WASHINGTON – Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Gov. Gavin Newsom stood side by side, in a forest that burned badly a year ago, pledging to work together against California’s raging wildfires.
Vilsack, acknowledging criticisms that the U.S. Forest Service hasn’t done enough to fight fires, said the Biden administration was ready to spend billions beefing up the agency.
“We’re partners,” Newsom said during an appearance last week with Vilsack at the Mendocino National Forest.
After four years of antagonism between Sacramento and Washington, the state has a friend in the White House — and, perhaps more importantly, a president who agrees with California’s leaders on the root cause of the wildfire crisis plaguing the West.
Former President Donald Trump — like his successor — said Western forests have to be managed more aggressively to reduce fuel loads that have built up over the decades. Newsom signed a memorandum of understanding last year with the Trump administration in which each side promised to “thin” a half-million acres of forestland each year.
But Biden, unlike Trump, says the country must address climate change and the lethal effect it’s having on the increasingly-flammable landscape of the West.
California’s clash with Trump over climate issues took many forms — including years of litigation over the state’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions from cars.
But the conflict may have crystallized in one extraordinary moment last September, when the president held a roundtable discussion with state leaders in Sacramento as the Mendocino forest was being scorched during the worst wildfire season on record.
During the meeting at the former McClellan Air Force Base, the secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, Wade Crowfoot, challenged Trump to do something about climate change.
In a response that went viral, Trump said global warming was reversing itself. “It will start getting cooler,” he told an incredulous Crowfoot. “Just you watch.”
Biden, during a recent video meeting with Newsom and other Western governors about wildfires, took a different approach. He said one of his goals is to “convince the American people there is a thing called climate crisis.”
WILDFIRE PREVENTION
En route to a meeting with California Gov. Gavin Newsom about wildfires in September 2020, Trump told reporters that when trees fall and dry out, they become like a “matchstick” and “explode.”
“Also leaves, if you have years of leaves, dried leaves on the ground, it just sets it up. It’s really a fuel for a fire, “ he added. “So they have to do something about it.”
Beyond the rhetoric, Trump signed legislation in 2018 to give $2 billion per year to the U.S. Forest Service specifically for wildfire fighting, instead of forcing it to borrow money from other parts of the agency.
“We need to have adequate forest management, grassland management, so that we don’t have the buildup of fuels which ultimately fuel such a more hot fire,” Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, who helped introduce that legislation, said in an interview last week. “When we rob the very budgets of the agencies that are supposed to be managing the land so that it’s not as susceptible to fire, then we actually add to the problem.”
Despite that, Vilsack said the U.S. Forest Service has actually been “robbing Peter to pay Paul” — taking money away from the U.S. Forest Service’s wildfire kitty and spending it elsewhere. That’s left forests badly overgrown and susceptible to wildfire. He promised to direct billions to the forest service, with an emphasis on funding forest-management projects — but those dollars will depend in large part on Congress passing Biden’s infrastructure bill.
Biden said thinning out the forests is an obvious aid in preventing fires. Trees that have been damaged by insects, fires or climate change “become real tinder” if left standing. “It becomes like dropping a match in a pool of fuel,” he told the Western governors.
The recently appointed chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Randy Moore, previously served as a regional forest manager in California. He accompanied Vilsack to the Mendocino forest.
A spokeswoman for the agency, Babete Anderson, wrote in an email that Moore will “bring perspective informed by a long career in the Forest Service, some of which he served as the Regional Forester in California during a decade when the state saw a dramatic increase in catastrophic wildfire.”
He has started on some of the issues already, Anderson wrote, included staffing and paying firefighters, looking at climate change and forming better partnerships with federal, state, tribal and private land managers.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND WILDFIRES
Trump frequently shrugged off suggestions that climate change was contributing to California’s wildfire problems. After touring the devastation in Paradise, where 85 people were killed in November 2018, he said, “No, No,” when reporters asked him if the Camp Fire changed his mind about climate change.
Biden, meanwhile, has linked his spending priorities to climate change. Several pieces of the bipartisan infrastructure bill are connected to climate change and thus fires, Biden said.
That includes provisions on droughts, floods and funding for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as research shows tribal nations have been disproportionately impacted by climate change. And $3.37 billion out of the $1 trillion deal is dedicated directly to wildfires, including for forest management, satellite fire detection, controlled burns, firefighters and post-fire restoration.
“Overlaying all this is a necessity successfully confront climate change,” Biden said in the meeting with governors.
Biden referenced the infrastructure bill and said that hopefully its two corresponding pieces of legislation, which have been heavily amended, will pass in the next month.
“We can’t ignore how they overlap and they intertwine,” he said. “Extreme heat, prolonged drought and supercharged wildfire conditions are affecting the country.”
Biden also suggested to governors that they consider creating a “civilian climate corps” to specifically tackle climate change, comparing it to civilian corps in the Depression.
“California is proving your theory,” Newsom said in the meeting with Biden on Friday, describing the California Climate Action Corps, established in 2020, which helps protect high-risk communities from wildfires, among other works. “It’s inspiring beyond words.”
FIRE SUPPRESSION IN CALIFORNIA
Newsom’s biggest beef with the Biden administration has been the Forest Service’s approach to fighting fires — a crucial issue in that the federal government controls 57% of California’s vast forested land. He and others said the agency was too slow to react to newly-ignited fires, such as the Tamarack Fire, which is burning in California and Nevada.
“There’s a culture that too often is ‘wait and see,’” Newsom told Biden. “We can’t afford that any longer.”
Biden agreed to offer more federal support, noting that the administration was running into supply chain issues with firefighting tools such as hoses. Moore issued a directive saying the Forest Service would get more aggressive on new fires, but warned that the agency is still struggling with manpower shortages and will have to prioritize those fires that directly threaten people and property.
“You only have so many firefighters,” Moore told The Sacramento Bee during the visit to the Mendocino forest.
Trump did provide California with more equipment. He signed a provision of the defense authorization bill added by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in 2018 to give air tankers that drop fire suppressant to Cal Fire. Three of the seven promised aircraft have been transferred.
Trump focused less on firefighter pay than Biden. The Biden administration recently boosted pay for federal firefighters to $15 per hour and said it would raise pay more as part of the infrastructure bill.
“Up until a couple weeks ago, firefighters in California were getting paid less than the minimum wage,” Rep. Josh Harder, D-Turlock, who pressed for the raise, said in an interview last week.
“I don’t think that made a lot of sense — and they didn’t think it made a lot of sense either, which is why we had a lot of fire trucks sitting idle.”
