As California firefighters battle several major blazes across the state, including the largest in its history, the Mendocino Complex fire, President Donald Trump has fanned the flames of controversy with his remarks on the fires. Trump claims the fires have been made worse by a water shortage in the state resulting from “bad environmental laws.” Click here if viewing from a mobile device. As a result, “Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross ordered the National Marine Fisheries Service to prioritize sending water to firefighters to use against the flames over other concerns – including making sure water flows to the habitats of endangered fish and other wildlife that that agency is tasked with protecting,” reports The Washington Post. Start your day with the news you need from the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our Morning Report weekday newsletter. California, however, says it does not need any more water. According to the Post, the President’s tweets about the wildfires “baffled experts who said the president did not seem to understand the basics about how the fires are being fought there.” See how cartoonists viewed the situation.<doc-sep>In his first public comments on the wildfires that have been ablaze in California for weeks, Donald Trump Donald TrumpTrump lashes out after grand jury seated for New York criminal probe Schumer tees up vote on Jan. 6 commission bill Senators struggle to save Jan. 6 commission MORE, in typical fashion, took to Twitter to send a series of nonsensical tweets that attacked California, and showed his ignorance and insensitivity. California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2018 He tweeted: “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading!” ADVERTISEMENT California has some of the strongest environmental laws in the country, but the impact of extreme drought conditions caused by climate change are intensifying wildfires. Contrary to his tweets, the Trump administration’s anti-environment policies, not California’s pro-environment reforms, will make matters worse and hurt our planet for generations to come. I served 10 years on the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the primary state agency responsible for protecting public health from the harmful effects of air pollution. I was appointed by three governors – one Democrat and two Republicans. I am proud of the work CARB has done, which is centered around science and evidence-based research. California leads the nation and world in fighting air pollution by setting its own, tougher standards on greenhouse gas emissions, as allowed under the Clean Air Act, a bipartisan compromise signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970 and expanded in 1990 under George H. W. Bush. In 2012, President Obama brought national standards in line with those set by CARB, creating the One National Program. The genius and beauty of the Clean Air Act is that it has been a bipartisan success. This past week, Trump announced a move to roll back national fuel economy standards and undermine California’s innovative efforts to address our unique air pollution problems. In response, I led a coalition of 60 Democratic members in introducing a resolution condemning the move, signaling to the administration that it will be met with a unified front of opposition should it choose to go down this path. Without standards to curb current emissions levels or the other proactive work California is doing, global temperatures could rise by over four degrees in the coming decades. This change in temperature will certainly lead to more natural disasters including an increased risk of wildfires. Natural disasters, including three hurricanes, wildfires, hail, flooding, tornadoes, and drought, cost the federal government $306 billion last year. The previous record in one year was $215 billion. There were 15 disasters last year that had damage that exceeded a billion dollars each. One hurricane took more than 1,000 lives with fires taking dozens and extreme heat adding to the toll. Today, 17 fires rage across California, including the largest in its history. While Donald Trump is not going to stop playing with fire, it is incumbent on lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to push back on his grandstanding. It took Republicans and Democrats to pass clean air legislation. And, it is going to take all of us working together to anticipate and prevent natural disasters that will occur without reducing the effects of climate change. Our lives and our planet depend on it.