Why Can't The Conservative Brain Grapple With Science-- And Will The Climate Crisis Destroy Us All Because Of That Flaw?

 

Audrey Denney is running for Congress in the northeast corner of California (CA-01), where the state meets Oregon and Nevada. It's a largely rural district with the most exposure to Climate Change-induced wildfires anywhere in the state. She told me yesterday that the Trumpist incumbent, Doug LaMalfa "does not believe in human induced climate change. He has recently called climate change policies 'radical.' He either has been bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry (as his FEC reports show)-- or he doesn’t have the capacity to wrap his mind around science. He has also been quoted as saying abortions cause breast cancer-- so I am leaning toward both."

Denney, whose campaign leans heavily on talking with voters about the Climate Crisis said that "Climate change is not a threat in the distant future. It is taking the lives, homes, and livelihoods of people who live in my district today. We lost 93 lives in 2018 in the Carr and Camp Fires and we lost at least 15 lives last week in the North Complex fire. In 2018 the Carr fire and Camp Fire alone emitted nine times as much CO2 as the state of California was able to reduce our emissions by that year.  Our federal forests are MASSIVE carbon sources-- but have the potential to be carbon sinks-- actually helping us turn the dial back on climate change. Forty-one percent of my district-- and fifty seven percent of the state of California-- is federal forests. And the vast majority of them are in desperate need of vegetation management work and forest restoration work to bring them back to a state of health. This is the only way we will reduce our fire risk and be able to mitigate climate change. If you do not think this work is critically important than you are not paying attention. Or perhaps live in one of the few places that is not shrouded in smoke from the West’s fires... Only by restoring our forests to health by doing the critical thinning, selective logging, and fuels-reduction work, will we be able to lessen our wildfire risk and mitigate the dangerous result of climate change. We can create economic incentives to find new industry utilization for the woody biomass removed from our forests. This will look like manufacturing sustainable building materials like cross laminated timber (CLT) and processing woody biomass into low carbon transportation fuels. We can set policies in place to support the career and technical education programs and apprenticeship programs that will be necessary to build the required local workforce. All of these opportunities mean high paying jobs and more economic opportunity for the real people of California’s first district."

Yesterday, Ron Brownstein's Atlantic column asks a simple question millions of Americans probably have asked themselves at one time or another, Why is it that Republican officials still don’t care about Climate Change?. He begins by introducing us to Mary Nichols, who's been "part of the struggle to prevent catastrophic climate change for about as long as anyone in American life. For years, she’s directed California’s pathbreaking efforts to reduce carbon emissions as the chair of the California Air Resources Board-- a position she held first in the 1970s before taking it up again in 2007. Nichols has also served at the federal level, working as the chief regulator for air pollution at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. And yet even Nichols has never seen anything that crystallizes the dangers of climate change more clearly than the historic outbreak of wildfires scorching California and other western states this year. 'Yes, absolutely,' she told me earlier this week, when I asked her whether this year’s fires are the most tangible danger to California that she’s seen from climate change. 'It’s not suddenly going to reverse itself … to years when there’s no fire season, or it’s not going to happen until October. The changes are going to be real, and they are going to be long-lasting.'"

Then he introduced us to Carol Browner who served as the EPA administrator for both of Clinton’s presidential terms and later worked as Obama’s first White House adviser on climate. "When she looks at the confluence of extreme-weather events battering the United States in recent years-- not only the wildfires, but also the Gulf Coast hurricanes, Midwest flooding, and the Southwest’s extreme heat-- Browner likewise sees stark evidence that climate change is disrupting American life earlier and more powerfully than almost anyone expected when the debate over these issues seriously began about three decades ago. 'What we have now is the absolute environmental demonstration or evidence of just how dramatic the impact of climate change is going to be. This is not going to stop,' Browner told me. 'There is going to be something next year, and the year after, if we don’t get on it.'"

Environmental scientists and policy experts around the country agree that the massive wildfires are just the latest indicator that climate change has thrust the U.S., and the world, into a dangerous new era. But it’s far from certain that the growing recognition of that threat can break the stalemate over climate policy in Washington. The accumulating evidence about climate change’s destructive power represents an irresistible force for action. But it’s colliding with an immovable object: the unbreakable resistance to any response among both Republican voters and elected officials.

Polling shows that, overall, a growing share of Americans believe climate change is happening, that human activities are driving it, and that the threat is manifesting right now. But as on many issues, the gap on all of these questions is widening between voters in the Republican coalition and other Americans. Annual polls by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that although the numbers have increased markedly for Democrats, Republican partisans are no more likely than in 2008 to believe that human activity is causing climate change, and they express even less concern about its impact now than they did then. (Belief in human causation has declined somewhat among independents, but concern about the effects of climate change has increased substantially.)

These attitudes within the GOP coalition both reflect and reinforce Republican officials’ rejection of any effort to reduce carbon emissions. [The Donald], echoed by many prominent conservative commentators and congressional Republicans, continues to dismiss the evidence that climate change is even contributing to the spike in extreme-weather events. With Joe Biden offering the most aggressive climate-change agenda of any Democratic presidential nominee in history, the conditions for the long-stalled debate over the issue in Washington are becoming as combustible as the dried forest floors of California.

Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale climate program, says that in the past, even those Americans concerned about climate change tended to see it as a remote problem. “It was distant in time, [in] that the impacts won’t be felt for a generation or more,” he told me. And it was “distant in space”-- “this is about polar bears and maybe some developing countries, but not the United States … not my friends, not my family, not me.”

Seen through that lens, he said, climate “just blended in the background with 1,000 other issues out there... so we can deal with it later. That’s where more of the country was in 2007 and 2008. Now we skip forward to today, that’s not true anymore because of the [weather] events we’ve been talking about.”

In Yale’s polling, the share of Americans who say that climate change is affecting weather at least somewhat reached nearly three-fifths in 2020, up from about half in early 2013. But Leiserowitz said more disruptive weather events aren’t the only things moving attitudes on climate. Another important factor is the broad, diverse chorus of voices expressing worry about it. Ten years ago, he noted, Americans might have heard concern about the climate only from “environmentalists and liberal politicians like Al Gore”; now it’s much more common to hear concerns raised by public-health professionals, business executives, and even faith leaders, such as Pope Francis.

The result has been an undeniable, though not overwhelming, shift in public opinion. In Yale’s latest national survey this spring, slightly more than three-fifths of Americans said human activities are causing the climate to change, a new high. The share of Americans who say they are very worried about climate change’s impact is relatively modest, at 27 percent. But it’s nearly double the level it was in 2008; overall, about two-thirds of respondents are now either very or somewhat worried.

Americans’ attitudes about the imminence of the danger have changed more drastically: 45 percent in the latest survey described climate change as a threat to Americans now, a big increase from 33 percent in 2008. The share who say climate change won’t be a problem for 25 years or more is at 42 percent, down 10 points compared with 2008.

