Heat, not light

President Trump generates a lot of smoke when he talks about fire. While California’s summer wildfires burned, he perplexed people across the spectrum by accusing lefty environmentalists of withholding water from firefighters. Now he’s charging lefty environmentalists with protecting the trees that fuel the blazes — and threatening to cut federal funds if state officials don’t “get their act together and clean up their forests.”

Give the president credit for shifting to a slightly more believable story. Unlike his fantasy about water rationing for firefighters, Trump’s latest contribution contains embers of truth. But it’s still fundamentally false.

While exurban sprawl and a warming climate play important roles, forest mismanagement is an acknowledged factor in the growing risk of wildfire throughout the West. This is less about tree-hugging than, ironically, firefighting: By suppressing the natural cycle of forest fires, we’ve allowed vegetation to grow until fires are more catastrophic when they do happen. Addressing this requires clearing undergrowth by controlled burns and other means, not just chopping down the big trees that environmentalists and loggers fight over.

Nor do those interests fight as much as they used to in California, having come to more agreement that thinning can be good for forests, industry and residents. Hence the state’s Democratic government has been augmenting forest management funds even as the administration has been proposing cuts.

What’s especially absurd about Trump’s latest fulmination is that much of this is up to him: The federal government manages about 46 percent of California’s land and more than 60 percent of the acreage that burned in 2016. But such facts are irrelevant to a president who is only looking to fan partisan flames.