Canadian wildfires have released 1 billion tons of CO2 this year—equivalent to annual airline emissions

More than 5,000 wildfires have burned across Canada so far this year, and wildfire season isn’t even over yet.

This year, more than 5,100 fires have burned across Canada. They’ve sent smoke plumes around the world, blanketing parts of the East Coast in an eerie haze and even drifting over to Europe. They’ve burned 13 million hectares of land, or about 32 million acres, a size equivalent to the country of Greece. And they’ve already released one billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the air, according to one estimate—about the same as the global airline industry emits in a year, or a year’s worth of driving from more than 222 million gas-powered cars.

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