Yet, on all of these fronts, the movement has not been symmetrical. Democrats are expressing much more concern than they were a decade ago, and most independents slightly more. Republicans, meanwhile, are either no more or even less concerned. (Rigid GOP attitudes largely explain why the overall shift in public opinion on many questions hasn’t been more dramatic, despite the quickening pace of weather disruption.) Since 2008, for instance, the share of Democrats who say human activity is causing climate change has spiked from 70 percent to 85 percent; among Republicans, it’s virtually unchanged, at just 37 percent. And although nearly half of Democrats now say they are very worried about climate change (almost double the level in 2008), only about one in 14 Republicans is equally concerned. That share is essentially unchanged from 12 years ago.

This pattern of public attitudes looks very similar to opinions on racial-equity issues: Compared with a decade ago, substantially more Democrats of all races accept that systemic racism against Black Americans is a serious problem; however, many Republicans are even less likely to agree it exists compared with 10 years ago. The divergence between the parties on climate, as on race, reflects the larger resorting of the electorate along lines of culture rather than class. (Republicans, as I’ve written, increasingly rely on a coalition of older, non-college-educated, evangelical, and rural white voters, while Democrats depend heavily on young people, people of color, and college-educated white Americans.)

Just as many Republican voters have cheered GOP attacks on public-health experts during the coronavirus crisis, portraying them as “elites” who look down on and want to control ordinary people, they have embraced similar accusations against climate scientists. “Climate change is an issue... where most people don’t know that much... and in those circumstances-- especially for an abstract, seemingly far away, invisible problem like climate change-- they look to their leaders to help guide them through that incredibly complicated landscape,” Leiserowitz told me. “Republicans who began talking about climate change as if it was a ‘hoax’ had an incredible impact on other Republicans.”

Many environmentalists have hoped that more and more exposure to the furious effects of weather disruption might soften resistance among Republican voters and leaders to acting on climate change. But in dramatic polling last year from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post even Republican voters who acknowledge that their communities are facing more extreme weather overwhelmingly reject the notion that climate change is significantly contributing to those events.

Detailed results provided to me by Kaiser underscore an astonishing gap between the parties. Among people who agree that their communities are experiencing either more hot days, more floods, or more droughts, at least three-fourths of Democrats say climate change is a “major factor” in those events; but at least seven in 10 Republicans in each case say it is only a minor factor, or does not contribute at all. Slightly more than seven in 10 Democrats living in places experiencing more wildfires consider climate change a major factor in causing them; three-fourths of Republicans see climate as little or none of the cause. Even after this summer’s searing events, an Economist/YouGov poll released yesterday found that although three-fourths of Biden supporters said “the severity of recent hurricanes and Western wildfires is most likely the result of global climate change,” fewer than one in five Trump voters agreed.

Those contrasts offer very little reason for optimism that even if Biden wins, any meaningful numbers of congressional or state-level Republicans will feel pressure to support measures to reduce carbon emissions. Among other reasons for pessimism: In both presidential and Senate elections, Republicans are more and more reliant on the states that produce the most fossil fuels, which tend to be the same states with large populations of non-college-educated, Christian, and rural white voters drawn to Trump’s message of racial and cultural backlash.

Across the 20 states that emit the most carbon per dollar of economic output-- a good proxy for states’ integration into the fossil-fuel economy-- Republicans now hold 35 of their 40 Senate seats. That’s nearly enough senators to sustain a GOP filibuster against climate action on its own. The final brick in the wall of GOP opposition is that fossil-fuel producers, once an important source of campaign funding for southern Democrats such as Lyndon B. Johnson, are all-in on bolstering Republican power. Over the past 30 years, oil and gas producers have directed more than 80 percent of their massive $711 million in total federal campaign contributions toward Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Gene Karpinski, the longtime president of the League of Conservation Voters, the environmental movement’s principal electoral arm, sees little prospect for GOP participation on climate even if Trump loses. “Because of the fossil-fuel influence on the Republican Party and the leader of the party still calling climate change a ‘hoax,’” GOP skepticism about “climate change is out of step with the rest of the country,” he says.

But others see some cracks in the resistance. Kenneth Medlock, the director of the Center for Energy Studies at the Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, says the terms of daily discussion in Texas and in neighboring states have changed since Houston was deluged with historic floods during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. “Even in the Gulf Coast, the conversation around extreme-weather events and the like is more the norm than it was five years ago,” he told me. “Up until Harvey happened, nobody really wanted to address the elephant in the room, which is that the climate is changing and this is a real risk.”

Even with that evolving dialogue, Medlock doesn’t expect big changes among Republican elected officials in Texas. He predicts that, to the extent that they acknowledge climate change, they would be more likely to talk about fortifying communities against its effects (an issue he considers important too) than to talk about reducing carbon emissions. But Medlock anticipates that position will become more and more untenable for Republicans over time-- not because their voters necessarily demand more action, but because the business community and institutional investors will keep moving ahead without them to cut carbon.

The dialogue among elected Republicans, he told me, “has kind of quietly shifted.” He explained that the Baker Institute, which is based at Rice University, is involved in several initiatives aimed at reducing net-carbon emissions in the region. “What’s really interesting about [those] efforts is that when we talk to state lawmakers and federal lawmakers [including Republicans], there’s no resistance,” he continued. “You open the conversation with, ‘The world is changing; consumers and investors are demanding lower carbon footprints; this is an economic opportunity for Texas...’ and immediately the conversation becomes very lively. So, in some ways, it’s about how you approach the conversation.”

Sean McElwee, the Data for Progress pollster who analyzes progressive causes, sees a similar opening. Although most Republican voters still recoil from measures presented as addressing climate change, more are open to promoting clean-energy sources, he says. (Yale’s polling has found that too.) “When we do testing … clean energies are very popular among Republican voters, and people are really interested in the jobs framework,” he told me. Just as important: Relatively few Republican voters intuitively embrace arguments from Trump and others that defending oil, gas, and coal is a culture-war statement against “elitists” promoting solar and wind energies. “I don’t think voters have an allegiance to coal and oil the way Republican politicians have,” he said.

Browner, the former EPA head, is also a voice of relative optimism. “If Biden wins and they start moving forward” with a climate agenda, she told me, “there will be Republicans calling. Maybe I’m a minority on this, but when they see you are serious and you want to do something, they want a seat at the table.”

Even if Republicans remain obdurate, unified Democratic control of Congress and the White House is more likely to produce climate action than the last Democratic trifecta in 2009 and 2010, most experts I spoke with said. At that point, the House Democratic Caucus still contained a large number of southern and rural “blue dog” members who resisted cap-and-trade climate legislation the chamber passed in 2009. (Forty-four Democrats voted no.) Now the House Democratic Caucus is overwhelmingly centered on urban and suburban districts where acting on climate is popular. As Karpinski said: “If you look at 2018, the key reason why Nancy Pelosi is now the speaker [is because] it’s mostly suburban and some of the semi-urban districts. It’s a combination of young people, communities of color, and suburban women. They are the most supportive of this issue and want action.”

