“Unmitigated crap,” one scientist called it:
Two years ago, an actual headline from CBS in Sacramento was, “Donald Trump Tells California ‘There Is No Drought’ As Drought Continues.”
And now, on Sunday evening, Trump’s denial of reality in California continued, as he attempted to blame the ever-worsening wildfires in the state on everything but climate change.
“California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized,” the President tweeted. “It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire spreading!”
The tweet came just hours after the Trump administration declared the California wildfires a major disaster.
Experts, however, immediately mocked Trump’s explanation — and his refusal to acknowledge that climate change is a major driver in worsening wildfires.
The Republicans want to continue burning fossil fuels because their masters, the wealthy Fascist oligarchs who own all the wells, expect them to.
“We are not going Socialist,” scream the Trumpians.
Yes, dear Fascist comrades, that is exactly where we are going.
The water wars have been going on here since before I was born, and as Vonnegut put it, what Fergus knows about them can be accurately described as “diddly squat” (or “doodly-squat” depending on which book) and as my father worked for the Forest Service in the Six Rivers and Trinity National Forests for thirty years and I myself fought on some forest fires when I was young, I feel confident in calling bullshit on this latest nugget of distraction from our president.
There are indeed management problems that add to the difficulty of wildland fire control these days, not the least of which is the fact that wildfires were a part of the ecosystem long before we came along and built houses in places where those wildfires used to burn the underbrush and make way for the new growth of seedlings of larger trees.
But now those places are owned property to be protected from wildfires that might damage their dollar value and inconvenience the owners and users of said property.
This makes the jobs of the firefighters incredibly difficult, as a fire doesn’t care whether there are houses or cabins in its way, and neither does a back fire or controlled burn, two of the tools firefighters and forest managers have to try and fight or prevent these large, destructive fires we seem to be having more and more of every year.
And that drought that he denied the existence of? It made the situation exponentially worse in several ways besides just the hotness and dryness that adds to the likelihood and severity of wildfires, it also made the use of controlled burns far too dangerous to use for most of a decade, during which the “fuel load” of brush and other dry vegetation just increased year over year, and it weakened the defenses of certain kinds of trees to pine beetles, which have decimated huge swaths of forest now, peppering otherwise healthy stands of trees with dry, dead snags that a brush fire can use to become a forest fire with the greatest of ease.
If we are going to build and live in the “wildland-urban interface” we are going to have to learn to control the factors that enable and cause wildfires, and we are going to have to accept that they will happen, much like we have to accept that floods will happen when we build on flood plains.