On Capitol Hill on Wednesday, demonstrators repeatedly disrupted the confirmation hearing for Chris Wright, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary for the Department of Energy.

The longest interruption came when Wright responded to Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi about halfway through the first round of questions.

“The climate crisis is here! L.A. is burning!” a protestor shouted, blaming “fossil fuel companies and Big Oil billionaires” despite evidence the fires may have been ignited by arson and inappropriately managed power lines. The destruction of the wildfires was magnified by state and local leadership’s inability to refill reservoirs or fire hydrants and failure to prevent dry vegetation from building up on poorly maintained land.

Wright calmly sipped his water while Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming banged the gavel to reconvene the hearing as more demonstrators stood with black and yellow cloths with messages for the senators.

“I think we figured out it’s every other speaker here, so just heads up,” said Sen. Hyde-Smith. “But I drew out a lot of them.”

Lone wolf protestors repeatedly interrupted the hearing throughout Wright’s testimony, which provoked several Republican senators to respond directly.

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana recommended demonstrators examine material submitted by the nominee, which “shows that U.S. emissions have come down in absolute amounts, per capita amounts, every way you want to measure it since 2000, since 1990.” According to data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the combined U.S. greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons were lower in 2022 than in 1990.

Freshman Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia, who was sworn in on Tuesday afternoon once his successor took over the governor’s office in Charleston, addressed one male protestor who stood up while the senator delivered a speech about the necessity of fossil fuels.

“I would just tell you just this,” Justice said. “I think that gentleman is misdirected in his thought. But with all that being said, I would always be respectful to that gentleman, and that’s how we all ought to be.”

But while Republicans confronted the demonstrators in the hearing who frequently cited the wildfires as their fuel for outrage, at least one Democrat on the committee tacitly endorsed the message. Sen. Alex Padilla of California opened his line of inquiry with a lecture about the devastating wildfires that have ravaged Los Angeles.

“The climate crisis and its deadly effects is very real to my neighbors and my constituents,” Padilla said. “You’ve written that the ‘hype over wildfires is just hype.’”

“Given the devastation that we’re currently experiencing in Los Angeles, do you still believe that wildfires are just ‘hype?’” Padilla asked.

“It is with great sorrow and fear that I watch what’s happening in your city of L.A. and those fires,” Wright said.

“Do you think it’s just ‘hype’ or not?” Padilla said.

“Climate change is a real and global phenomenon,” Wright said.

“Is it ‘hype’ or not?” Padilla said.

“I stand by my past comments,” Wright said.

“Tell that to the families of the more than two dozen lost in these fires, and counting,” Padilla said.

Any honest examination of the Los Angeles wildfires, however, indicts incompetent government leadership rather than climate change for the devastation experienced by residents across the West Coast.

Wildfires had never been rare in California until the arrival of western settlement when fire suppression became the standard response to any area set ablaze. According to ProPublica, between 4 and 12 million acres burned naturally in prehistoric California every year, but between 1982 and 1998, California bureaucrats only burned an average of 30,000 acres annually. Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, however, cut the state’s budget for fire prevention by more than $100 million, and L.A. Democrat Mayor Karen Bass trimmed her city’s fire department budget by nearly $18 million.

The state’s underfunded efforts have struggled to catch up as the mountains and forested areas continue to develop into unmanaged tinderboxes waiting to be ignited either by a lightning strike or a poorly reinforced power line. The Los Angeles Fire Department in particular, which was more focused on the identities of firefighters than preparing for fires, has only conducted a “handful of prescribed burns in recent years” to clear excess fuels.

“As of 2019, Los Angeles County had not conducted a prescribed burn in more than a decade, largely due to legal and bureaucratic obstacles,” Chuck Devore, a former California lawmaker reported for The Federalist this week. “California’s all-powerful administrative state is akin to a once-sleek ship gradually being covered with so many barnacles that it can now barely move.”