If Biden wins and Democrats gain the Senate majority, he could drive a big part of his climate agenda through a coronavirus-relief stimulus package; his plan includes massive spending to promote renewable power, electric cars, and energy-efficiency upgrades for homes and businesses. Obama did the same thing in the stimulus package he signed to counter the Great Recession, tucking in huge investments in clean energy (that Biden as vice president was assigned to oversee).

But to secure Senate approval for measures that directly limit carbon emissions, Democrats would almost certainly have to end the filibuster, which empowers what I’ve called the “brown blockade” of Senate Republicans who represent the fossil-fuel-producing states. (Unable to overcome a filibuster, the Senate never considered the cap-and-trade climate bill the House passed in 2009.) And even if Democrats do end the filibuster, serious climate legislation could face a tight squeeze to reach a simple majority, with Joe Manchin, from coal-producing West Virginia, and possibly other Democratic senators having to take a very tough vote.

All of those outcomes are impossible to predict. But what’s clear is that the tension will grow between a sluggish political system locked in a partisan standoff and a climate system that is poised to generate disruption at an accelerating pace. “This is not some ‘new normal’ that we can plan around … it’s a system that continues to spiral out of control,” says Vijay Limaye, an environmental epidemiologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There definitely is a signal in these record-setting months that … we are heading into a new era when we will see records set, and they will fall just as quickly … It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around now, but as bad as things have been this year, unquestionably, they will get worse.”

Nichols, the veteran climate regulator, is just as stark in her warning: Even today’s extreme weather may soon seem like the (relative) calm before the storm. “The rate of change is accelerating, so it is absolutely possible that we’ll see more visible signs of bigger storms,” as well as higher temperatures and sea-level rise, she said. “All of those things could happen much faster.”





She explained that the famous apocalyptic scene from the movie The Day After Tomorrow still isn’t likely to happen, where big waves wash over the skyscrapers of New York City. “But bigger storms and more damage and loss of property and loss of life as a result absolutely is likely going to continue-- not just in a gradual slope, but at a rate of acceleration that is greater than was predicted before,” she said.

The biggest message of the California wildfires may be that not only the terms but the tense of the climate debate is changing. Climate change has evolved from something that will threaten America to something that is doing so today. “The people who used to talk about how they were trying to save the world for their grandchildren need to start thinking about their children and even themselves,” Nichols said.

Kara Eastman is the Democratic candidate running for the Omaha-based congressional seat (NE-02) occupied by Trumpist stooge, Donald Bacon. The Climate crisis is a big issue she talks with Nebraska voters about constantly promising to help lead the battle when she replaces-nothing-Bacon in Congress:

Climate change-- appropriately called climate chaos by many-- is clearly the result of human activity. The wildfires on the West Coast bring this reality into dramatic relief. In order to reverse this trend we need immediate action from policy-makers from the entire political spectrum. In the past, there was an environmental consensus. Major environmental legislation from the Clean Water Act through the Montreal Protocol Treaty were passed by huge majorities on both sides of the aisle. Unfortunately, due to the extremist takeover of the Republican party, led by Donald Trump and Don Bacon, the GOP is no longer the party of the environment. On the contrary, they continue to give voice to the fringe belief that the massive climate upheavals we are witnessing in real-time today are part of some "normal" weather cycle, moreover, that these events we can see with our eyes and choke on in our lungs aren't really even happening.

Don Bacon wants to have it both ways. In front of a Republican audience, he says the the science is "uncertain" on climate, but on the other hand he claims membership to the bipartisan but largely ineffectual climate solutions caucus when he's confronted by local voters. Meanwhile, in Nebraska's Second Congressional District, we suffered from one of the hottest and driest summers on record, a year after central Nebraska suffered from devastating floods.

When I am in Congress, I will join my colleagues in putting climate front and center of the agenda. Nebraskans will be able to count on me to push a climate agenda, not simply push greenwashed window dressing. It's no longer some distant future crisis. It's here and now and we need to get to work.

Beth Doglio is in a D v D congressional general election in Washington. She's a progressive, endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus and her opponent is a ConservaDem endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street owned and operated New Dems. There is no issue more important in her campaign than Climate. And Beth has a stellar record while her opponent's record is putrid and, basically, Republican. Yesterday Beth told me that "As the wildfires rage on the West Coast, lives are being lost, towns are burning to the ground, and millions of acres of land are now charred deserts. This is climate change. The stakes have never been higher and the consequences of failing to act have never been more clear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that we have just one decade, one last chance to act, before it’s too late." She continued:

The United States must step up and must act with the urgency this moment demands. And the reality is that beyond its dangers, climate change actually presents us with a great opportunity. We can build a clean energy economy, strengthen our middle-class, and create millions of good union jobs. But we need leaders with expertise to get us there. Leaders who have stood up to the fossil fuel industry and won. Leaders who have actually passed policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and grow jobs.

As a climate advocate, I led the effort to stop the development of 7 coal export terminals dead in their tracks, while my opponent as mayor was busy working to site the world’s largest Methanol plant in her town. While she points in part to her support for community gardens as her track record on climate issues, I point to playing a pivotal role in passing legislation that significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions-- like the nation’s best 100% Clean Electricity Bill that integrates equity and labor standards with hard deadlines to remove fossils fuels from our electric sector and grow clean energy jobs. Or my first of its kind Green Buildings Law that makes our buildings more healthy and efficient at the same time it creates jobs. I’m calling for a sector-by-sector decarbonization of our economy. I am serious about and experienced in pushing for and passing emission reduction policies that will leave a safe planet for my kids.

You can ask anyone-- I love gardening and, in fact, I helped build a robust garden program at my children's elementary school-- but gardening is not what is going to get us out of this! This issue can no longer take a backseat, play second fiddle, remain an afterthought. We must have a plan, it must be ambitious, it must go far enough. I am calling for Washington, D.C. to follow Washington state’s lead and get serious about passing legislation to address the issue at scale.

Trump Didn't Set The Wildfires, But...

Another non-partisan Patagonia ad

Trump won support from just 31.6% of Californians, but that still came to 4,483,810 votes-- more than anywhere else but Texas (4,685,047) and Florida (4,617,886). Almost four and a half million Californians voted for him and, disproportionately, they're in parts of the state that are on fire. Also 1,221,747 Washingtonians and 782,403 Oregonians voted for him. But he's offering no help or solace to anyone on the West Coast and feels put upon but this over demonstration of Climate Change or, as he puts it, the "Chinese hoax."

