Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Monday stressed the role of climate change in stoking the fires and called President Trump a "climate arsonist" and warned that another four years of Trump's policies would expose suburbs to more deadly wildfires.
As wildfires sweeping the west coast states assumed center stage on Monday (September 14) in the US election campaign, Biden slammed Trump who has blamed the fires on poor forest management, has not done enough.
Calling Trump a "climate arsonist," Biden said, "If we have four more years of Trump's climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned by wildfires? How many suburban neighborhoods will have been flooded out," he said.
“He fails to protect us,” Biden said in a speech delivered outside the Delaware Museum of Natural History. “And from the pandemic, the economic freefall, the racial unrest, and the ravages of climate change, it’s clear that we are not safe in Donald Trump’s America.”
“If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if more of America is ablaze?” he added.
Biden called for immediate and wide-ranging action to stem the impacts of climate change, framing investments in clean energy as a way to create jobs and protect Americans.
“We can invest in our infrastructure to make it stronger, more resilient, improving the health of Americans and creating millions of good-paying jobs while at the same time tackling the root causes of climate change,” he said. “Or we could do it Donald Trump’s way: Ignore the facts, deny reality which amounts to a full surrender and a failure to lead.”
Biden has blamed human-caused higher average temperatures in US West coast states for the wildfires and included climate change in his list of major crises facing the United States, along with the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump, who pulled the United States out of the Paris accord that laid out an international approach to combat climate change, has authorized federal disaster aid for both California and Oregon and is due to meet with firefighters and emergency officials in Northern California.
Source: Agencies
