You might think 2026 is the worst year of fires given the huge clouds of smoke that blanketed the Midwest and Northeast earlier this month. But last year was actually worse in terms of the number of acres burned. Whether it will be the worst year on record or not, we need to come to grips with the fact that millions of acres of forest burn every year. Environmentalists should spend their political capital to manage government forests better rather than lobbying to restrict what kinds of cars or stoves we can use.
While forest fires are catastrophic in their own right, destroying millions of acres of forest and the plants and animals in them as well as human structures, they also release more carbon dioxide than many countries. Canada‘s wildfire season started slowly but has expanded to more than 750 fires and about 6.9 million acres burned (compared to an average of 6.1 million) by mid-July.
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The United States isn’t far behind. By mid-July, nearly 40,000 fires had burned more than 3.6 million acres nationwide this year, including half a million acres in just two weeks — almost 10,000 more fires and nearly a million more acres than the 10-year average for this point in the season.
Europe is also burning. More than 60,000 people near Madrid have had to evacuate from an 84,000-acre fire burning nearby. In France, wildfires rage so intensely as to affect the weather and create fire thunderstorms (pyrocumulonimbus). More than 200,000 people have been evacuated near Bordeaux. Europe is on pace to see roughly 2 million acres burned by the end of the year.
None of this is unprecedented.
In 2023, Canada saw 45.7 million acres burn. NASA-funded researchers calculated that Canada’s 2023 fires released about 640 million metric tons of carbon over five months — more than Russia’s or Japan’s entire annual fossil fuel emissions. The World Resources Institute put Canada’s total 2023 CO2 output at roughly 3 billion tons, nearly four times global aviation’s annual emissions. That’s a big carbon footprint!
And 2025 wasn’t much better. One Canadian climate analysis estimated 2025’s fires released more than 500 million tons of CO2. While Canadian forest fires can release more CO2 than most industrialized countries, forest fires in Europe amounted to roughly 48 million metric tons of CO2 in 2025 — or nearly 2% of Europe’s fossil fuel-derived emissions.
Environmental activists have pushed expensive green policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: electrification requirements, boycotting low-cost but high-emission fuels, mandating solar panels and expensive insulation, net-zero goals and carbon capture. But even a modest reduction in the extent of forest fires would do more for the atmosphere than any number of induction stoves or heat-pump mandates.
Many claim that climate change itself is driving these fires through worse droughts, higher winds, and hotter temperatures. But while drought and wind can make forests more flammable, the important question is how much fuel is sitting there waiting to burn. And that is a function of forest management, not the weather.
The proof is in the federal management track record. Federal land accounts for up to two-thirds of acreage burned nationally in recent years, despite representing a minority of total fires. Eighty-four percent of all prescribed burning nationally occurs on state and private land. According to the Congressional Budget Office, fires on federal land average nearly five times the size of those on nonfederal land and accounted for 62% of U.S. wildfire CO2 emissions from 2001 to 2021.
Fire seasons cannot be fully tamed by better management; but “we can’t control the weather” is no excuse to neglect the one variable land managers can control — fuel load. While federal land is often more remote and in more fire-prone environments, the pattern is unmistakable: Land that is actively thinned, grazed, logged, and burned on a planned basis rarely goes up in catastrophic conflagrations. Trimming even a fifth of the acreage burned over the last decade would reduce emissions more than any number of individual lifestyle changes could.
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Year after year, millions of citizens face air quality alerts when skies turn orange across the Midwest and Northeast. Most people would gladly trade a slightly less efficient vehicle in their driveway for a summer where smoke doesn’t blot out the sun. Why not sell off most government forests to private companies? Private owners will have both greater incentive and greater means to manage their timberland.
Environmentalists should focus on privatization, active forest management, and taking care of the physical environment rather than telling everyone else how to live.
Paul Mueller is a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.
