The US President visits the forest fire areas and again denies climate change. His opponent Joe Biden promises a greener policy. Enough for a real change?
The leaves are to blame. And dry trees that buckle. They are like matches, and the wind is gasoline. This is how US President Donald Trump sees the situation in the states of California, Oregon and Washington, where devastating forest fires are raging. In California alone, more than 19,000 square kilometres of forest and scrubland, roughly the size of Rhineland-Palatinate, have been destroyed. At least 35 people died, tens of thousands are on the run. For Trump, however, they are not an expression of accelerating climate change, but a failure of the state’s forest management.

And so, during his visit to Sacramento, the president referred all reporters’ questions about climate change to California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. He mentioned that 57 percent of the forest in the state was the responsibility of the federal government and made climate change partly responsible for the fires. In doing so, he contradicted Trump, which, however, did not bother the president. In response to further questions about climate change, he said it was “getting colder soon, just watch”. He contradicted admonitions from a local politician to follow science: “I don’t think science knows.”