Oh Well!!! A Castrated Federal Govt. Facing A New Age Of Wildfires In Forests That Haven't Been "Cleaned"

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Looking back at his first term, Trump had a poor record managing large wildfire emergencies – and he had many opportunities. After presiding over the response to destructive blazes that left a devastating toll, including the Camp fire that claimed the lives of 85 people in and around the town of Paradise, in 2020 he told a crowd in Pennsylvania that high-risk fire states such as California, and their residents, were to blame. “I said you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests – there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up,” he said. That year, a record 10.2m acres were charred across the US. In a signal of how politicized disaster management in the Trump era became, he added: “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.”

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Billion-dollar weather and climate disasters are on the rise. There was a historic number in the US in 2023 with a total of 28 – surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2022. With more than a month left, there have already been 24 this year. Trump has a history of stalling in the aftermath of natural disasters, opting instead to put a political spin on who receives aid. For wildfires during his first term, that meant threatening California and other Democratic-majority states with delayed or withheld funding to punish them for their political leanings.

This time, some fear he may also reduce the amount of aid provided by Fema. Project 2025 has called for a shift in emergency spending, putting the “majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government” and either eliminating or armoring grants that fund preparedness to push Trump’s political agenda. The framework advises the next president to remove all unions from the department and only give FEMA grants to states, localities and private organizations who “can show that their mission and actions support the broader homeland security mission”, including the deportation of undocumented people.

These tactics could hamper both preparedness and recovery from wildfires and other disasters, especially in high-risk blue states such as California and others across the west. The administration has also been advised by Project 2025 authors to dismantle or severely hamper the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose forecasting has been essential to warn when dangerous weather arises, and remove all mention of the climate crisis in federal rhetoric and research.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/18/trump-administration-wildfires-climate-crisis