<doc-sep>California is burning. More than 15,000 firefighters have been fighting wildfires across the state. As of Monday, the Mendocino Complex fire became the largest in California history. Donald Trump recognized the tragedy by … inaccurately condemning the state’s water policies. This should give us pause, not because of what the president says, but because of the point this marks in Trump’s long, ongoing war with California. Here’s what he said on Monday: “Governor Jerry Brown must allow the Free Flow of the vast amounts of water coming from the North and foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Can be used for fires, farming and everything else. Think of California with plenty of Water - Nice! Fast Federal govt. approvals.” Advertisement Plenty of digital ink has been spilled by journalists and experts responsibly trying to parse the president’s bizarre declaration. His claims have no scientific basis and have little to do with the tragedy going on right now. You might notice a few strange things about that tweet, aside from his neglecting to express any sympathy for the Californians who have lost their homes, and some their lives. One odd note is the appearance of “farming” in a tweet that’s ostensibly about wildfires. Another is “Fast Federal govt. approvals.” What does federal government approval have to do with the fires? Approvals of what? Advertisement Advertisement The most obvious answer—though not the only one, as I’ll argue shortly—is disaster relief. The Trump administration’s aid to California has been stingy. Consider the president’s response to the 2017 wildfires. While some hurricane relief funding (including funds to rebuild) was supplied to Southern states in the White House’s November 2017 disaster aid request to Congress, not a cent was initially designated for victims of the California wildfires to rebuild. (Even Republican Sen. John Cornyn called the White House’s disaster relief budget “wholly inadequate.”) Trump’s long-standing hostility to California is no secret: In February 2017, he told Bill O’Reilly that California was “out of control” and said withholding federal funds “would be a weapon” he’d use to punish the state for opposing him. Given this admission, lawmakers nervous about a Trump vendetta have taken peculiar steps: 13 of 14 California Republicans refused to sign their own state’s request for federal aid following the 2017 floods and wildfires—the Republicans signed a separate letter, one uncontaminated by Democrats. Advertisement These are the sorts of real effects a petty, vindictive president achieves. Nor is there much reason to believe things have changed since last year. While Trump approved a disaster declaration this past Sunday that would make some federal aid available to Shasta County (where the Carr fire has raged since late July), he had to tweet something nasty about California’s governor. (It’s also not unreasonable to note that the county went for Trump in the 2016 election.) More funds have been requested by lawmakers to provide relief for other affected California counties—Lake, Mendocino, and Napa counties now have huge blazes of their own with which to contend. Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has added his voice to the bipartisan request for additional aid. But will Trump help? The earliest an answer would come is the end of this week after a damage assessment is completed, but the mere fact that there’s a question about this is symptomatic of the government-by-suspense he inflicts on the country—and on California in particular. Advertisement Advertisement Trump’s ill will toward a state that won’t bend to him (it has in fact filed 29 suits against his administration) has a long and bitter history. He certainly couldn’t be happy about the vandalism of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which he bought in 2007—perhaps, some speculated, to distract from a feud with Rosie O’Donnell. But now the star has been vandalized so often that West Hollywood’s City Council has approved a symbolic resolution to remove it. Hollywood’s repulsion of the man has been near universal (as any awards show will attest), and Trump’s other efforts to make his mark on the state have been similarly disappointing. During the campaign he liked to say he’d be the first Republican to win the state in decades, but he lost to Hillary Clinton by an incredible 4.3 million votes. That figure became the basis for Trump’s false claim that there was rampant voter fraud. He couldn’t have lost the state by that much; it must have been the illegal immigrants! His plan in the 1980s to build a structure on Wilshire Boulevard that would be the tallest building in L.A. fizzled. When he visited Los Angeles for a mere 22 hours in 2018, as president, he made a point of spending the night in the building currently bearing that “tallest tower” designation—the Wilshire Grand. Advertisement Advertisement This is a man furious with a state that seems invulnerable to him. But it’s as a political project that California has been a fly in Trump’s ointment. The world’s fifth-largest economy is succeeding wildly in defiance of Trump’s every prescription. As Bloomberg’s Matthew Winkler argues, the state disproves Trump’s policies at every turn. Trump credits environmental deregulation and cutting taxes for the rich for the humming American economy, and yet Jerry Brown’s agenda, which almost perfectly opposes Trump’s, has accompanied even better growth: “California’s 4.9 percent increase in GDP last year was more than twice the gain for the U.S. and enabled the state’s jobless rate to slide to 4.2 percent, the lowest on record since such data was compiled in 1976.” And the state has done it while leading on policies meant to combat climate change. Advertisement So far, Trump has not been able to bring this “out of control,” pro-immigrant state to heel. His attempt to punish California for sanctuary cities by weaponizing federal funds backfired: the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the president had exceeded his authority since “only Congress can put conditions on federal funds.” The same man who in 1988 was hyping the dangers of California earthquakes has slashed the earthquake budget.