As crazy as it may sound, and as crazy as it would have sounded to me not so many years ago, I think the misery is the point.

The idea they are pushing is that wildfires are happening more often and are worse because of "climate change". The reality is that there are eco-nuts and random lunatics setting fires intentionally (usually mentioned in the aftermath but downplayed) and old systems of wildfire spotters have been shut down and governments just aren't trying to actually put them out anymore.

I'm sure that there are also other motivations... like wildfire-affected land being easier to strip of environmental/development protections and repurposed/sold/developed, the unburned forest areas adjacent to the burned-out areas suddenly being legally eligible for logging or something.

It's the same in Europe. When a normal non-apocalyptic heatwave hits, their media and authorities tell them it's the hottest heatwave ever and also "No, you cannot have air conditioning!" and also use bureaucratic-expert paperwork schemes invented a few decades ago to automatically collect death data and then inferring and link normal deaths to the heat somehow (similar to what happened with "covid death" tallies during the scamdemic) ... to drive people into a sort of near-hysteria.

It's all about creating the illusion of a grand, global external crisis to make people fearful and malleable and provide a pretext for huge societal changes that non-miserable, non-fearful people would reject.