon. But it does mean that if you based your expectations for air cleanliness on our experience of the last couple of decades, probably that's going to be getting worse from fire. So David, this conversation is pretty depressing, I'll be honest. Can you give me any hope about the future, about how we solve this problem of wildfires? Well, you can take action both upstream and downstream. So starting with the fires themselves, one of the things that's driving this new fire era is climate change and global warming. And we can limit the effect there by limiting our use of fossil fuels,

getting them to zero pretty quickly, and making sure that the planet's temperature rises only a little bit more and not a lot more. That's really significant. It's a huge challenge, as we all know, thinking about climate change in other contexts, but it is meaningful. We can also take action at the level of the forests themselves, which is a transformation that's already underway,

in part because more and more people are alarmed at the size and intensity and health threat posed by these out-of-control, totally monumental wildfires. Right. And that's to say undoing the damage that was done by about a half century or more of fire phobic forest management. So for many decades, we basically responded to any fire by trying to put it out immediately because we thought all fire was bad. And that's contrary to the way that the landscape really operates. You know, the natural landscape of any forest is for there to be some significant fire almost all the time. But because we spent so long suppressing fire we now

have all this additional fuel and we are already taking a different approach which means that we're trying to do more of what are called controlled burns where we sort of make sure that a certain fire once set will only burn a certain amount of land and then light it and let it burn ourselves. So that in a future event, when there's a future non-human accidental or even human but still accidental ignition, the fire won't spread all that much because a huge chunk of this land will have already burned. There are some complications to this program. It doesn't mean that no air pollution is produced because fire is fire. But if the fires are burning at lower temperatures through certain kinds of brush, as opposed to big trees, you can reduce the amount of exposure,

especially if you do it at the right time when there's not much wind, you can sort of make sure that certain local populations are not exposed. And that means that, you know, presumably as the climate continues to warm over the next couple of decades, we could also be, through those efforts,

reducing the amount of fuel it finds to burn. But David, we in the U.S. can't exactly do more to change Canada, right? I mean, that's a more complicated question. Yeah, it's one of the sort of unfortunate, mind-bending features of this new science is the way in which the effects of these fires cross not just local boundaries, but national boundaries, even continental boundaries, it is no longer the case that Cal Fire is just managing Californians' smoke exposure. They're also managing the smoke exposure of many states across the West, and indeed all the way to the other side of the country. And in the instance of this event, we're not even dealing with a cross-country exposure. We're dealing with a international exposure. And, you know, it happens that Canada has a close ally of ours, and there is a way of coordinating some action

there. But that's not true for every country in the world. And the farther that these effects travel from their source point, the harder it will be for those affected to take action to control what's actually damaging and impacting their lives. So because this problem has become so dispersed, smoke travels across international borders, right? As you're saying, it's way more complicated to solve. Not unlike how climate change has been hard to solve because, you know, you have to get the whole world on board and that's very hard to do. Yeah, it wouldn't exactly be easy to solve the problem of wildfire within national borders, but it gets a bit harder internationally. And I think as a result, it's a little more dispiriting than thinking that it's something that we might be

able to commandeer some political response to in a more direct way. So David, given that this is not a problem that's easy to solve, and it's not going away anytime soon, I want to focus on what we can do right now, like practically what we can actually accomplish. Like, what are you going to do to protect yourself with all this smoke in the air? Well, you know, I think everybody probably needs to calibrate their own sense of risk here for themselves. I would say as a broad principle,

just keep in mind that, you know, there is a threat out there, but it is not resolvable necessarily at the individual level where you know that if you take one action or another, it will have this very concrete and predictable impact on your particular health in the next week or the next month or even the next year. The last couple of days in New York may well be the worst air quality readings of any city

in the world anytime this year. And so if you put yourself in a position where you're asking questions like, you know, should I wear a mask outside? Should I go outside? Should I exercise? How much I wear a mask outside? Should I go outside? Should I exercise? How much time should I spend outside? Should I open my window? Should I close my window?

