President Trump suggested the world would “start getting cooler” Monday, dismissing pleas from California officials that he work with them on climate change.
“It will start getting cooler. You just watch,” Trump told California Secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot during a briefing on the dozens of major wildfires engulfing the state and much of the West.
“I wish the science agreed with you,” Crowfoot countered. Trump, in response, said, “Well, I don’t think the science knows, actually.”
Crowfoot had been asking Trump to look beyond just working with California to better manage its forests. The federal government should support climate change science and work with state officials to protect forests from its worst effects, including extreme heat and risk of wildfires, he said.
“That science is going to be key,” Crowfoot said. “If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting California.”
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, too, pressed Trump on climate change, though his remarks weren’t quite as pointed as Crowfoot’s.
“We obviously feel very strongly that the hots are getting hotter and the drys are getting drier,” Newsom told Trump. He added “climate change is real” and “exacerbating” the wildfires.
While he said there’s an area of “commonality” on better managing vegetation and forests in California, Newsom asked Trump to “please respect the difference of opinion out here on this fundamental issue” of climate change.
Trump, with his response, perhaps unwittingly underscored Democratic rival Joe Biden’s main campaign message on Monday. Biden, during remarks at the Delaware Museum of Natural History, slammed Trump as a “climate denier” and a “climate arsonist,” delivering some of the most direct remarks of his campaign on the effects of climate change and the costs of inaction.
“If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires?” Biden said during remarks Monday at the Delaware Museum of Natural History. “How many suburbs will have flooded out? How many suburbs will have been blown away in superstorms?”
If Trump gets a second term, “these hellish events will continue to become more common, more devastating, and more deadly,” Biden said of the Western wildfires, droughts and flooding in the Midwest, and the Atlantic’s extremely active hurricane season.
California’s climate and energy policies have increasingly become a flashpoint in the presidential race. Trump has used the state’s energy woes and recent rolling blackouts to argue that California is too prescriptive in its energy policy, shutting out fossil fuel power at the expense of keeping the lights on.
Trump has linked California’s policies to Biden’s climate plans, which would seek to eliminate carbon emissions from the power sector even quicker than California’s do.
Biden, however, is ramping up his messaging on the damages caused by climate change and the toll that has and could take on the economy. His aggressive climate change plans meet the moment, he argues.
“Some say that we can’t afford to fix this. But here’s the thing: Look around at the crushing consequences of the extreme weather events I’ve been describing,” Biden said at the Delaware museum. “We’ve already been paying for it.”
