Following record-setting 2020, this summer’s wildfire season to test Biden

Extreme heat and drought in the West are sparking another intense wildfire season this year, intensifying debates around President Joe Biden’s efforts to curb climate change and federal and state government forest management.

More than 1 million acres have burned already this year, which is more than the United States saw by this time in 2020, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Arizona experienced one of its 10 largest blazes in history, and large fires have burned in Utah, California, and Alaska.

Last year, the U.S. saw one of its most intense wildfire seasons, with more than 10 million acres burned. California, Oregon, and Washington all saw record blazes, as did Colorado. Wildfire smoke blanketed the West for weeks, worsening air quality.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden spoke of the Western wildfires as a manifestation of climate change, and he boasted that his aggressive policies to tackle greenhouse gas emissions would ultimately help prevent more severe wildfire seasons in the future.

“It shouldn’t be so bad that millions of Americans live in the shadow of an orange sky and are left asking, ‘Is doomsday here?’” Biden said during a campaign speech last September when fires burned in the West.

Nonetheless, Biden’s aggressive climate policies won’t immediately quell the wildfires in the West. The Biden administration is already facing pressure from lawmakers to take steps to mitigate more intense fires through better forest management.

Biden’s proposal in his fiscal year 2022 budget for “robust funding” for forest thinning and reforestation, two tactics to prevent and reduce the severity of wildfires, isn’t enough to address the gap, wrote Sens. Joe Manchin and John Barrasso, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, in a June 14 letter to Biden.

“We need to increase the pace, scope, and scale of this work, not incrementally, but by orders of magnitude,” the senators said. They called on Biden to direct the Agriculture and Interior departments to issue a public report outlining their challenges and how the agencies can improve efforts.

Experts say both climate change and poor forest management have contributed to worsening wildfires in the West.