Environmentalists criticized Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Monday for blaming the wildfires raging through California on forest management and claiming that climate change has not played a role in the blazes.
Zinke, on a two-day tour of areas devastated by the Carr Fire in Redding, Calif., downplayed the importance of managing global warming in addressing the fires on Sunday.
“I’ve heard the climate change argument back and forth,” Zinke said in an interview with a local television station, KCRA 3. “This has nothing to do with climate change. This has to do with active forest management.”
Conservation groups said that Zinke and the Trump administration are purposely ignoring climate change for political reasons.
[Opinion: Fire and fury: How government failures make wildfires even worse]
“Secretary Zinke is either being willfully ignorant or purposely deceptive,” said Greg Zimmerman, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities. “Any politician ignoring the role a warming climate plays in record-setting wildfire seasons loses all credibility as an honest broker. Instead, Zinke is in California using an ongoing natural disaster to push an unpopular political agenda.”
California state and federal officials have responded to about 4,500 fires this year that have burned nearly 400,000 acres of land, easily outpacing last year’s record.
In California, 14 of the 20 largest wildfires on record have occurred over the past 15 years, coinciding with some of the warmest years documented in the U.S.
Federal officials who specialize in firefighting response say hotter and drier weather is contributing to more destructive wildfires, along with the fact that fires are increasingly burning close to homes and people as the West becomes more populated. Overcrowding in forests due to poor management has also made fires more intense.
“Change in climate and the weather is causing us to have longer fire seasons,” Jessica Gardetto, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center, recently told the Washington Examiner.
Zinke, however, in comments to local media Sunday, amplified the Trump administration’s push for improvements to forest management policies, rather than blaming climate change.
He accused environmentalists of holding up forest management projects, which involve the removal of trees and vegetation in forests to take away fuel for fires.
“We need to manage our forests, we need to reduce the fuels,” Zinke said in comments reported by the Sacramento Bee. “The public lands belong to everybody, not just the special interest groups.”
California state officials maintain that they’re taking prevention seriously.
The California Legislature provided more than $200 million this fiscal year for forest management, Scott McLean, the information officer for Cal Fire, told the Washington Examiner.
At the federal level, Congress passed a measure in March as part of the omnibus spending bill containing $1.95 billion for fiscal 2018 fire suppression and prevention across the Forest Service and Interior Department.
But it’s not enough to address the problem, experts say.
“The biggest challenge to getting work done in the woods is funding,” said Robert Bonnie, who was the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment in the Obama administration. “Congress has stopped the bleeding, but needs to do more,” Bonnie told the Washington Examiner.
The U.S. faces a backlog of needed forest management projects, as federal and state agencies have used more of their budgets responding to wildfires, rather than preventing them.
For years, the Forest Service has taken money from other preventative accounts to make up for shortfalls in firefighting funding.
Congress’ omnibus spending bill also addressed the “fire borrowing” problem by establishing a contingency account for use in bad fire years, funded with more than $2 billion a year through 2027.
The bill also allowed the Forest Service to do more prescribed burns or forest thinning management projects with less rigorous environmental reviews.
But conservatives say that those changes are not enough, and want to enact further reforms in the upcoming farm bill to make it easier for states and counties to assist in managing federal forests, and to combat lawsuits by environmentalists that they say slow down projects.
