[speedybird]

> bad air quality over half a continent away

If you mean that Californian fires are smoking out states like Nebraska, that's something I haven't heard of. But if you mean smoking out Seattle, the example used above by DisjointedHunt, that's not right. All of the west coast burns; from California all the way to Alaska. The smoke in Seattle mostly comes from fires in Washington and British Columbia.

And it really is a "you live in the wrong place" problem because there isn't a solution to that other than humans completely re-engineering the ecology of the west coast, which simply is not going to happen for a myriad of reasons. So either you learn to cope with it (as I and many others have) or you move further East. The fires won't stop.