One hard hit fire area is the Butte/Tehama/Glenn Lightning Complex, 3 counties that are as red as you can imagine. Trump won Butte with 48%, Glenn with 61.7% and Tehama gave him 65.5%. But because the West Coast's 74 electoral votes went to Hillary and will go to Biden... Trump doesn't care about anyone in California, Oregon or Washington. NPR reported over the weekend that annual catastrophic wildfires "are the latest signal that we shouldn't necessarily even be rebuilding or encouraging more development in places we know will burn. In the libertarian-leaning West, loose building codes and other factors have been attributed to an explosion in development in wild lands that are prone to fire. Yet therein lies one of the biggest and thorniest issues facing the West, and many other parts of the country in this era of climate change. Many people are living in high fire risk areas in California and Oregon in particular because it's the only place they can afford to."

Robert Reich's read on the wildfires is similar-- Trump doesn't care if wildfires destroy the west-- it didn't vote for him. He wrote that the air quality outside of his window is yellow, although it was orange the day before. And the Air Quality Index where he is is over 200-- and has been for several days. The EPA defines numbers that high as a "health alert" in which "everyone may experience more serious health effects if they are exposed for 24 hours." Today it will have been 96 hours. "The west is burning," he wrote. "Wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington are incinerating homes, killing scores of people, sickening many others, causing hundreds of thousands to evacuate, burning entire towns to the ground, consuming millions of acres, and blanketing the western third of the United States with thick, acrid and dangerous smoke. Yet the president has said and done almost nothing. A month ago, Trump wanted to protect lives in Oregon and California from 'rioters and looters.' He sent federal forces into the streets of Portland and threatened to send them to Oakland and Los Angeles. Today, Portland is in danger of being burned and Oakland and Los Angeles are under health alerts. Trump will visit California on Monday, but he has said little. One reason: these states voted against him in 2016 and he still bears a grudge. He came close to rejecting California’s request for emergency funding. 'He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him,' said former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor."

Another explanation for Trump’s silence is that the wildfires are tied to human-caused climate change, which Trump has done everything humanly possible to worsen.

Extreme weather disasters are rampaging across America. On Wednesday, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released its latest State of the Climate report, finding that just in August the US was hit by four billion-dollar calamities. In addition to wildfires, there were two enormous hurricanes and an extraordinary Midwest derecho.

These are inconvenient facts for a president who has spent much of his presidency dismantling every major climate and environmental policy he can lay his hands on.

Starting with his unilateral decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump has been the most anti-environmental president in history.

He has called climate change a “hoax.” He has claimed, with no evidence, that windmills cause cancer. He has weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plants and from cars and trucks. He has rolled back rules governing clean air, water and toxic chemicals. He has opened more public land to oil and gas drilling.

He has targeted California in particular, revoking the state’s authority to set tougher car emission standards than those required by the federal government.

In all, the Trump administration has reversed, repealed, or otherwise rolled back nearly 70 environmental rules and regulations. More than 30 rollbacks are still in progress.

Trump may be a ring-leader couldn't do this alone. In California, Climate Change-denying conservatives are complicit. I asked some of the California candidates being opposed by conservatives why more isn't being done about Climate in a state that should be much tougher in protecting the people here.

California Is Burning-- But Trump Told FEMA Not To Help Because Not Enough Californians Voted For Him In 2016

There are dozens of wildfires raging across northern California right now-- primarily in Napa, Sonoma, Solano, Lake and Yolo counties. Thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes. At least 5 people, including 2 first responders, are dead. During his Convention segment Thursday night, Gavin Newsom said "If you are in denial about climate change, come to California." Led by Ted Lieu, the majority of California's congressional delegation has asked Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari to open an investigation into allegations-- watch the video from the former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff below-- that the federal government improperly denied or delayed aid to California wildfire victims. The letter follows allegations from a former Department of Homeland Security official that President Trump ordered FEMA to deny assistance to Californians because of the political demographics of the state. Taylor said that on a phone call with FEMA, Trump told them "to cut off the money and no longer give individual assistance to California. He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn't support him."





Trump has lost whatever bit of sanity he ever had. Although only 31.6% of Californians voted for him, that's still 4,483,810 people-- more voters than from any other states other than Texas and Florida. And most of the worst devastation from the fires were in Republican areas in the northeast corner of the state, solidly Republican CA-01, where a notorious Trump apologist and enabler, Doug LaMalfa is the congressman.

Ted Lieu's letter to Cuffari asks 4 questions all Californians should want to hear answered:

• Did the President or DHS officials improperly influence the issuance of any fire management assistance grant?
• Did the President or DHS officials improperly delay granting or deny any requests for an emergency or major disaster declaration?
• Did the President or DHS officials attempt to revoke or delay the distribution of any assistance that had already been granted to California fire victims?
• Did the President or DHS officials improperly deny requests from the State of California to adjust state and local cost share requirements associated with debris removal and emergency protective measures assistance?

Lieu asked every member of the California delegation to sign onto his letter. Most did-- but not a single Republican did. They rejected it out of hand. Kevin McCarthy, Devin Nunes, Ken Calvert, Tom McClintock, Paul Cook, Mike Garcia and, most shockingly, Doug LaMalfa all showed they would rather stand with Trump politically than stand with their own constituents in a life or death situation. California has 53 House members but just 7 are Republicans. In a justice world, there wouldn't be single California Republican left in Congress.

Liam O'Mara is a history professor in Riverside County running for the last southern California seat the GOP has managed to cling onto. Yesterday, after reading Lieu's letter-- and seeing Ken Calvert wasn't a signatory-- O'Mara noted that "Calvert is a hyper-partisan creature, afraid to buck this president and act in the interests of Californians. His spinelessness is part of the reason he's never chaired a committee and authored so little legislation-- he's afraid to stand out from the crowd. Our 'Representative' will never have the courage to challenge his own party leadership, even when doing so is transparently in the interests of his constituents and his home state. Failing to speak up as Californians die and their houses are destroyed is unconscionable and almost criminally negligent."

There's another corrosive "Devin" in the Central Valley-- it's a popular name among Republicans-- Devon Mathis of Tulare County, widely considered one of the California legislatures very worst members. His opponent is a young progressive first-time candidate, Drew Phelps, who told us that "Once again, California is faced with an unprecedented wildfire season. Meanwhile, to find out recently that the federal administration may have withheld past wildfire aid is extremely alarming. While our state leaders and the federal administration can bicker over policy differences, putting human lives at stake over those differences is never acceptable and should not be tolerated."

Jackie Fielder is running for California Assembly also, but in a November contest that pits her-- a staunch progressive-- against another Democrat, Scott Wiener, a corporate shill and conservative lackey of special interests. Jackie told me yesterday that "Californians affected by the wildfires are Americans, too. Whether the President likes it or not, he is their president. It’s disgusting he would let politics get in the way of providing relief for people who are being asked to leave their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs in the middle of the night. We simply don’t have enough resources to fight these fires and save lives."

