Democrats clash with Trump on cause of devastating US wildfires
● West coast governors attack president’s stance on climate change
Democratic governor sand president Donald Trump clashed over the role of climate change ahead of the US leader’s visit to California yesterday.
California, Oregon and Washington state have seen historic wild fires that have burned faster and farther than ever before. Numerous studies in recent years have linked bigger wildfires in the US to global warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
The Democratic governors say the fires are a consequence of climate change, while the Trump administration has blamed poor forest manage - ment for the flames that have raced through the region and made the air in places like Portland, Seattle and San Francisco some of the worst in the world.
Scientists say the wildfires are all but inevitable, but state that the main drivers are plants and trees drying out due to climate change and more people living closer to areas that burn. Forest thinning and controlled burns have proven challenging to implement on the scale needed to combat those threats.
Yesterday, Trump was headed to Mcclellan Park, a former air base just outside Sacramento, California, White House spokesman Judd Deere said. California governor Gavin Newsom’s office said he would be meeting Trump.
Washington governor Jay Ins lee on Sunday called climate change“a blow torch over our states in the west”.
“It is maddening right now that when we have this cosmic challenge to our communities, with the entire west coast of the United States on fire, to have a president to deny that these are not just wildfires, these are climate fires,” Inslee said on Sunday on ABC’S This Week.
As Newsom toured a ghostlike landscape destroyed by flames on Friday, he called out
the “ideological BS” of those who deny the danger.
“The debate is over around climate change. Just come to the state of California, observe it with your own eyes,” he said.
He noted that justin the last month, California had its hottest August, with worldrecord-setting heat in Death Valley. It had 14,000 dry lightning strikes that set off hundreds of fires, some that combined into creating five of the ten largest fires in the state’s recorded history. And it had back-to-back heat waves.
Oregon governor Kate Brown said about 500,000 acres typically burn each year, but just in the past week, flames have swallowed over a million acres, pointing to longterm drought and recent wild weather swings in the state.
“This is truly the bellwether for climate change on the west coast,” she said on Sunday on net work CBS. “And this is a wake-up call for all of us that we have got to do everything in our power to tackle climate change.”
At a rally in Nevada, Trump blamed the way states have run the land, saying “it is about forest management”.
White House adviser Peter Navarro echoed that on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, saying that for many years in California, “particularly because of budget cutbacks, there was no inclination to manage our forests”.
Forest management, which includes tree thinning and brush clearing, is costly, labour-intensive work that is effective in reducing fuel for wildfires. Millions of dollars are spent on such reduction efforts ever y year in western states though many argue more needs to be done. The efforts can also be undercut when homeowners in rural areas don’t under take similar efforts on their own properties.
Los Angeles mayor Eric G arc et ti accused Trump of perpetuating a lie that only forest management can curtail the massive fires seen in recent years.
“Talk to a firefighter, if you think that climate change isn’t real,” the Democratic mayor told CNN.