A person uses a garden hose in an effort to save a neighboring home from catching fire during the Eaton Fire on Jan. 8, 2025, in Altadena, California.  (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Like a three-pack-a-day smoker who blames their chronic cough on everything but their addiction, President-elect Donald Trump continues to embrace an absurd and criminally irresponsible brand of denialism on the subject of climate change.

This hard truth was exposed yet again by the latest horrific California brushfires.

As the news outlet Cal Matters reported, California has 78 more annual “fire days” — when conditions are ripe for fires to spark — than 50 years ago. The chief cause: climate change that has spurred repeated droughts, more lightning and windstorms and created an epidemic of dead trees.

Amazingly, however, even as California was burning and just a few months after Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, Trump was pledging to expand our nation’s use of fossil fuels and torpedo efforts to grow sustainable energy.

The bottom line: Climate change – and its impacts on everything from human health to immigration to the economy — is the existential policy issue of our times. And the politicians who deny this fact willfully endanger us all.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.