The Invisible Arms Race Against Wildfire Smoke

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Emma Varvaloucas: Wildfires are raging, but where there’s smoke, there’s Good news. The most exciting story you’ll hear about helium this week, roads are getting a little less dangerous, and the cutest comeback from extinction yet. Welcome to the What Could Go Right progress report, where we dive into all the good news that you probably missed because it was buried under the barrage of bad news.

Hey, if you’re new here, I’m Emma Varvaloucas, and I’m the executive director of the Progress Network. Let’s get into it. There’s nothing quite like walking outside in the middle of summer, taking a deep breath, and realizing your lungs are suddenly acting as a catalytic converter for an entire forest fire three states over.

A thick, apocalyptic blanket of orange smoke settling over your city has its own special way of making things feel decidedly hopeless. And look, when you combine that haze with today’s genius political leadership on the issue, it’s entirely understandable why the worst possible timeline meme has become a permanent fixture of the internet.

I mean, it really does feel sometimes like we’ve hopped in the TARDIS and actually jumped timelines. And before you get your panties in a wad, yes, I know, that involves overriding the standard controls. But back to the real science of this timeline. Though there are always multiple factors that lead to any specific fire, the latest attribution science fingers climate change as very likely to have, quote, “increased the likelihood and severity of extreme fire weather,” the hot, dry, windy conditions that let fires ignite and spread.

That’s according to climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. With the world set to continue warming over the coming decades, a smoke-laden summer is no longer a freak anomaly. It is possibly the new seasonal weather pattern. It’s the new pumpkin spice latte, except instead of nutmeg, that’s a dash of ash you’re tasting.

And there lies the rub, because as terrifying as the wall of flames looks on the evening news, the real insidious danger isn’t the fire itself, it’s the smoke, which kills more people than the actual burn zones do. It’s very easy to look at that reality, cough your way through summer, and conclude that we are, without a doubt, trapped in the worst possible timeline, searching for our magical phone booth, hoping for a ride to any time else.

Except, on the smoke front in particular, it’s not quite that simple, at least in North America. While the environmental threat has undeniably worsened over the years, it’s not the only weight on the scale. On the other side, thankfully, the suite of protective tools that we have at our disposal has gotten exponentially better.

We are living through an invisible technological arms race against our own changing atmosphere. And to see it from a perspective that’s a bit more silver lining than the usual climate change fare, let’s take a quick, highly specific trip through time, with one condition: You’ve gotta take today’s smoke with you.

Imagine it’s 1942. Smoke is pouring into your neighborhood, and you wanna seal your house up tight. Well, bad news. You don’t even have the option to cover the gaps in your windows and doors with duct tape because the MacGyver of tapes hasn’t been invented yet. That silver gift to humanity didn’t come around until 1943, when an ingenious Illinois mother named Vesta Stout realized soldiers needed a heavy-duty fabric tape that allowed them to open ammunition boxes quickly while under fire.

Gee, thanks, Ma. Nor could you buy an in-home air purifier. The HEPA filter, the absolute gold standard of air filtration that catches those microscopic lung-destroying particles, was another wartime invention developed in the 1940s to protect scientists and others working on the Manhattan Project from radioactive particles.

The things that come out of war. Is it just me, or is even the silver lining of this smoke cloud a little dark? Anyway, let’s jump forward a couple decades to 1965. Congratulations, you can finally run to the hardware store and buy duct tape. The only catch is you’re now gonna bake yourself alive in your living room because it’s highly unlikely that you have air-conditioning yet.

Oh, and you think you’ll just escape to your car? Think again, because it probably doesn’t have AC either. But even if you did, it would be another full decade before car manufacturers popularized the recirculation button, that vital little switch you’d wanna press during a wildfire so your car stops actively vacuuming the outside smoke directly into your face.

But hey, you can finally buy a consumer air purifier. They first hit the market in 1963. The only problem? The cheapest option will set you back nearly $1,000 in today’s money. And while it did do a passable job of scrubbing dirt out of the air, it had a fun little quirk. It produced ozone gas as a byproduct.

1965 you is suddenly experiencing chest pain and violent coughing fits, forcing you to accept that you’ve traded one respiratory nightmare- For another. Okay, TARDIS. Let’s try 1989. Odds are much better that you can afford a non-ozone producing purifier, but it doesn’t include a pre-filter or an activated carbon one, both standard features in modern models, meaning your house still smells like a well-tended campfire.

And it operates just a touch more quietly than a vacuum cleaner. So super easy to watch MTV or have a conversation. Your 1991 self can’t step outside wearing a modern N95 mask to walk the dog because Taiwanese-American scientist Peter Tsai hadn’t developed the process for electrostatically charging the polypropylene material yet.

That electrostatic charge is the secret sauce. It’s what allows a mask to be dense enough to catch microscopic soot while still remaining breathable. He developed that breakthrough a year later in 1992. And while bandanas are great, there’s a reason they’re not the go-to face covering of modern-day firefighters.

Let’s try 2009. You can’t easily pull out your phone and Google instructions for DIY budget air purifiers on your way to Home Depot because smartphones were still transitioning from a tech nerd luxury to everyday life. And even if you could look it up, you won’t find the necessary materials on the shelves.

MERV 13 filters, the exact high-efficiency filters you can duct tape to the back of a standard box fan to build a cheap, highly effective air purifier, are only just beginning to hit residential hardware stores in a variety of sizes. Okay. 2011. It’s gotta be better here. What’s that? You’re gonna have to judge the air quality in your house pretty much entirely on vibes?

