Europe's Wildfires Demand EU Sanctions on US, Hurst Argues
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- Wildfires in France's Gironde region have burned tens of thousands of hectares and displaced more than 200,000 people — France's largest peacetime evacuations — with flames closing to within kilometres of Bordeaux's million-plus residents.
- Spain is fighting what officials call the largest fire in its history, with blazes merging on Madrid's outskirts and burning triple the hectares of an average July.
- Canadian boreal forest fires across 270 million hectares sent smoke south into US cities; Hurst notes some MAGA politicians responded by proposing sanctions or tariffs on Canada rather than offering firefighting help.
- The United States has emitted more than one-fifth of all historical emissions and remains by far the highest per-capita major emitter alongside Saudi Arabia, while China is "fostering breathtaking growth in renewables" and now dominates the world's green industries, Hurst writes.
- The Trump administration is pursuing "drill, baby, drill" while dismantling green policies — a posture Hurst labels "ecological warfare" and frames as pitting the US against the rest of the world.
- Hurst proposes extending the EU's emissions trading system to all sectors, strengthening the carbon border tax, slapping tariffs on US finished goods with easy substitutes, and pooling the resulting revenue for decarbonisation and adaptation.
Why it matters: Europe's largest peacetime evacuations — 200,000 people displaced around Bordeaux — and Madrid's record-blaze are being recast not as natural disasters but as policy consequences, with the author urging Brussels to abandon its recent instinct to deregulate in order to stay competitive with the US. The proposed EU toolkit (ETS extension, hardened carbon border tax, targeted tariffs on US goods) would redirect billions toward adaptation while penalizing American exports, marking the sharpest economic clash yet between Europe and Trump's climate agenda.
