Zubrin recently wrote that climate change does not explain these fires. “The culprits here … have not been humans, but Western Pine Beetles,” he wrote, which turned “over 60 million acres of formerly evergreen pine forests into dead red tinder, dry ammunition” for fires.

Zubrin told the Free Beacon that logging would solve the problem.

“Logging as part of a program of rational forest management” could decrease the risk of fire by “thinning out mature trees that are the pine beetles’ major targets,” and creating “gaps between forests, to act as firebreaks and beetle-breaks,” he said.

If “you turn that wood into furniture, it doesn’t turn into CO2,” Zubrin said. Green activists “don’t care if a billion tons of wood turns into CO2,” so long as people are not responsible.