ABC’s This Week invited two of my favorite progressive Northwest elected officials on today, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley. To talk about the Western Wildfire Crisis and about how this catastrophic fire season is being driven by Climate Change.
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STEPHANOPOULOS: I know you spent the day traveling your state yesterday. What have you learned? Where do things stand right now?
MERKLEY: Yeah, George, it is apocalyptic. I drove 600 miles up and down the state. I never escaped the smoke. We have thousands of people who have lost their homes. I could never have envisioned this. The -- the east winds came over the top of the mountain, proceeded to turn the fires into blowtorches that went down and just incinerated a series of small towns, like Blue River and Phoenix and Talent. Just, you have community after community with fairgrounds full of people, refugees from the fires.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And, Governor Inslee, how is the situation in Washington state this morning?
INSLEE: The same situation, the skies are a smoke that we have never seen before except two or three years ago. It's apocalyptic. And it is maddening, George. And I'll tell you why. I was -- I was in Malden the other day, a town that was absolutely decimated; 80 percent of the homes were burned down, in southeastern Washington, talking to a woman who -- who moved there to try to have a peaceful existence in a small town. And she just broke down and could not stop crying.
And what struck me is, as I was listening to her, the only moisture in eastern Washington was the tears of people who have lost their homes, and mingling with the ashes. And now we have a blowtorch over our states in the West, which is climate change.
And we know that climate change is making fires start easier, spread faster and intensify. And it is maddening right now that, when we have this cosmic challenge to our communities, with the entire West Coast of the United States on fire, to have a president to deny that these are not just wildfires, these are climate fires.
And if this -- if this is not a signal to the United States, I don't know what it will take. Because, as Governor Newsom suggested, it may not be fires in the Midwest. It's floods in Hamburg, which washed away Hamburg, Iowa. It's -- its the rising seas that are drowning Miami Beach. It's the hurricanes on the East Coast.
We need to act, and we need to act now. And these people whose homes were -- were destroyed, that I've seen, with their tears, in the last few days, they deserve action against climate change.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Is that contributing to this, Senator Merkley?
MERKLEY: You know, the president has said it's all about raking the forest. It's just a -- a big and devastating lie. We have -- the Cascade snowpacks have gotten smaller. Our forests have gotten drier. Our ocean has gotten warmer and more acidic. And this has been happening steadily over the last several decades.
These are consequences of a warming planet that have huge impacts, huge impacts on rural America, with our forests, with our farming, with our fishing. This should not be blue or red. This should not be rural or urban. This is devastating to everyone.
And we need -- just on COVID, we need to have a president follow the science. We need to have a president now who follows the science on global warming. America not only has to get its own act in order. It has to help lead the world to take this on. This is a planetary-scale tragedy of the commons that we need leadership to end.
STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the other signs of the times here, Governor Inslee, that we're seeing is that the response to this fire has been complicated by a lot of disinformation out there on social media.
Any way to comb
at that?
INSLEE: Yes. Vote. Vote. And vote on climate.
Get out there and vote against any politician like Donald Trump who has downplayed climate change, just like he's downplayed COVID. And for Donald Trump to say he's a hero of climate change is like saying he's a hero of masks against COVID.
And this idea that somehow we could have solved this problem by timber thinning is just a bunch of malarkey. I was in Bridgeport, Washington, yesterday, a town that lost about 20 homes. And I looked at where the fire came from. And where it came from was grass and bunchgrass and cheatgrass and sagebrush.
It doesn't have a dang thing to do with thinning timber. It's just a bunch of malarkey.
Now, there are places where it makes sense that we thin our timber. And we are doing that. Of course, the Trump administration doesn't want to help us actually finance that. They just want an excuse.
And, listen, it is way too late to be debating this. This is not a debate. The time for excuses, for denial, for downplaying this, those days are over. The days of consequence are upon us.
And the point I want to make about this event, it's not just happening to us. And it's happening today. Look, most of the scientists thought maybe we had a few more years to deal with this. But it's today.
The orange skies over California is something that we thought Hollywood just would portray in some apocalypse movie. But it's today.
So, we need to act. We need to act now. We are doing it. We're building jobs. We're putting people to work. We got a great candidate, Joe Biden, who understands we can put people to work.
You know, that town I told you that burned down, you can see the wind turbines there that are generating clean electricity and putting people in jobs with good union jobs generating clean energy. That's the future that we need.
But we have got to have action. So, what we can do is vote this year
It’s very smokey here on Whidbey Island today, as it has been to some degree since the smoke arrived on Tuesday. Visibility is about ¾ of a mile, particulates are reading 199. I have a large Blueair air filter running in the living room to keep my asthma and COPD at bay. My brother just bought a place in central Oregon near Bend, where they had particulate readings of 600+.
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