<doc-sep>A firefighter runs while trying to save a home as a wildfire tears through Lakeport, Calif., Tuesday, July 31, 2018. The residence eventually burned. Firefighters pressed their battle against a pair of fires across Mendocino and Lake counties. In all, roughly 19,000 people have been warned to flee and 10,000 homes remain under threat. Noah Berger/AP An airplane flies over a large wildfire plume from a recent flareup of the Woolsey Fire near Lake Sherwood, Calif., Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2018. Forecasters had warned of continuing fire danger in Southern California due to persistent Santa Ana winds, the withering, dry gusts that sweep out of the interior toward the coast, pushing back moist ocean breezes. (AP Photo/Amanda Myers) Flames burn inside a van as the Camp Fire tears through Paradise, Calif., on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018. Tens of thousands of people fled a fast-moving wildfire Thursday in Northern California, some clutching babies and pets as they abandoned vehicles and struck out on foot ahead of the flames that forced the evacuation of an entire town and destroyed hundreds of structures. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) BIG BEND, CA - NOVEMBER 10: The Camp Fire burns in the hills on November 10, 2018 near Big Bend, California. Fueled by high winds and low humidity the Camp Fire ripped through the town of Paradise charring 105,000 acres, killed 23 people and has destroyed over 6,700 homes and businesses. The fire is currently at 20 percent containment. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) They lost everything in the fires Fire evacuee: All we could do was pray A firefighter runs while trying to save a home as a wildfire tears through Lakeport, Calif., Tuesday, July 31, 2018. The residence eventually burned. Firefighters pressed their battle against a pair of fires across Mendocino and Lake counties. In all, roughly 19,000 people have been warned to flee and 10,000 homes remain under threat. Noah Berger/AP (CNN) — Even the White House can’t explain President Donald Trump’s tweets suggesting California environmental laws have worsened wildfires raging in that state. On Tuesday, administration officials declined to offer any clarity on Trump’s series of tweets claiming environmental laws and water regulations in California are hampering the state’s ability to fight the wildfires. Wildfire experts and local officials say the President’s claims simply don’t hold up. Instead, some White House officials admitted to being slightly perplexed at where Trump may have gotten the notion that California’s long-running water crisis and a debate over how to divide limited supplies are somehow related to the out of control fires. While Trump’s tweets can sometimes be linked to segments on Fox News, there have been no correlating segments linking the two issues in recent days on the channel that frequently serves as presidential inspiration. White House officials also couldn’t say whether Trump had discussed the issue with California lawmakers involved in the water debate. What Trump said Trump launched his unfounded suggestions in a tweet on Sunday claiming: “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.” He then claimed that the water is “being diverted into the Pacific Ocean.” He reiterated those claims on Monday, calling on Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown to “allow the Free Flow of the vast amounts of water coming from the North and foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Can be used for fires, farming and everything else.” Trump’s claims are false, according to California officials and wildfire experts. Trump said Tuesday at a dinner with business leaders that a “very tough situation” is underway in California, where wildfires are raging. “It’s been a very tough situation taking place in California for a number of years and we’re going to have to have some meetings about it,” Trump said from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. Trump said there are “things you can do to mitigate” the damage, but did not expand upon his remarks. He said he was “deeply grateful to firefighters and first responders” combating the flames, and said that his administration would do “everything in our power to protect those in harm’s way.” He did not repeat his earlier claims, made on Twitter, that a water shortage was affecting impacting the state’s ability to fight the fires. What officials and experts have said Local officials have made clear they have not had any difficulty accessing enough water to fight the fires. A FEMA official also told CNN there is no water shortage or problem with access to water hindering firefighting efforts in California. Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift declined to comment on Trump’s tweets: “We don’t weigh in on the President’s tweets. We let those statements speak for themselves.” As for water “being diverted into the Pacific Ocean,” while there is a debate raging in California about how much water should be diverted to coastal communities versus farmers in the central part of the state, water is not being intentionally flushed into the ocean. “I was stunned when I read this this morning,” Henri Grissino-Mayer, a climatologist and biogeographer at the University of Tennessee, told CNN in an email. “California does NOT divert water to the ocean. Ridiculous.” Grissino-Mayer noted that water “is diverted to the coastal cities for a constant water supply but all such water is used by the coastal communities.” What’s the context? Trump’s tweet comes after California water officials ignited a debate this summer by proposing a plan to limit the amount of water that can be drawn from the San Joaquin River for use in cities and farmlands. The proposal has pitted farmers against fisheries and environmentalists, but Trump’s attempt to connect the debate to wildfires doesn’t pass muster. Instead of environmental laws and water regulations, local officials and experts have said scorching heat and dry conditions have led to several of the worst wildfires California has ever seen. Experts say those conditions are being driven by climate change, which Trump has previously dismissed as a hoax. CNN’s Brandon Miller, Judson Jones, Greg Wallace and Rene Marsh contributed to this report.<doc-sep>
Last week, 18 wildfires were burning at once in California, including its largest in history, destroying over 1,100 homes and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate. The smoke made the air in the state’s Central Valley unhealthy to breathe for a record 15 consecutive days, as I can personally attest. Donald Trump decided to use the opportunity to renew his war with California by nonsensically blaming the wildfires on environmental laws. California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2018 It’s no surprise that Donald Trump dislikes California. His 2.9m national popular vote deficit to Hillary Clinton is a sore spot, and her margin of victory in California was by 30% and 4.3m votes. California has also long been a leader in developing laws to clean and protect the environment, and Trump despises regulations that benefit public health and welfare at the expense of industry profits. And so, we got the Tweet bemoaning water being “diverted into the Pacific Ocean” (in scientific terms, they’re called “rivers”). Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director of Cal Fire immediately noted that water isn’t firefighters’ problem: We have plenty of water to fight these wildfires, but let’s be clear: It’s our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires Climate change is making wildfires bigger Although Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA), who represents the district encompassing Redding (or what’s left of it) denied the reality of human-caused climate change in an interview with the Guardian, the scientific research clearly shows that global warming is exacerbating wildfires. As one might expect, hotter, drier conditions lead to bigger fires. Zeke Hausfather showed in an analysis for Carbon Brief that there’s a strong correlation between temperatures and the total area of forests burned in the western USA. Red bars show western US forest area burned (in thousand hectares) using data provided by Prof John Abatzoglou, updated from the data used in Abatzoglou and Williams (2016). Black line shows March-August temperature anomalies relative to a 1961-1990 baseline period for the US west of 102 degrees longitude using data from NOAA. Illustration: Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 75% of year-to-year variations in area burned by wildfires in the western US can be explained by fuel aridity (a combination of temperature and precipitation), and: Anthropogenic climate change accounted for ∼55% of observed increases in fuel aridity from 1979 to 2015 across western US forests … and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984 July 2018 was the hottest month ever recorded in California. The past four years were the state’s four hottest, and 2018 is on pace to also finish in California’s top-five hottest years. Plus, California just recently emerged from its worst drought in over a millennium, which was likewise amplified by global warming and created plentiful wildfire fuel. California average annual temperature data from Noaa (blue) and linear trend (red). Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli Other factors like forest management have also played a role in the growing size of wildfires, but human-caused climate change is clearly a major contributor. Under a high-emissions global warming scenario, a 2011 study found that by the end of the century the annual area burned by wildfires in California would increase by about 50%, and would double in heavily-forested Northern California. It’s also worth noting that forest management is primarily a federal, not state issue, headed by the Department of Interior and US Forest Service. As the Sacramento Bee reported: The Trump administration’s own budget request for the current fiscal year and the coming one proposed slashing tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Interior and U.S. Forest Service budgets dedicated to the kind of tree clearing and other forest management work experts say is needed. Ironically, California has been using the $256m allocated to wildfire risks from the state’s carbon cap and trade system revenues. Visiting the state yesterday, Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said: It doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in climate change. What is important is we manage our forests.