The fires raging in Southern California have released far more carbon dioxide than all of the state’s climate policies have reduced over the last 20 years. California was concerned with putting solar panels on 2 million houses and closing coal, natural gas, and zero-carbon dioxide emitting nuclear power plants for its climate ideology. The hundreds of billions of dollars the state and electric users in California have paid for reducing carbon dioxide emissions are all for naught because of the state’s regular wildfires.
State Farm canceled homeowners’ policies in California because, as reported by Newsweek, the “move was justified to avoid ‘financial failure’ as the frequency and severity of wildfires is growing in the Golden State, especially in at-risk zones.” Contrast this with Florida, which has not had homeowner policies canceled because of wildfire risk. Unlike California, Florida has a policy “to encourage maximum proscribed burning consistent with good forest management practices.”
Texas and many other states also have proscribed burn policies to prevent out-of-control wildfires. The left-leaning Nature Conservancy tells us “that Indigenous peoples in North America skillfully used fire to manage the land benefiting people and nature alike.” Forest management matters the most in preventing out-of-control wildfires. Worldwide, forest fires are declining, according to NASA, except in California.
California has put its leftist climate ideology ahead of commonsense approaches to protecting its people from catastrophic wildfires. State leaders neglected the very basics of protecting their citizens and property from the wildfires raging in the Los Angeles area. In fact, just a few months ago, they canceled all proscribed burns, saying they were doing so to save money. This author thinks it was really because of ideology and other priorities. Managing forests with proscribed burns is the gold standard of wildfire management.
They also didn’t build the necessary water retention reservoirs to fight these fires even after voters approved $7 billion to build them in 2014. California has a varied weather pattern and gets plenty of water that runs off the mountains from the snow melt. If they had captured this and done their job building the reservoirs, they would have had water to fight this fire. The governments of California and Los Angeles failed their citizens.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California has had a couple of years of extra rainfall, which will cause the vegetation to grow lush and create more fuel for future fires. If the state had reservoirs, it could have captured water. If leaders had done proscribed burns, they could have prevented this fire or made it far less intense.
Remember, back in 2021, NOAA and the legacy media told us that there was a mega-drought throughout the Southwest, and it would likely continue because of climate change. Then, the region had far above-average rainfall in 2022 and 2023. So much for that climate doom prediction. Southern California has always had this El Nino, La Nina-driven variable rainfall pattern.
Los Angeles also had more than 300 hydrants stolen last year and sold for scrap. Many haven’t been replaced. The city cut $17 million from its fire department budget just last year. So, the blame isn’t entirely with the state government. There’s plenty of blame to go around. There is a strong case to be made that Nero, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), and his woke crew fiddled, and now Los Angeles is burning.
Climate change has become the convenient scapegoat for leftist government mismanagement. This happened with the devastating Maui fire as well. While other states have put effort into wildfire prevention, California and Los Angeles had their eye on their woke agenda, dominated by wrong-headed, expensive climate change and diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities.
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Will Californians and other blue state voters wake up to the fact that they are voting climate and woke fanatics into leadership positions rather than servant leaders who take care of the most basic services that they pay taxes for? Let’s hope so. Preventing disasters, preparing for them, maintaining and improving infrastructure, and keeping citizens safe in their homes and on their streets is their government’s job.
It is time for certain people to wake up, or there will be even more disasters. Or is this all part of the plan to allow more disasters progressives can blame on climate change to further their agenda?
Frank Lasee (@lasee_frank) is president of Truth in Energy & Climate and a former Wisconsin state senator.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
