The state of California is on fire now, but really, the state of California is always on fire now—always on the brink of another tiny, momentary outbreak of flames transforming another drought-ravaged forest into another blackened, windswept emptiness. In the south, the Woolsey Fire has forced the evacuation of a quarter-million people and burned through some 100,000 acres along the Pacific Ocean; to the north, more than 1,000 people are missing in the still-uncontained Camp Fire, which is already the most destructive one in state history. Climate change has made life in America's most populous state a constant exercise in glancing worriedly at the sky for telltale signs of smoke.

Ryan Zinke, who heads the U.S. Department of the Interior, insists that "radical environmental groups" are to blame. His boss, Donald Trump, thinks a little more proactive forest management would have prevented all of this from happening.

Over the weekend, while standing alongside California governor Jerry Brown and governor-elect Gavin Newsom—and in front of the smoldering wreckage of what was people's homes—Trump recounted an illuminating conversation he had with the president of Finland. "He said, 'We're a forest nation.' He called it a forest nation. They spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and don't have any problem, and when it is, it's a very small problem." The president said this as if it were the normal, rational, reasonable response to a tragedy that has wiped entire towns off the map.

"It's not time for finger-pointing," Zinke added in a recent interview with Breitbart News, just before pointing the finger at his bogeyman of choice. "We know the problem. It’s been years of neglect, and in many cases it’s been these radical environmentalists that want nature to take its course." He continued: "You know what? This is on them." He noted that he lived in Germany for a while, where there are forests that are not always on fire. It must be the case, he concludes, that those loony liberal Californians are doing something wrong.

As the Los Angeles Times notes, Zinke is wrong; the Woolsey Fire is not near any forests, and the Camp Fire burned through heavily logged areas unaffected by overgrowth. Trump is wrong, too, in that his explanation omits the facts that affected areas in Finland received more than 22 times as much rain as affected areas in California, and that in Finland, the dry winds that cause California fires to burn out of control do not exist. His threats to withhold federal funds for forest management do not mention that his own federal government is responsible for well over half of the state's forests.

The clock is ticking, and loudly. By 2030, researchers warn, climate change will have rendered vast swaths of the planet even more dangerous and unrecognizable than they have already become. And yet at this critical juncture in human history, our nation's leaders—the people on whom we depend to solve hard problems and keep us safe—cannot stop searching for alternative explanations, no matter how absurd, because acknowledging the most glaring and obvious one of all is fundamentally at odds with the worldview they espouse. These are the terrible consequences of decades of embedded science-denialism within the conservative movement: As the world burns, all its most powerful person can think to do is buy more rakes.