Fox News Guest Says Trump Was Right on Wildfires, California Should Have Swept the Forests

A Fox News guest has suggested that President Donald Trump was right when said California's failure to maintain its forests had caused wildfires.

Appearing on the network on Wednesday, former California assemblyman Chuck DeVore said the California Kincade fire, which has blazed through more than 76,000 acres, was "one of the most preventable tragedies in human history."

"Governor [Gavin] Newsom likes to blame capitalism, he blames global warming, he blames the utilities like PG&E," DeVore said.

"We've seen this coming for a long time, we have half the people in California today that used to work in the logging industry, because environmentalists and their political enablers have shut down the timber industry in California—and when you don't log the timber eventually it's got to burn," he told Fox News, also adding that the state had chosen to invest in wind and solar energy but had not invested in maintaining power lines.

Asked about whether there was a need to adapt because of climate change, DeVore said: "I don't see it that way at all, because 13 years ago the western governor association predicted exactly what we're seeing now in their biomass report.

"What we've seen in California is because of the decline in the timber industry. We don't clean up the forest anymore. And by the way, President Trump was right about this last year when he criticised California for not properly maintaining their forests."

The president had faced a backlash when he commented on the California wildfires of 2018, suggesting that the blazes had been caused by a failure to rake leaves in forests rather than climate change.

Asked about the wildfires in 2018, the president conceded that climate change may have contributed "a little bit" but said he thought that "The big problem we have is management."

"You need forest management, it has to be, I'm not saying that in a negative way.... I'm just saying the facts, and I've really learned a lot," the president said at the time.

And speaking in Northern California, accompanied by then California Governor Jerry Brown and governor Gavin Newsom, Trump explained: "You've got to take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest, very important. You look at other countries where they do it differently and it's a whole different story.

"I was with the president of Finland and he said, 'We have a much different—we're a forest nation.' He called it a forest nation, and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don't have any problem," he added.