One Day Soon, When The Earth Is Barely Habitable, Will People Hunt Down Today's Politicians And Hang Them? Will There Be Trials First?

It’s 3,350 miles from Canberra, capital of Australia, to Jakarta, capital-- for now-- of Indonesia, a little less than 7 hours by air.

Air quality index (AQI) readings above 200 are considered dangerous to human health. A reading over 300 means no one should go outdoors. This week in Canberra readings were over 3,000-- sometimes double that. And some of the Canberra suburbs like Monash and Florey were even worse. There are cities around the world you’ve probably never heard of where breathing the air is deadly-- Linfen, Pingdingshan, Luohe, Zhengzhou, Dongying, Jining, Xinxiang, Anyang, Jinan and dozens more in China, Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, Al-Ahmadi in Kuwait, Barisal, Gazipur and Narayangong in Bangladesh, Nagpur, Jodhpur, Lucknow, Patna, Faridabad, Kanpur and dozens more in India. And speaking of India, the capital city, Delhi is basically unlivable-- as is a hip and happening suburb, Gurugram-- and three the the country’s greatest tourist attractions, Agra, Jaipur and Varanasi (formerly Benares) are to dangerous to visit without a heavy duty mask. Three of Pakistan’s biggest cities are also basically uninhabitable-- Karachi, Rawalpindi, Peshawar-- as are the capitals of Mongolia (Ulaan Baatar) and Uganda (Kampala).

I was supposed to visit Hanoi over the Christmas holiday but I cancelled the trip at the last minute when the AQI readings were hovering around 700. I first visited Katmandu, capital of Nepal, in 1971 and loved it. I’ve been back several times but the last time I was there, will, unfortunately be the last time. A heavy duty breathing mask wasn’t enough.

You’ve read about the fires in Australia, right? As Adam Morton, the environmental editor of The Guardian reported last week, Yes, Australia has always had bushfires: but 2019 is like nothing we've seen before. “Record low rainfall,” he wrote, “has contributed to a continent-scale emergency that has burned through more than 5 million hectares… an area larger than many countries… and alarmed scientists, doctors and firefighters.” Over a thousand homes have been burned and at least 9 people have died-- as have hundreds of millions of animals.

The right-wing government-- which denies a Climate Crisis-- is trying to play the whole thing down as just run of the mill stuff. The firefighting agency for New South Wales begs to differ. And David Bowman, director of The Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania, says “the most striking thing about this fire season is the continent-scale nature of the threat. ‘The geographic range, and the fact it is occurring all at once, is what makes it unprecedented. There has never been a situation where there has been a fire from southern Queensland, right through NSW, into Gippsland, in the Adelaide Hills, near Perth and on the east coast of Tasmania.’“

He says one of the less explored issues, though it has begun to receive some attention in recent days, is the economic impact of having prolonged fires that affect so many Australians.”

“You can’t properly run an economy when you get a third to a half of the population affected by smoke, and the media completely focused on fires,” he says. “I’m not quite certain why anybody would want to be claiming fires have been like this before. It’s concerning as it is a barrier to adaptation. To deal with these sort of fires the first step is to acknowledge the scale of the problem.”

Ross Bradstock, from the University of Wollongong’s Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, points to the Gospers Mountain fire, which started in a lightning strike north-west of Sydney in late October and has now burned about 500,000 hectares, as evidence of how this season differs from what has come before.

The fire has now combined with others on the NSW Central Coast to create a mega-blaze, but Bradstock says it was almost certainly the largest single ignition-point forest fire recorded in Australia and, for mid-latitude forests, possibly the world. He says it is bigger than any in California and Mediterranean Europe. A large fire in those conditions is usually about 100,000 hectares.

“We can find no evidence of forest fires of that size anywhere,” he says. “You just don’t see fires of this size in these parts of the world because you do not usually get the extreme dryness and unrelenting nature of the weather.”

Two months in, Bradstock says the Gospers Mountain is a monster, “just unimaginably big” and near impossible to contain unless there is substantial rain.

…This season has also seen the loss of rainforests, wet eucalypt forests, dried-out swamps and banana plantations that do not usually burn because they are too wet.

Damage to the Gondwana rainforests in 40 reserves between Brisbane and Newcastle prompted the Unesco world heritage centre to last month express their concern to Australian authorities. The reserves include the largest areas of subtropical rainforest on the planet, some warm temperate rainforest and nearly all the world’s Antarctic beech cool temperate rainforest. They are considered a living link to the vegetation that covered the southern supercontinent Gondwana before it broke up about 180 million years ago.

There are also fears critically endangered Wollemi pines have burned in the fires tearing through the Blue Mountains. They were thought extinct until discovered by bushwalkers in 1994. Their whereabouts had been kept secret from the public to keep them safe.

Authorities say the smoke that has smothered Sydney, Canberra and other centres and towns in recent weeks has produced pollution up to 11 times greater than the hazardous level for human health. In Sydney, the air pollution has been hazardous for at least 30 days.

NSW’s director of environmental health, Richard Broome, last week told reporters the state was enduring “an unprecedented emergency from a smoke point of view”. “We haven’t seen conditions like this in Sydney, certainly in anyone’s memory that I’ve spoken to,” he said.

Broome said there is early evidence that the number of people turning up at hospital emergency departments needing help is higher than usual. Dr Kate Charlesworth, a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, said there was no safe level of air pollution, and that the most vulnerable in the community-- babies, children, the elderly and people with pre-existing disease-- were the most likely to be affected.

What role does climate change play?

The explanation should be familiar by now: greenhouse gas emissions do not cause bushfires, but they play a demonstrated role in increasing average and particularly extreme temperatures and contribute to the extraordinarily dry conditions afflicting eastern Australia.

Scientists cite the near absolute lack of moisture in the landscape as a key reason the fires have been so severe.

Multiple studies, here and overseas, have found the climate crisis is lengthening the fire season.

In the past, the season started in spring in NSW before moving south to Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the new year. Just as Australia’s fire season is more overlapping with that in California, making resource-sharing more difficult, it is also running simultaneously across the country.

Among other issues, that is putting greater strain on volunteer firefighting brigades. It is an issue that firefighters and some experts say the country needs to acknowledge and address. The Morrison government appeared to make an initial, qualified step in this direction on Christmas Eve.

So what does this have to do with Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, Australia’s closest neighbor to the north? Their climate crisis is very different from Canberra’s-- but no less horrifying. Yesterday, Eric Leister, AccuWeather senior meteorologist, reported that heavy rains have caused the worst flooding in years and has turned deadly and left much of the city underwater. So far there are 26 reported deaths, 62,000 have been evacuated from their homes and several parts of the city are without power. Rail and road services all around the city has been disrupted and the airport was forced to shut down.





Reuters: “Dwikorita Karnawati, head of the Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), told reporters separately that heavy rainfall may continue until mid February.”

