Climate ‘not a partisan issue,’ Harris warns
AUBERRY, Fresno County — As she surveyed the devastation of the Creek Fire, Sen. Kamala Harris said she couldn’t help but notice how little the flames left behind. For some, all that remained standing were the chimneys.
“Those chimneys remind me of tombstones,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee said.
It’s a landscape that the West is likely to see more of if the country doesn’t accept the reality of climate change science and act accordingly, Harris said Tuesday as she redoubled the Democratic presidential ticket’s new emphasis on the threat that an unchecked output of greenhouse gases poses for people’s lives, health and property.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seized on the issue Monday, after a week when wildfires throughout the West killed more than 30 people, turned the midday skies orange in California and Oregon and laid down a blan
ket of smoke from Southern California into British Columbia. Biden called Trump, who has systematically rolled back environmental regulations and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris accords limiting carbon dioxide emissions, a “climate arsonist” who ignores the danger of wildfires “burning the suburbs of the West.”
It’s become a point of sharp demarcation with Trump, who reiterated his rejection of climate change science Monday when he told California officials that “it’ll start getting cooler.” He added that “I don’t think science knows” whether people are contributing to climate change, although in fact scientists are in wide agreement that human activity is driving the phenomenon.
Harris sought to emphasize the divergence as she visited her home state Tuesday. She and Gov. Gavin Newsom viewed a town largely leveled by the Creek Fire, which broke out in the Sierra foothills near Sequoia National Park on Sept. 4 and has burned more than 220,000 acres.
Harris and Newsom stood in front of a burned playground outside an elementary school in Auberry, 35 miles northeast of Fresno, where in better times children would have been playing during lunchtime recess. Ash fell from the sky as they spoke.
“Sadly, these wildfires and the devastation they cause are utterly predictable,” Harris said. “This is not a partisan issue. This is just a fact. We have to do better as a country.”
The school itself survived the flames, but the playground is a total loss. Charred pine trees, their foliage burned away, stick up from the surrounding hills for miles.
“We have to understand that California, like so many other parts of our country, has experienced extreme weather conditions,” Harris said. “It is incumbent on us, in terms of the leadership of our nation, to take seriously these new changes in our climate, and to do what we can to mitigate against the damage.”
Harris has called for eliminating carbon emissions from the electricitygenerating sector by 2035 and has put forward a plan to spend nearly $2 trillion over four years on increasing renewable power and creating incentives to build more energyefficient buildings, homes and cars. Biden predicts this would create 10 million jobs in the clean energy sector, triple the current total.
Harris said that “the people who are victimized by these (fires), they could care less ... who they voted for in the last election. This is not a partisan issue.”
Harris praised firefighters who have been battling the Creek Fire, in some cases as their own houses burned.
“They are working around the clock without rest,” she said. “They have been working 90hour shifts, some of them, to save families, to save property.”
Newsom, who a day earlier gently urged Trump in a wildfires briefing outside Sacramento to accept that “climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this,” bumped elbows with Harris as he arrived. The two peered at the rubble of a home that burned down to its foundation and looked at a burned pickup truck nearby.
Newsom alluded to Trump’s visit as he spoke alongside Harris: “If you don’t believe in science, come to California and observe it with your own eyes,” he said. “You cannot be in denial about this reality.”
The governor said Harris “gets it” and that a Biden administration would be committed to rapidly overhauling America’s energy economy by reducing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.
The Creek Fire is already the 12thlargest in California history and it’s still burning, having been just 16% contained by Tuesday. Five of the state’s 20 largest fires have happened this year, as a dry winter, searing heat and an August lightning storm combined to light the state ablaze.
Both Harris and Newsom talked with emergency officials who gave an overview of the fire’s extensive damage, and talked with firefighters who have been on the front lines.
“What a year, you guys,” Newsom could be heard saying.