'A climate arsonist’: Trump faces heat for ignoring climate change amid West Coast wildfires

New York Daily News, The (NY)

President Trump was put on the hot seat during a wildfire briefing in Northern California on Monday, with local leaders grilling him on his science-defying refusal to acknowledge the role climate change has played in exacerbating blazes in the region.

The briefing, hosted at a command center in Sacramento by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state officials, turned awkward almost immediately, as Trump made clear he still doesn’t accept the scientific community’s consensus that climate change is making wildfires on the West Coast worse every year.

Instead, Trump reiterated his long-held belief that poor “forest management” by local authorities is to blame.

“When you have years of leaves, dried leaves on the ground, it just sets it up,” Trump said. “It’s really fuel for a fire. So they have to do something about it.”

Newsom, a Democrat, pointed out that 57% of forests in California are controlled by the federal government, meaning the state’s local agencies couldn’t do much to prevent fires there even if they wanted to.

Additionally, Newsom pointed out that the chaotic infernos currently devastating California are blazing through coastal chaparral and grasslands, not forest, making Trump’s point moot.

But Trump just shrugged after Newsom’s assessment and asked for the next speaker to proceed.

State Natural Resources Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot, who spoke a bit later, pleaded with Trump to “recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests.”

“If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians,” Crowfoot added.

“Okay,” Trump interrupted, “it will start getting cooler, just you watch.”

A befuddled Crowfoot pushed back: “I wish science agreed with you," at which point Trump replied, “I don’t think science knows, actually.”

The wildfires crushing California, Oregon and Washington could become another political quagmire for Trump’s reelection bid, which is already sagging in the polls because of the coronavirus pandemic, mass unemployment and widespread social unrest over police shootings of Black Americans.

Dozens of people have already died in the horrific wildfires, which now span nearly the entire West Coast and is showing few signs of slowing down.

Joe Biden, delivering remarks near his home in Delaware, took sharp aim at Trump over his latest bout with climate change denialism and drew parallels to other natural disasters.

“If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires? How many suburbs will have been flooded out? How many suburbs will have been blown away in superstorms?” he said. "If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if more of America is ablaze?”

Trump has a long history of climate change denialism.

He once infamously called climate change a “hoax” produced by China. In 2015, shortly after announcing his first White House bid, he stated bluntly: “I’m not a believer in global warming, I’m not a believer in man-made global warming.”

Up until his Monday trip to Sacramento, Trump has been mostly quiet as the catastrophic fires have unfolded on the West Coast over the past few weeks.

A tweet he posted late Friday offering appreciation for California firefighters was his first public comment on the blazes that have burned millions of acres and forced thousands of people from their homes.

After the briefing in Sacramento, Trump traveled to Phoenix for a campaign stop and also found time to complain over Twitter about NFL players who take a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality.

“No thanks,” Trump tweeted from Air Force One, “tell them to ‘protest’ some other time!”

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