What We Don’t Know About Wildfires Might Kill Us: Mark Gongloff

Imagine if the Internal Revenue Service informed you tomorrow that it would be garnishing your wages for the rest of your career but refused to tell you exactly how much would be coming out of your paycheck, instead just taking random amounts every two weeks. You wouldn’t stand for that. Yet somehow we’re letting wildfires do pretty much the same thing to the global economy.

The northeastern US was smothered all week in toxic smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away in Canada. The western US has been dealing with a version of such nightmares for years, though their frequency and intensity are ...