Over 30 million people live in the Jakarta area-- which is often as polluted as Delhi (and getting worse)-- and the government has recognized that the city isn’t going to survive the Climate Crisis and is planning to move the government to Borneo, northwest of Java, the overcrowded island that includes Jakarta, which is also sinking. When will it be open season on politicians who accept bribes from corporations who benefit from denying the Climate Crisis? When?

Many People Say Trump Started The California Wildfires As A Kind Of Sick Revenge

Rep. Mark DeSaulnier represents a district (CA-11) northeast of San Francisco and Oakland-- most of Contra Costa County: Walnut Creek, Concord, Pittsburg, Danville Antioch, Mount Diablo-- where people are always vigilant to the dangers of wildfires. Mark sits on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and on the Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials. This morning, as the California wildfires continue to cause devastation, he reminded us that "California has some of the strongest environmental laws in the country, but the effects of climate change are causing fires to intensify, and the anti-environment policies enacted by the Trump Administration are only making matters worse. Trump’s attacks on California’s leaders are baseless, and he is grasping at straws to gin up support from his political base. If the President acts on his threat of stripping funding from California, it will be met with fierce opposition."

The California fires are no laughing matter, but Trump is a joke, albeit a tragic one. How predictable is it for him to try blaming the raging California fires on... Adam Schiff and on other Democrats he doesn't like. The L.A. Times covered it over the weekend. James Rainey wrote that "Autumn in California now comes not only with fierce, wind-driven wildfires but with routine claims from President Trump that the state’s leaders are to blame for the disasters, followed by assurances from experts that the president doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The cycle renewed again Sunday, when Trump tweeted that Gov. Gavin Newsom and U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) had failed to properly manage the state’s forests, causing a string of recent blazes. Newsom 'has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must clean his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers,' Trump said in an early-morning missive on Twitter.

A few hours later he concluded a slam on Democrats for their impeachment inquiry against him, concluding, “Corrupt Adam should clean up & manage the California forests which are always burning!”

The president tossed in a shot at the state for its “ridiculously closed” water distribution policies.

The missives drew a combination of incredulity and anger from many Californians, in part because the vast majority of the acres consumed by fire since early October were grasslands and chaparral, far from the forest.

Residents also remarked on the president’s failure to express sympathy for the thousands of people displaced from their homes in recent weeks.

The online fracas did little to illuminate the realities of forest or water policy in California.

Of the 33 million acres of forest in the state, 57% is controlled by the federal government and even the timber industry-- which Trump appears to be trying to support-- has slammed the U.S. for doing too little to manage those vast holdings.

California’s leaders have acknowledged the need to reduce the fuel buildup in the forest the state does control. Gov. Jerry Brown signed a series of bills last year to streamline regulations for thinning forests in fire zones, allow limited removal of some larger trees and force cities and counties to plan better defenses for homes and communities. And Newsom has continued fire threat-reduction initiatives since he took office in January.

“You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation,” Newsom responded to Trump via Twitter. The governor later issued a statement: “We’re successfully waging war against thousands of fires started across the state in the last few weeks due to extreme weather created by climate change while Trump is conducting a full on assault against the antidotes.”

The state government’s expanded commitment to wildfire prevention under Brown included a $1-billion pledge over five years to clean up thousands of acres of deadwood, scrub brush and forest — California’s biggest-ever program to reduce fire fuels.

That $200 million-a-year annual commitment and other spending are helping the state by “reducing fuels in the forest, increasing forest health, and defensible space around homes,” Newsom’s office said.

Countering Trump’s contention that the governor is in the thrall of environmentalists, his office said he had waived environmental regulations to fast-track work on 35 critical fire breaks to protect 200 of the state’s most vulnerable communities.

Newsom’s office contrasted California’s stepped-up efforts with what it said was the federal government’s slashing of spending on the same kind of work.

The U.S. Forest Service has reduced the forest it plans to “treat” through thinning, controlled burns and other measures to 220,000 acres, from the previously promised 310,000 acres, Newsom’s office said.

And California said Trump’s 2020 budget cut $40 million from hazardous fuels reduction.

But that discussion is all about forest land, while the fires that have bedeviled California for several weeks have mostly ignited far away from the tall timber.

The most destructive of the wildfires broke out in brushland near the 405 Freeway on L.A.'s suburban Westside, not far from the Getty Center museum. It was similar terrain that sparked the Easy fire, which threatened the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.

The Hillside fire began in national forest land in the San Bernardino National Forest, before quickly burning downhill into a San Bernardino neighborhood.

Although the massive Kincade fire in Sonoma County burned some forest, it also shifted into grass and scrub country alongside vineyards.

“These fires are not burning in forested landscapes where you could go in and do anything to alter the forest,” said Glen MacDonald, a geography professor at UCLA and expert on climate change and wildfire. “These are scrublands and grasslands and a discussion of forest management is completely not applicable.”

Trump’s statements also fail to acknowledge the amount of work California has done to correct a legacy of fire containment that has left some forests overgrown and loaded with fuel, said Jay Ziegler, director of policy for the Nature Conservancy in California.

“California’s pace and scale of action in addressing this issue at the end of the Brown administration and now under Gov. Newsom is really unprecedented,” Ziegler said.

Trump’s slam was the latest in a series of attacks on California, coming after his attempt to reverse the state’s stringent fuel efficiency requirements for cars and trucks and his blaming of government for the exploding homeless population.

The White House issued no official statement on wildfires, but it appeared the president may have been responding to an interview in which Newsom accused Trump of “a full-on assault” on the state’s attempts to rein in Earth-warming greenhouses gases.

Trump concluded his string of three tweets on California’s wildfires with his attack on the state’s water regulations.

“Also, open up the ridiculously closed water lanes coming down from the North,” he wrote. “Don’t pour it out into the Pacific Ocean. Should be done immediately. California desperately needs water, and you can have it now!”

That embraces the position of some of the state’s farmers-- that too much water is being allowed to flow into the San Joaquin and Sacramento River delta to support salmon, other fish and endangered species.

But it belies the fact that greater snowpack in 2017 and 2019 allowed bigger water allotments to Central Valley farmers, Ziegler said.

“It’s really misleading to tell farmers they could do better and get more water in future years,” Ziegler said, “when we are right at historic export levels because of the big winters we had in 2017 and 2019.”

Trump’s latest broadside comes just short of one year since he attacked California for “gross mismanagement of the forests.”

As with his most recent tweet, he then threatened to withdraw funding from the state, saying “Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Among those chastising the president then was the president of the California Professional Firefighters. Brian Rice called Trump’s message and threat to withhold aid “ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines.”

A couple of months before that, Trump had used Twitter to claim that wildfires were “being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized.”

Again, experts closest to the scene corrected him. “We have plenty of water,” said Scott McLean, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “We are not having any issues with a lack of retardant or water.”

