President Biden is in Northern California surveying wildfire damage.
Following an aerial tour of the Caldor Fire in nearby El Dorado County, Biden said over 44,000 wildfires have burned land roughly the size of the state of New Jersey. "We can't ignore the reality that these wildfires are being supercharged by climate change," the president said, while laying out the case for his Build Back Better plan currently being considered in Congress.
He is pledging California will have every resource needed to keep families safe. He is also calling for action to combat climate change, saying this year, extreme weather will likely break the record in damage costs incurred. In response to the concerns voiced by centrist members of his party, like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, that his Build Back Better infrastructure plan is too expensive, Biden countered that a tepid response to climate change would prove even costlier. The $3.5 trillion bill would make possible a wide range of actions to reduce climate pollution, aid communities on the frontline of increasingly frequent natural disasters and invest in a number of the administration’s domestic priorities, such as lowering costs of childcare, health care and housing, according to Yahoo! News.