Climate denial in a burning California
Trump visits, dismisses plea to heed scientists
SACRAMENTO — President Trump resisted calls to confront the reality of climate change during a brief visit to California on Monday — a position that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, signaled he may focus on as wildfires burn across the West.
During a twohour stop at an airfield near Sacramento, Trump met with state officials for a briefing on the fires. Gov. Gavin Newsom took the lead, urging the president to consider how “the plumbing of the world” has changed, intensifying hot and dry conditions that have pushed California into a record wildfire season.
Trump cast doubt on that analysis — and cli
mate science as a whole — instead renewing his concerns that the state has not done enough to thin out trees and other vegetation fueling devastating fires.
“We’ll talk about forest management. I’ve been talking about it for a long time,” Trump told reporters at McClellan Park, a decommissioned Air Force base outside Sacramento that is now a hub for state firefighting operations. “They have to do that. You go to other countries and they don’t have this problem.”
Biden slammed Trump during a speech Monday in Delaware as a “climate denier” and a “climate arsonist” who was failing his most basic duty to keep Americans safe.
“If he gets a second term, these hellish events will continue to become more common, more devastating and more deadly,” Biden said.
Newsom has praised the president for providing disaster aid to California, but he has become increasingly critical of Trump’s record on climate change, which Newsom blames for worsening the severity of wildfires.
The governor tried to drive home that point during their meeting, telling Trump that “we’ve known each other too long and, as you suggest, the working relationship I value.”
“Something’s happened to the plumbing of the world, and we come from a perspective, humbly, where we submit the science is in ... that climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this,” Newsom said. “Please respect, and I know you do, the difference of opinion out here as it relates to this fundamental issue on the issue of climate change.” Trump replied, “Absolutely.” But when Wade Crowfoot, California’s natural resources secretary, later urged Trump not to “ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management,” Trump said, “OK. It’ll start getting cooler.
You just watch.”
“I wish science agreed with you,” Crowfoot responded.
“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump said.
Trump asked during the briefing how many fires are burning at the moment and whether the heat has ever been this bad in the state. Newsom, who wore a mask, and Trump, who did not, sat at a horseshoe table with Crowfoot and several other officials.
“I think we’re totally in sync,” Trump said as reporters were led from the room, according to a pool report.
Later Monday afternoon, while visiting fire evacuees on the grounds of the Camelot Equestrian Park in Oroville, Newsom said the conversation presented an opportunity to remind Trump that 57% of forested land in the state is under federal jurisdiction, and that forest management is a collaboration between federal and state governments.
“I wanted the President to know that we have established an engagement we would like to build on,” Newsom said. “And yes, frankly, to state in a way that wasn’t trying to take a cheap shot, wasn’t trying to score political points, but to make the argument, we believe in climate change out here. We don’t believe it just because science says it; we observe it, we experience it, and that was an opportunity to remind him of a point he’s very familiar with, but to do so in an honest and forthright way.”
At the Democratic National Convention last month, Newsom touted the state’s dozens of environmental lawsuits against the Trump administration. During a news conference in Oroville (Butte County) on Friday, he encouraged people to reject politicians who are “still in denial” about the reality of climate change.
Neither he nor any other official was on hand to greet Trump as the president disembarked from Air Force One. But scores of Trump’s supporters and protesters lined the roads outside the airfield, and confrontations turned tense as the day wore on. NBC Bay Area filmed an incident in which a man appeared to be injured when he climbed onto a California Highway Patrol car and fell from it as it sped away.
Trump, who once called climate change “a hoax,” had said little about the dozens of wildfires that have burned more than 3 million acres in California, killed at least 20 people and covered the state in smoke. He broke a threeweek public silence at a campaign rally in Nevada on Saturday, when he briefly mentioned the fires and said, “It’s all about forest management.”
Trump made similar assertions after the Camp Fire in November 2018, which destroyed much of the Butte County town of Paradise and killed 85 people. Although the federal government controls more than half the forestland in California and state and local agencies oversee just 3%, the president blamed California for logging restrictions and not doing more to thin out forests.
Trump returned to the subject Monday. He said he had recently talked to “the head of a major country” in Europe who he said told him, “‘We have trees that are far more explosive than they have in California, and we don’t have any problem because we manage our forests.’ So we have to do that in California, too.”
Trump’s assessment of the problem has been disputed by many forestry experts in the past. While clearing forests of heavy timber would help reduce the fire threat in some places, many of California’s most disastrous recent fires have been in grasslands and on oakstudded hillsides.
Last month, Newsom announced a statefederal agreement to reduce wildfire risks on 1 million acres of forest every year. Under the deal, governments will spend as much as $1 billion on fire preparedness in California by scaling up vegetation treatment over the next five years. The pact commits to a 20year program of forest and vegetation management, including wildland and watershed restoration.
Trump said Monday that “forest management is not only the leaves that have been sitting there for many years that are dry as a bone. But there are also the trees that go over. Anything over 18 months, that’s just a matchstick. It’s absolutely a matchstick.
“The federal government is now starting to do it in a very big way, but the state has to really do that,” he added.
The president dodged questions about the role of climate change and Newsom’s assertions that it is worsening the severity of wildfire season. “That’s up to him. Look, he does agree with me on forest management,” Trump said.
But he forcefully pushed back on criticism that he was too slow to publicly acknowledge the disaster unfolding in California, calling it a “nasty question.”
“I got a call from the governor immediately. I called him immediately. In fact, he returned my call. And on that call, I declared it an emergency,” Trump said. “A lot of presidents wait for months and months and months. They wait until after it’s all over, and then they consider it and then oftentimes they don’t do it. I did it right at the beginning.”
Biden, in a speech about his climate agenda in Delaware, said Trump was not treating the wildfire disaster with the urgency it demanded. He flipped a criticism of Trump’s — that Biden wants to abolish the suburbs by forcing lowincome housing into more communities — on its head.
“You know what is actually threatening our suburbs? Wildfires are burning the suburbs of the West,” Biden said. “If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires?” Chronicle Staff Writer J.K. Dineen
contributed to this report.