You know, one way of thinking about that is like, if you were taking a trip to what you knew would be the most polluted place in the entire world this year, would you feel comfortable doing those things? Right. You know, my own experience over the last couple of days is I've spent some time outside. I've mostly been inside.

I've mostly, when I've been outside, worn a mask, but I've also stepped outside without a mask. My windows have been shut. I have air purifiers in my house. And I've tried to get my five-year-old and my two-year-old daughter to wear a mask when they were outside, but I did not succeed. And don't feel like I'm, you know, throwing them under a bus by bringing them to school without a mask on for a 15-minute walk. I wish I had persuaded them, but I wasn't able to. So you want to try to limit all the exposure that you can.

And to the extent that you can afford it, run some air purifiers. To the extent that you can't, just stay away from the outdoors and try to block off the openings to where you are. And in a way, the pandemic prepared us for some of this, right? I mean, we still all have masks tucked up somewhere in a back closet. I got mine out this morning.

Yeah, I mean, it took a year or so into the pandemic for people to know what a KN95 was as opposed to just a mask. And now everybody knows exactly what it is. Right. And now everybody knows exactly what it is. We did see the CDC yesterday saying that, you know, masks are not a perfect protection against wildfire smoke, which is worth keeping in mind. But, you know, as with many of these things,

it's not about getting yourself from 100% risk to zero risk. It's just about limiting your risk. And it's the same with the choices you make about the way you organize your day. You know, probably most people are not going to be comfortable completely suspending all human activity in the event of smoke. But, you know, you might make some choices that are different in an environment where there's a lot of pollution outside versus one where there's not. And among other things that maybe, you know, kids aren't going outside to recess. And maybe when they come home, they don't play around outside in the playground either. They go upstairs instead.

In general, you know, the less exposure, the better. And the choices that you make should be your own responsibility. the less exposure, the better. And the choices that you make should be your own responsibility. Where you land on that spectrum is, as I say, more a matter of risk tolerance than hard science. But we're probably going to be learning a lot more about our risk tolerance for smoke and air pollution than we knew two or three years ago. David, thank you. Thank you. David, thank you.

Thank you. Just want to give a brief update on what's happening with the smog and the smoke. In New York City on Thursday, Mayor Eric Adams said he expected a gradual improvement of air quality. It would be great to see the sun again, but the wind is going to determine that. But he also said a sea breeze in the afternoon could push the smoke back over the city. Stay indoors, stay safe, and mask up if you are outside. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. In a surprise ruling, the Supreme Court found that Alabama's Republican-controlled legislature had violated the Voting Rights Act by drawing a congressional map

in which Black voters make up the majority of just a single district. The 5-4 decision broke from the court's recent pattern of weakening the Voting Rights Act, a civil rights-era law that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. As a result of the ruling, Alabama must now draw a second congressional district dominated by Black voters, who make up more than a quarter of Alabama's voters overall. The ruling could complicate Republicans' years-long effort to redraw congressional voting maps across the country in ways that favor members of their own party and frequently weaken the voting power of minority communities.

And... This is Andrew Kramer reporting for The New York Times. I'm standing in a giant flood zone because one of Ukraine's largest dams was blown up. In southern Ukraine, rescue workers in boats kept up a frantic effort to save thousands of people in the vast flood zone that was created when a dam was blown up earlier this week. I'm looking now at four-story buildings with water that comes up to about the middle of the first floor. My colleague Andrew Kramer talked to residents who saw cars, animals, and even houses floating in the floodwater.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky visited the stricken region on Thursday. The area came under Russian shelling a short time later. Today's episode was produced by Will Reed, Luke Vander Ploeg, and Claire Tennis-Sketter. It was edited by Paige Cowett, Michael Benoit, and Devin Taylor, with help from Lexi Diao. Contains original music by Marian Lozado and was engineered by Corey Schreppel.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Judson Jones. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you on Monday.