In his latest message Sunday, Trump said that the yearly pattern of fire in California was routinely followed by the state “coming to the Federal Government for $$$ help.” He added: “No more.”

That pronouncement particularly infuriated those who had read just three months ago how Trump had told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. stood ready to send aid to fight massive wildfires in Siberia.

Tweeted one disgruntled American on Sunday: “You forgot to send your thoughts and prayers to those affected by the fires....but of course we in California didn’t help get you elected so you don’t give a damn about us.”

In 2016, Hillary absolutely pulverized Trump in California--  8,753,788 (61.73%) to 4,483,810 (31.62%). And two years later, just in case Trump didn't get the idea about how the state feels about him, half of California's Republican members of Congress were defeated by Democrats-- 7 out of 14. Orange County was once to the GOP what Bavaria was to the Nazi Party in Germany. Now there is not a single federally-elected Republican left in the county-- 4 having gone down in the 2018 midterms. Next year, a competent DCCC would take down the rest of the California Republicans or at least win the LaMalfa, Nunes, Hunter and McClintock seats as well as the open Cook seat... but there hasn't been a competent DCCC in decades. You can help turn California bluer by clicking on the 2020 California thermometer on the right and contributing what you can to the progressives running against LaMalfa (R), Nunes (R), Republican-lite Blue Dog Jim Costa and one other very special California Democrat who opposes Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal.

Rep. Barbara Lee, like most people in California, is angry at the way Trump is approaching the fires. "Trump," she told her supporters, "is threatening to pull federal aid for those affected. Thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes while thousands more watch the radar in fear as new areas fall under critical threat. For Trump to threaten to pull federal aid for those desperately in need makes me sick. My heart is with all those impacted by these terrible wildfires. I’m so grateful for the first responders who have been working tirelessly to keep us safe in California." She asked people who would normally be contributing to her to give what they can to the California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Relief Fund to help all those impacted by the California wildfires.

Trump Targets Californians For Reprisals-- Californians Will Defeat More Republicans In 2020, Including Him

Active Shooter by Nancy Ohanian

Going into 2018, there were 14 Republicans in California's delegation to Congress, including 4 in Orange County alone. When the new Congress was sworn in, there were no longer any Republicans representing Orange County and the Republicans in the statewide delegation had been halved. Gone were Jeff Denham, David Valadao, Steve Knight, Ed Royce, Mimi Walters, Dana Rohrabacher and Darrell Issa, all of whom had been targeted by Ted Lieu, then DCCC vice chair for the West Coast. Worse yet, the small margins by which many of the others had managed to hold on, indicate that California will very likely lose more Republican congressmen next year. Duncan Hunter, Devin Nunes, Tom McClintock and Doug LaMalfa are all dangerously vulnerable.

Is it fair to blame these losses on Trump, which is exactly what most congressional Republicans and their allies do-- at least in public? "He's like an anchor around our necks," one GOP campaign staffer told me in confidence this morning. "If we stand up to him, we're in danger of losing the base. If we go along with some of his preposterous bullshit, independent voters associate us with him-- and they really hate him... Here in California, there's a growing perception that he is targeting the state for retribution and that's going very badly for us."

On Thursday, Politico published an essay by Michael Grunwald, Trump's War On California. This is what the state's shrinking pool of Republican elected officials have to live with-- starting with his constant bashing of the state. That he targets Democrats like Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters, the governor etc. with immature nicknames, hurts the party brand among independent voters-- and remember, in California, the GOP has fewer registered voters than people who have registered as independents.

Trump and his cronies, points out Grunwald, "have begun framing 2020 as a last stand against the hippie-lefty Californication of America. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk has warned that 'Democrats want California to be the blueprint for America,' while Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, has suggested that Trump’s reelection slogan should be: 'I’m not going to let the Democrats turn America into California.'"

California has earned its reputation as the politically correct capital of Blue America, a heavily urban majority-minority coastal state where it’s legal to smoke pot but illegal for retailers to provide plastic bags or cops to ask suspects their immigration status. Taxes are high, the first year of community college is free and driver’s licenses have a third option for residents who don’t identify as male or female. But while California has plenty of problems, from worsening wildfires to overpriced housing to that troubled bullet-train project that became the latest target of presidential mockery, there’s one serious hitch in the GOP plan to make California a symbol of Democratic dysfunction and socialistic stagnation: It’s basically thriving.

“California is doing awesome,” says Congressman Ted Lieu, an immigrant from Taiwan who co-chairs the policy and communications committee for the House Democratic Caucus. “It’s a beautiful, welcoming, environmentally friendly place that proves government can work. Who wants to run against that?”

California is now the world’s fifth-largest economy, up from eighth a decade ago. If it’s a socialist hellhole, it’s a socialist hellhole that somehow nurtured Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, Uber, Netflix, Oracle and Intel, not to mention old-economy stalwarts like Chevron, Disney, Wells Fargo and the Hollywood film industry. California firms still attract more venture capital than the rest of the country combined, while its farms produce more fruits, nuts and wine than the rest of the country combined. During the Great Recession, when the state was mired in a budget crisis so brutal its bond rating approached junk and it gave IOUs to government workers, mainstream media outlets were proclaiming the death of the California dream. But after a decade of steady growth that has consistently outpaced the nation’s, plus a significant tax hike on the wealthy, California is in much sounder fiscal shape; while federal deficits are soaring again, the state has erased its red ink and even stashed $13 billion in a rainy day fund.

Of course, every state is in better economic shape than it was during the Great Recession, but California has enjoyed its renaissance while pursuing policies Republicans associate with economic ruin. It has an $11-an-hour minimum wage, scheduled to rise to $15 by 2023. Its unusually aggressive implementation of Obamacare since 2013 has reduced its uninsured rate from 17 percent to just 7 percent. Its ambitious clean energy and climate policies in many ways inspired the Green New Deal; the state is committed to generating 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 100 percent by 2045, and its stringent fuel-efficiency standards help explain why it’s home to half the nation’s electric vehicles.

In general, California is flourishing while pursuing the exact opposite of the policies Trump is pursuing in Washington. And it has sued the Trump administration dozens of times, not only taking the lead on the new 16-state lawsuit against the president’s emergency wall declaration, but fighting for loan forgiveness for students defrauded by for-profit schools, net neutrality and Obamacare’s guarantees of free birth control, while fighting to stop the ban on travel from several Muslim countries, the ban on transgender service members, and a slew of environmental rollbacks. For example, Trump is trying to dismantle California’s strict fuel-efficiency rules, which have become de facto national rules since other blue states have adopted them and every automaker has complied with them, and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is now battling the administration in court to protect them.

“If people want to call what California is doing socialism, fine, but it isn’t having a negative impact on the economy,” says political scientist Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Center for Budget and Policy. “By just about every measure of productivity, we’re at the upper end of the spectrum.”

