Dems seize on wildfires to pound GOP's climate opposition

The wildfire smoke blanketing the Capitol is giving Democrats a fresh opportunity to lambaste the GOP for its opposition to taking action on climate change — including steps that Republicans were taking as the wall of haze descended.

In Congress, Republicans railed this week against climate rules for power plants and attempted to kneecap future regulations on indoor air pollution from gas stoves. In Virginia, meanwhile, state regulators appointed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin voted Wednesday to pull their state out of a regional program meant to slash power companies’ greenhouse gas pollution.

Democrats say those actions fly in the face of a wealth of science, including research backed by the U.S. government, showing that the planet’s warming is worsening wildfires and other disasters around the globe. That reality is now creating milky smog and orange skies for tens of millions of Americans because of smoke from hundreds of fires in Canada, while schools cancel recess and flight delays hamper passengers throughout the East Coast. And it's literally hitting Washington leaders where they live and breathe.

“Imagine being a Republican climate change denier in Congress — you show up to work at the Capitol today, see the skies filled with smoke … and you still don’t get that we need bold and immediate action to save our planet? Ridiculous,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted on Wednesday.

Republicans accused Democrats of overplaying the public health risks. And some said the Canadian blazes are giving East Coast residents a taste of life out West, where destructive wildfires have become the norm.

“I’m guessing people in most Western states would laugh at this being called poor air quality,” House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) said Wednesday during an interview outside the Capitol under a haze-obscured sun.

During a Senate hearing on federal wildfire response Thursday, lawmakers of both parties from Western states emphasized that the smoky conditions D.C. is experiencing have been common in their home states.

“My guess is that folks on the East Coast are already sick of the smoke,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said, referencing travel disruptions the wildfires have caused in cities such as Philadelphia. “Look, this is what we deal with out West frankly every summer.”

Democrats have largely echoed a message that President Joe Biden repeated in a statement Thursday — that the Canadian wildfires and the resulting cascade of smoke are “another stark reminder of the impacts of climate change.”

“It would be irresponsible to have this hearing and not consider the role that climate change is playing in the fires that we’re experiencing in the West in particular, and now in Canada as well,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said during Thursday’s hearing.

Climate scientists say the hotter temperatures caused by climate change have dried out forests and trees, making them more susceptible to blazes. Drought has also fed more intense blazes and fueled longer wildfire seasons. In the global record wildfire year of 2020, California registered five of its 10 largest blazes on record, according to NASA.

Some Republicans — including former President Donald Trump — have argued instead for more effective forest management to prevent wildfires from happening. Democrats and climate scientists acknowledge forest health plays a role, but that Republicans are missing the point by minimizing how a hotter world is fueling longer, more intense fire seasons.

Westerman, who notes he is the only professional forester in Congress, said better management is the best way to tame wildfires while ensuring carbon-sucking forests stay standing.

“We're not going to change global carbon emissions in a short enough time to get near the benefits we would get from actually going in and making our forests healthy,” he said.

For the most part, GOP lawmakers no longer dispute that climate change is occurring — even if Trump, their leading White House contender, has dismissed climate change as a hoax “created by and for the Chinese.” (At a wildfire briefing three years ago, Trump assured California’s natural resources chief that “it’ll start getting cooler, just watch.”)

Instead, the main Republican attack on Biden’s climate policy is that a quick transition away from fossil fuels would make the United States dependent on countries such as China. They have also questioned whether specific disasters, like the wildfire smoke now coursing down the coast, are directly linked to a hotter world.

“We’ve had wildfires forever, and I’m sure this is not the first time that this has ever happened,” Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), who in the past two congressional sessions sat on the now-defunct House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, told POLITICO. “We have to work toward getting us to less carbon emissions, but I don’t know how much of this is really due to climate change.”

But the causes of climate change are well known: Burning fossil fuels has created most of the warming the world has experienced, multiple studies endorsed by bodies such as the federal government’s 13-agency National Climate Assessment have found, and climate scientists say restricting their use would curtail the damage.

The two parties are also at odds on the larger role of federal regulations in protecting the environment — including by lessening air pollution, which was a much bigger problem before Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970.

Independent studies have shown that that law has led to fewer premature deaths and illnesses, as well as other benefits such as improved productivity and lower medical expenses. Federal agencies also banned leaded gasoline for cars starting in the mid-1970s, while state and local rules helped drive cigarette smoking out of workplaces and public establishments.

The Biden administration’s efforts to build on those rules are getting a sharp response from the GOP.

This week, Republicans on the House and Commerce Committee criticized a proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule that would require many fossil fuel power plants to slash their greenhouse gas pollution by as much as 90 percent by 2040.

House Republicans also attempted to schedule votes on bills that would prevent the Energy Department and the Consumer Product Safety Commission from tightening regulations on gas-fired stoves, whose emissions have drawn concern for their effects on both human health and the climate.

At the state level, Virginia regulators voted Wednesday to leave a regional carbon market known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, in which 11 Northeast and mid-Atlantic states use economic leverage to reduce climate pollution from power plants. Youngkin has vowed to leave the compact, which he called a "failed program," while critics have questioned whether he can legally withdraw the state without the legislature’s approval.

Beyond those details, the wildfire disaster gave supporters of climate action a fresh example to point to for the urgent need to lessen fossil fuel use.

About 71 percent of Americans experienced extreme weather like floods or wildfires in the past year, with nearly 80 percent of those people linking it to climate change, according to aPew Research Center survey released in April. With places such as Long Island likely experiencing wildfire smoke for the first time in recent memory, it’s possible some Republican representatives will have to respond to climate concerns in new ways, said Elizabeth Gore, senior vice president for political affairs with the Environmental Defense Fund.

“It might not happen this week, but I do think that it is a contributing factor to the effort to accelerate activity on Capitol Hill,” she said.

Swiftly addressing the root causes of climate change such as fossil fuel consumption would help minimize destructive events, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University.

“I really thought we’d be able to adapt to the changes if we made the investments in economic and human capital,” he said. “And that was clearly wrong. We’re clearly not keeping up — we’re getting further and further behind.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who during the previous Congress led investigations into what oil companies knew about climate change while they lobbied against environmental policies, said some GOP lawmakers are heeding the message — he praised the dozens of Republicans who have joined the Conservative Climate Caucus led by Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah). Still, he said the party overall still hasn't made enough progress on accepting the reality of climate change.

"I believe until you have people running and winning in the Republicans on a climate agenda, it's not going to move,” he said. “And unfortunately they have so politicized a green agenda, a clean tech agenda, that it makes it hard for them to be for any sense of the policies."

Irie Sentner contributed to this report.