Yeah, affordable air quality sensors for your home weren’t a thing because engineers haven’t figured out how to miniaturize particulate sensors down to a size that would fit in a consumer device yet. Last try, 2018. That’s only eight years in the past. Yeah, that weather app you’re addicted to on your iPhone, you can’t use it to check the local air quality index before deciding whether to jog outside or not because Apple didn’t widely roll out that feature until 2020, and Canadians had to wait to get it until 2021.

When you stack all of that up against the scale of modern wildfires, it’s easy to dismiss it as a collection of neat trivia in the face of a disaster. Except, it isn’t trivia. It’s a relentless compounding of human ingenuity, even if it’s in the face of problems that humans have also created. As Eric Kennedy, an emergency management expert at York University in Toronto points out, simply getting effective air purifiers, reliable AC units, and high quality masks into people’s hands is what literally saves lives where the smoke is thickest.

And these tools are still accelerating. The latest air purifiers use built-in sensors and AI algorithms to automatically detect micro-pollutants, meaning your purifier may one day turn on and clear the air before your human nose even registers the smell of smoke. Living in a state of constant ambient dread is exhausting.

And yes, the truly painful twist of the psychological knife is the very real fear that we are the architects of our own demise. That fear is valid. It’s smokier out there than it used to be, at least when it comes to wildfires in North America. And there is so much more we could be doing regarding climate change and fire management.

But still, technological innovation deserves some more credit, because every time a new crisis comes our way, we don’t just sit back and take it. Filter by filter, sensor by sensor, mask by mask, we’re also turning out to be the architects of our own survival. Before we get into our shorter stories, here are some numbers that’ll make you smile.

32, the number of countries that have eliminated the eye disease trachoma. El Salvador is the latest to join the party, and if you’ve been following the podcast, it’s quite a big party. 59%, the decrease in US deaths from coronary artery disease since 1990. And five, the number of African monkey species discovered in the past 75 years, including an orange-lipped one newly found in the Congo.

And here are our quick hits for today. First up, I’m sure that wildfire story had you feeling all warm and fuzzy about the future of the Earth. But not to fear, because researchers have just identified the first Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks zone with An atmosphere. While so far we’ve only been able to identify the existence of helium, researchers believe that there may be more gases lower in the atmosphere that they haven’t been able to identify yet.

Now, for those wondering, the Goldilocks zone is the area around a star where the conditions are not too hot, not too cold for porridge, I mean water, specifically in its liquid form, to be found on the surface of a planet. And where there’s water, there’s alien life. Maybe We’ll get back to that. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s a bit more information about the discovery, which was made by a team of Harvard researchers.

The planet is called LHS 1140B, very poetic, and is only a quick 48 light years away. For reference, one light year is about 5.8 trillion miles. So not exactly a weekend trip. But according to one of the study’s co-authors, it’s, quote, “Perfectly reasonable to imagine that there might be life on that planet.”

Why is that? Well, in addition to its atmosphere, it is a rocky planet, and as previously mentioned, it’s the right temperature. Now, when I heard that they knew that there was an atmosphere around a planet that far away, I thought to myself, “How on earth do they know this?” And it turns out the answer is quite simple.

They used a telescope in Chile with a spectrograph and observed the planet as it passed in front of its star. There’s still a lot of research and innovation to be done before we pack our bags, but it’s the hottest lead on alien life that we have going. You know the old saying that you’re more likely to die in a car crash than win the lottery?

Well, it looks like the odds on that are changing. Why? Between 2011 and 2025, the global rate of road traffic deaths declined by 21%, which is particularly astounding when you consider the fact that humanity has exponentially multiplied the number of giant metal boxes hurtling down our roads over that exact same period.

If we’re handing out gold stars, here are the 10 countries that are the real overachievers. Belarus, Brunei, Dar es Salaam, Denmark, Japan, Lithuania, Norway, Russia, Trinidad and Tobago, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela were all able to reach a 50% reduction in deaths between 2010 and 2021. Now, the bad news is that US road deaths have been on an upward trajectory for the decade prior to 2024.

But if we wanna look on the bright side, and on this podcast we always do, more recent data seems to show that the number decreased from 2024 to 2025. And if you factor in miles traveled, 2025 saw the second lowest fatality rate in American recorded history. The lowest was in 2014. Now, before you get too excited, no, you still shouldn’t rush out and buy a stack of Powerball tickets.

The odds of dying on your commute might be dropping, but they aren’t dropping nearly enough to make the lottery a sound retirement strategy. And finally, if your algorithm is serving you one depressing environmental news story after another, like we did today, sorry about that, it’s easy to feel like humanity is a plague upon the earth.

But every now and then, humanity gets its act together and pulls off a genuine win. Enter the Australian numbat. I need to know who names that animal. If you aren’t familiar, imagine if a squirrel, a zebra, and an anteater walked into a genetic bar. It’s a small termite-eating marsupial that also happens to be the animal emblem of Western Australia, and in my opinion is devastatingly cute.

Unfortunately, in this case, cuteness wasn’t enough of an evolutionary defense mechanism, and the numbat, again unfortunately, found itself on the menu of feral cats and red foxes that were brought to Australia by European settlers. By 1979, the population of numbats, not European settlers, cratered, and only 300 of the little guys were left on the entire planet.

But conservationists politely refused to let them go extinct. Over the past 40 years, scientists and volunteers waged a tactical war. They built massive predator-proof sanctuaries, aggressively controlled invasive species, and established captive breeding programs to reintroduce numbats to the wild. And against all odds, it worked.

There are now about 3,000 numbats. Still low, but going in the right direction. I hope these stories remind you that there’s so much good in the world, so it’s important sometimes to shift our focus away from all of the bad. Send this episode to your friend who wasn’t able to snag a ticket to see The Odyssey in IMAX like me, and make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on your preferred podcast platform, and leave us a review.

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