That hasn’t stopped Republicans from making California their go-to nightmare scenario. In 2018, Senator Ted Cruz warned that liberals wanted Texas to be “just like California, right down to the tofu and silicone and dyed hair.” Democratic candidates for governor were accused of trying to turn Nevada and Florida into California, and Colorado into “RadiCalifornia.” In the Georgia governor’s race, Republican Brian Kemp’s stump-speech mantra about Democrat Stacey Abrams was that she was trying to import “radical California values.” The Republican National Committee’s nickname for Harris in its news releases is “California Kamala,” and it rarely mentions her without mentioning her “San Francisco values.”

California is so gigantic that it’s hard to pinpoint what its values really are. There are huge differences between its cities, exurbs, and rural areas, between crunchy Northern California and glam Southern California, between upscale coastal California and downscale inland California. But it’s undeniably a socially and politically progressive state, with laws banning pet stores from selling dogs that weren’t rescued, restaurants from giving their customers plastic straws unless asked, and employers from asking job applicants about their current salaries. Even the traditionally Republican suburbs of Orange County voted Democratic in 2018. And while economic conservatives consider its high-tax, pro-regulation policies “anti-business,” researchers have not found evidence that those policies drive businesses to other states or squelch innovation in California, although they do seem to encourage some retirees to move elsewhere. The president tweets on a platform created in California. It’s somewhat odd to portray the state that created health clubs, blue jeans, Pandora and Hulu as Venezuela in the making.

In fact, the secret sauce of the California dream seems to have something to do with attracting entrepreneurs who want to change the world as well as their bank accounts. Christine Moseley, the CEO of a San Francisco business-to-business startup called Full Harvest, was an executive for a global logistics conglomerate and then an organic juice chain before moving to the Bay Area to start an eco-friendly company of her own. She ended up developing a kind of Airbnb for ugly produce, a platform that connects farmers who have fruits and vegetables they can’t sell to grocery stores with juice companies and other buyers who don’t care what the food looks like as long as it’s fresh. America wastes about 40 percent of its food, contributing to global hunger as well as global warming; in three years, Full Harvest has sold 10 million pounds of produce that would have gone to waste.

“California was the perfect place to do this,” Moseley says. “It’s the tech and innovation capital of the world, but it’s also the place for people who care about food and the environment, and the place for people who want to solve big problems.”

A lot of those dreamers come to California from abroad; more than 10 million of the state’s 40 million residents are immigrants, and a quarter of those immigrants are undocumented. “There is a Revolution going on in California,” Trump tweeted during the legal battle over sanctuary cities last April, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. In his Oval Office address about his border wall last month, the president pointedly cited two murders committed by undocumented immigrants in California, and earlier this week he complained on Twitter this week that California is leading the fight against his declaration of a national emergency.

But illegal border crossings into California are at their lowest level since 1971, and the state government doesn’t view its undocumented residents as a threat. They’re eligible for driver’s licenses, subsidized health care for their kids, and in-state tuition rates, while police officers are prohibited from working with ICE to try to deport them. University of California Chancellor Janet Napolitano, who ran the Department of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama, created legal services centers throughout the system to help undocumented students.

“California recognizes their basic humanity,” says Kevin Johnson, dean of the University of California-Davis law school. “And if you look at the labor market, immigrants are a big reason why California has such a dynamic economy.”

Traditionally, another reason has been government investment; for example, the strength of its public universities helped attract the aerospace industry, build the technology mecca of Silicon Valley, and turn the San Diego area into the national capital of “precision medicine.” But government also helped finance the ill-fated solar manufacturer Solyndra, as well as the beleaguered San Francisco-to-Los Angeles bullet train that Governor Newsom tapped the brakes on last week. Newsom is also scaling back a similarly massive water project designed to alleviate droughts and protect the Sacramento River delta. Sometimes Republicans cite misleading statistics to make California look bad-- yes, it has the “most debt” and the “most families on welfare,” because it has the most people-- but sometimes, California’s dreams have exceeded its government’s ability to execute them.

...[T]he idea of California as a leftist hellhole is likely to persist. “California is going to hell in a handbasket,” Fox News personality Tomi Lahren declared during a recent segment on the border. A conservative Town Hall columnist, in a 2018 essay titled “To Hell With California,” urged the state to secede from the U.S., although he said he didn’t want to nuke it. (“Well … OK, I don’t.”) There’s already a Twitter meme proposing a new Harris campaign slogan: “Make America California.”

California does feel like a potential harbinger of a more multicultural, more progressive American future, which may be one reason Trump is so openly hostile to it, even threatening to withhold aid from its wildfire victims. A lot of Newsom’s plans for California are to counter what’s happening in Washington; he wants to reinstate Obamacare’s individual health insurance mandate in California, extend health subsidies to undocumented adults in California, and pursue even more ambitious climate goals. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates to take on Trump are pushing platforms that would take a lot of California policy to the national stage.

The story of California is the story of America-- immigration, innovation, investing in what works,” Lieu said. “Plus we’ve got amazing beaches, and Disneyland! How cool is that?”

This is just the kind of anti-California jidahist sentiment from Trump that drives Californians up the wall. The people who suffered from the catastrophic wild fires in the northeast of the state were Democrats, Republicans and independents. Trump's lack of empathy for their plight stings-- and is unprecedented for an American president. The local congressman, Republican Doug LaMalfa, a Trump enabler, seems scared to offend Trump to stand up for his own constituents. When Trump threatened to take away funds from fire victims, LaMalfa refused to take a stand and just told the people who put him in office to trust Trump. 

The progressive Democrat who nearly beat him last time and plans to finish the job this time, Audrey Denney, doesn't trust Trump-- or LaMalfa. About a week ago she reminded us that her home county "was ravaged by the most deadly and destructive wildfire in California’s history. We are still reeling from the effects of the fire. Around 30,000 people have been displaced. Many residents have moved away permanently because there is no available housing to accommodate them. We are mourning the loss of 85 of our community members.  Residents are grappling every day with how to piece their lives back together when everything they had was taken away traumatically and instantly. Homeowners are grappling with whether or not to rebuild, where to live in the coming years, and wondering how they will ever get fire insurance again. Renters across our county, myself included, are having to move in with friends because there are no rentals available and the pre-fire housing crisis in Butte County is exponentially worse now... My question is this: Where is our President’s empathy? How can his conscience allow him to use the citizens of Butte County as pawns in his political war? The lives and livelihoods of Americans must come before his partisan political games. Recovering from this disaster is going to take billions of dollars and many years-- we need help-- and we need leaders who will fight for us. The recovery of our communities is entirely dependent on receiving this Federal disaster funding. This is not the time for the President to cause more uncertainty while we try and move forward. This is not the time for our Congressman Doug LaMalfa to be content to stand by idly while his constituents are further harmed and traumatized by these political games."