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Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

History buffs will know the adage well, but for those with a more contemporary mindset, the phrase stems from an ancient story about a leader who supposedly turned a blind eye while a disaster was consuming the world around him.

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It is a morality lesson about complacency and wilful obliviousness, encapsulated neatly in just five words.

I use the expression because it seems at least somewhat apropos for the new United Conservative government, which began its work Wednesday to dismantle the previous government’s climate change initiatives at the same moment Alberta is ablaze with a series of out-of-control wildfires.

The irony of that timing is hard to miss, though deniers and skeptics who regularly pollute my email will undoubtedly cry foul at drawing such a connection.

They’re right in one sense — it is difficult if not impossible to establish a direct causal relationship between these particular wildfires and human-induced climate change. Alberta has always had forest fires and always will.