Even as California burns, its climate efforts are blocked
For the past three years, countries and companies around the world have looked to California as a counterweight to the Trump administration’s aggressive dismantling of efforts to combat climate change.
But last week, as wildfires burned across the state — fires that scientists said have been made worse by a changing climate — and as at least five large carmakers sided with President Donald Trump’s plan to roll back California’s climate pollution standards, the state’s status as the vanguard of environmental policy seemed at the very least diminished.
The state’s leaders found themselves both witnessing firsthand the effects of climate change and hamstrung to take actions to fight it.
“We’re waging war against the most destructive fires in our state’s history, and Trump is conducting a full-on assault against the antidote,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said in an interview.
Trump has taken broad aim at efforts to fight global warming since his first days in office. He has mocked the established science of human-caused warming as a hoax, turned his pledge to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord into a campaign rallying cry, and directed the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back nearly every federal policy designed to curb the heat-trapping fossilfuel pollution that is the chief cause of global warming.
But Trump’s quest to tear down rules that restrict the fossil fuel industry has homed in on California as a particular target. That’s in part because of California’s unique role as a beacon of the nation’s climate change policies: Some signature federal climate change programs Trump seeks to dismantle originated in the state. And since Trump has vowed to pull the United States out of the international climate accord, California has actively sought to replicate and link its policies with other countries.
As Newsom sees it, there is a contradiction between Trump’s willingness to help fire victims and his refusal to address the underlying reasons for the increasing ferocity of the fires.
“Last night they approved seven additional emergency grants in record time,” Newsom said. “But what’s so insidious, and what’s so remarkable, is that he’s doing everything right to respond to these disasters and everything wrong to address what’s happening to cause them.”
Asked to respond, a White House spokesman, Judd Deere, said California’s leaders “support destructive liberal policies” and have not done enough to manage wildfire risks. “California should focus on its own affairs rather than trying to regulate 49 other states with its big-government policies.”
Experts said that the administration’s efforts to roll back climate policy in California will not lead directly to worse wildfires. But California is the fifth largest economy in the world, and what happens here can reverberate and affect national and international efforts to halt global warming.
The past 10 days have brought home to many Californians the brutal reality of a changing climate and cemented the feeling that politicians far away in Washington are not just ignoring it but actively working to undermine their efforts to address it.
“The seas are rising, diseases are spreading, fires are burning, hundreds of thousands of people are leaving their homes,” Jerry Brown, the former California governor, told a hearing in Washington earlier this week. “California is burning while the deniers fight the standards that can help us all.
“This is life-and-death stuff,” he said.
The most destructive, the deadliest and the largest wildfires in California history have all occurred in the past two years. The Camp fire, which incinerated the town of Paradise in the Sierra foothills, killed 86 people and destroyed nearly 19,000 homes. A year earlier, the Wine Country fires killed more than 40 people and destroyed more than
5,000 homes. The Mendocino Complex fire last year, which burned 460,000 acres, was the largest ever recorded in the state.
The trauma of these fires has kept Californians in a heightened state of vigilance, sniffing the air for smoke, scanning hilltops for any signs of ignition.
Amid widespread anxiety, there are some reasons to be hopeful so far this year. Although the state’s fire agency has recorded about 5,000 fires this year in the area it oversees — about the same as during the same period last year — far fewer acres have burned: less than 100,000 compared with about 600,000 at this point last year.
But the number of people affected this year swelled into the millions because of the large-scale power outages that Pacific Gas and Electric, the state’s largest utility, carried out to prevent downed lines and other equipment from sparking fires.
Particularly frustrating is a realization for many California residents that both fires and the blackouts will return.
The chief executive of Pacific Gas & Electric, William Johnson, said recently that the deliberate blackouts would be necessary for the next decade. But some experts believe they could become a fixture of life in California for much longer.
California has contended for over a century with an annual wildfire season. But scientists have found that climate change – including longer, hotter and drier fire seasons, diminishing snowpack and lengthening droughts – have already measurably worsened the size and scale of fires in the western United States. Hotter temperatures means drier vegetation, making it more likely to burn.