Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who still has not resigned for some reason, graciously hopped on a plane this weekend to go tour the aftermath of the Carr Fire in California. His primary job was to say nothing of value while patting Donald Trump's addled head and calling him a good boy, so that means defending the Trump notion that if we just cut down more of these very profitable trees this sort of thing wouldn't happen.
“The public lands belong to everybody, not just the special interest groups,” he said as he stood in front of a largely destroyed neighborhood in the Keswick Estates area of west Redding. [...]
He also denied any suggestions that he wants to see wholesale logging operations on public lands. “No one loves public lands more than me,” he said. Forests can be thinned without “destroying our habitat (and) making sure our endangered species get protected,” he said.
"The president's right," he offered on this one, that being the one thing that all Trump staffers are contractually obligated to say during every appearance. He also, however, confessed that "temperatures are getting hotter" while bending over backwards to say it "doesn't matter" whether climate change is real or is not, which is a neat trick. Let’s not bicker about climate change just because we’re seeing a changing climate, you sillies. No need to be divisive.
As a Californian with a very good view of the still-raging fires from mah house, I confess I am a wee bit too tired of this argument to even much care what boot-polishing Zinke and the rest of Trump's personal toadies want to engage in. It is insincere. It doesn't mean anything. Much like Trump's claims that we could stop wildfires by refusing to let so much river water flow into the Pacific Ocean, it's a bare dribbling of someone else's thoughts pushed through the fine mesh screen of the Trump team's unrelenting corruption and stupidity.
The big California fires didn't start in timberlands, but in brushlands. Clearing trees would not have helped. The Mendocino Complex fires, still going strong after the upper fire alone claimed its spot as the largest fire in modern California history, has rapidly burned through well-grazed and well-logged lands. The fires came into being and exploded uncontrollably in size and are still going today because it is Hot. It is very, very hot—the hottest July ever recorded—and it is not even truly fire season yet.
Thinning forests can be a valid method of reducing fire spread when fires occur, once we've mucked up the local ecosystem to such an extent that acre-by-acre intervention becomes necessary, but it is not special interest groups preventing it from happening. It is money. It is not cutting down mature trees that slows fire spread, but cutting down the scrub and brush around those trees, and that costs money. The timber companies would be happy to cut down the mature trees, but doing the sort of thinning that would actually help curb fires costs a lot of money of the sort that Republican hacks are always furiously insisting we cut because Republican golfing buddies desperately need three yachts instead of two so screw the rest of you and screw the National Forests that have been asking for that money for a very, very long time.
Zinke's crowd has been unanimous in their priority-setting and true fire prevention, like building a more robust electricity grid in Puerto Rico, ain't on the list.
So fine, the scandal-plagued and profoundly unqualified Interior secretary flapped his very expensive wings and touched down in California to make the case that Trump Republicans genuinely give a damn about the California fire in unspecified, ambiguous ways that nobody should bother asking about a month from now. Duly noted. He could have stayed home and done the same. We've got enough hot air around here without one of Trump's walking, talking scandals jumping into the fray to provide his own.