Despite a visit meant to emphasize his actions on wildfires, experts say
there is little the president can do for now to reduce the damage as
climate change gets worse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/climate/biden-california-wildfires.html
President Biden visited California on Monday to tout his efforts to better
protect the state against the raging wildfires that have burned more than
two million acres, displaced thousands and pushed responders to the brink
of exhaustion.
“These fires are blinking code red for our nation,” said Mr. Biden, who
used the occasion to promote two bills pending in Congress that would fund
forest management and more resilient infrastructure as well as combat
global warming. The country couldn’t “ignore the reality that these
wildfires are being supercharged by climate change,” he said.
But experts say there are limits to what the federal government can do to
reduce the scale and destructive power of the fires, at least in the short
term. That’s because much of the authority needed relies on state and
local governments, those experts said.
Federal action largely depends on Congress approving new funding — but
even if approved, that money might not make much of a difference anytime
soon.
“Climate change impacts can’t be absolved in a single year,” said Roy
Wright, who was in charge of risk mitigation at the Federal Emergency
Management Agency until 2018. The goal, he said, should be “investments
that will pay back over the coming three to five years.”
On wildfires, like so much else, President Biden presented himself as the
opposite of former President Donald J. Trump: Clear about the role of
climate change, willing to listen to experts, and promising to better
defend places like California against a growing threat.
“If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs
will be burned in wildfires?” Mr. Biden said in a speech last year as
California staggered through record-breaking fires. “If you give a climate
arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised
if we have more of America ablaze?”
Mr. Biden, of course, won the election — only to see the damage from
wildfires in California and across the country continue to get worse.
On Monday, Mr. Biden flew over the Caldor fire, which has consumed more
than 200,000 acres south of Lake Tahoe and forced thousands of people from
their homes.
“We have to act more rapidly and more firmly and more broadly than today,”
Mr. Biden told a small crowd gathered in the California Governor’s Office
of Emergency Services. “We can’t afford to let anything slip further. It
really is a matter of what the world will look like.”
Over the past decade, the number of fires in California each year has
remained consistent, hovering around 7,000 to 10,000 annually.
What has changed is their scale.
Until 2018, the largest wildfires in the state seldom burned more than
300,000 acres, according to state data. In 2018, the Ranch fire consumed
more than 400,000 acres, and last year, the August Complex fire topped 1
million acres, making it the largest blaze in the state’s history.
Just north of the Caldor fire is the Dixie fire, which has already burned
more than 960,000 acres and is not yet contained. That fire could break
last year’s record.
“The fire situation in California is unrecognizably worse than it was a
decade ago,” said Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy
program at Stanford University. He said that with the exception of 2019,
each of past five years has brought fires that were more destructive than
the year before it.
The wildfire crisis in California has often become a political fight. Last
summer, President Trump blamed California for its fire problem, and
initially denied federal disaster aid.
“You gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests,” Mr. Trump
said at the time, in comments that emphasized just one aspect of a complex
problem. “There are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and
they’re like, like, so flammable.”
Mr. Trump also dismissed the link between forest fires and global warming.
When state officials urged him not to ignore the science of climate
change, which shows that higher temperatures and drought are making fires
more destructive, Mr. Trump inaccurately responded, “I don’t think science
actually knows.”
While Mr. Trump was wrong to dismiss the role played by climate change in
exacerbating the fires, he was right that more aggressive forest
management is vital for addressing those fires, experts say. But much of
that work must come from the federal government, which owns about half the
land in California, Dr. Wara said.
Mr. Biden’s first budget request, earlier this year, didn’t ask Congress
for enough money to reduce the amount of flammable vegetation in the
nation’s forests, Dr. Wara said. The $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure
bill now pending on Capitol Hill would significantly increase that
funding.
“There’s no fixing the wildfire problem without dealing with how forests
have been managed,” Dr. Wara said.
The Biden administration has taken other steps to reduce the damage from
fires, including increasing the number of air tankers and helicopters at
its disposal and boosting pay for federal firefighters to $15 an hour.
“We owe them a whole hell of a lot more,” Mr. Biden told California
emergency workers on Monday, before leading a rendition of “Happy
Birthday” for an employee.
FEMA has also made more money available to help communities prepare for
fires in advance, for example by building fire breaks or retrofitting
homes. And after a fire strikes, the agency has made it easier for fire
victims who have lost proof of homeownership — documents that are often
destroyed in a fire — to apply for assistance to rebuild that home.
And Mr. Biden has asked Congress to approve measures that would reduce the
country’s greenhouse gas emissions. But even if those changes were to
become law, the amount of carbon dioxide and other warming gases that has
already been released into the atmosphere means the planet will continue
to heat up for years.
Much of the action that would go the furthest toward reducing wildfire
risk is outside the scope of federal authority, according to Kimiko
Barrett, a wildfire policy expert at Headwaters Economics, a consulting
group in Montana.
Protecting Americans from fires means reducing home construction in fire-
prone areas — decisions historically made at the state and local level,
she said.
“We’re developing and building homes in places that are very exposed to
wildfires,” Dr. Barrett said. She said communities need to incorporate the
risk of fires into how they grow, just as they do with flooding and,
increasingly, with sea level rise.
Still, Mr. Biden could use the megaphone of the presidency to encourage
state and local officials to be more thoughtful about where and how they
build, said Michele Steinberg, wildfire division director for the National
Fire Protection Association.
“Folks, there is something called building codes, and land-use ordinances,
and they’re really good, and they really work when applied,” Ms. Steinberg
offered as the message Mr. Biden could convey. “That would be a huge step
in the right direction.”
But even if Mr. Biden wanted to send that message, he would be competing
against the deeply held American view that land is something to profit
from, rather than to conserve or protect, she said.
“It’s more like, let’s get the value out of this land that we can right
now,” Ms. Steinberg said, “and let the next generation worry about it.”
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Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
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Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.