Trump Has Head-Scratching Solution For California Wildfires : 'It Will Start Getting Cooler'
President Donald Trump touched down in California on Monday to survey the wildfire damage and immediately launched into his usual talking points about poor forest management while denying the role of climate change.
Trump arrived in Sacramento as more than two dozen major wildfires burned across the state. More than 2 million acres in the state have burned this year, a nearly 2,000% increase in land burned compared to this time last year.
At a roundtable discussion about the wildfires, California Secretary for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot said Trump’s focus on forest management was obscuring the grim reality that climate change was behind the historically high temperatures and years of drought.
“It will start getting cooler. You just watch,” Trump fired back at Crowfoot, adding, “I don’t think science knows actually.”
Minutes before, when Trump had just disembarked his plane, reporters repeatedly asked him to acknowledge how climate change has influenced the situation. But Trump wouldn’t budge on his claims that the disaster is simply a matter of cleaning up the state’s forests.
“I think this is more of a management situation,” Trump said to one of the reporters. “If you look at other countries, if you go to other countries in Europe, Austria and Finland and numerous countries ... they don’t have problems like this,” even with “explosive” trees.
“When trees fall down, after a short period of time they become very dry — really like a matchstick ... and they can explode,” he continued. “Also leaves. When you have dried leaves on the ground, it’s just fuel for the fires.”
For the last three and a half years, the Trump administration has denied and downplayed the role of climate change in driving extreme wildfires in the West. During the wildfires that plagued California in 2018, for example, then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told KCRA-TV that the inferno had “nothing to do with climate change,” only to declare days...
