Rather than prepare for the state’s extreme (but unfortunately predictable) weather variations, elected officials in the Golden State have chosen to ignore tried and true fire-prevention policies. The results are now painfully apparent as at least 24 people have died, hundreds of thousands of people are displaced, and property damage estimates are soaring into the tens of billions of dollars.
“Extreme but predictable weather variations” isn’t the message you hear in the media. Instead, many assert that the fires in Los Angeles are directly attributed to climate change. To choose just one high-profile example: CNN’s Brianna Keilar interviewed the famous climate scientist Michael Mann, who argued that these fires are “definitely related to a trend of drier conditions in California and the western U.S. caused by human-caused warming, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels.”
It’s an easy-to-believe narrative, but it’s also false. Weather and climate are very different, as climate scientists like to say, and the weather affecting California fits with the historical pattern — regardless of changes in the climate. The U.S. Drought Monitor shows that California has experienced extreme weather — droughts followed by deluges — for millennia.
In fact, the last century gave California some droughts more intense than the current one, as Roger Pielke, formerly of the University of Colorado Boulder, pointed out. Similarly, the strong Santa Ana winds stoking the current fires “aren’t unusual,” former assistant professor at the University of Alabama’s Department of Geological Sciences Matthew Wielicki explained in a social media post. California has had wildfires throughout its recorded history, as the enabling conditions keep coming back.
Since California has been dealing with such extreme weather for so long, it’s dishonest to suddenly blame climate change. However, that’s not to say these fires couldn’t have been prevented. They could have. The same is true for almost all the fires that have caused so much damage in California in recent years.
Sadly, the state’s leaders refused to take necessary action to reduce the amount of fire-prone vegetation near populated areas. To make matters worse, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass cut the budget for the city’s fire department by $17.6 million last year.
The state and the city should have spent far more money managing the natural areas next to Los Angeles and other cities. In the wake of California’s Camp Fire in 2018, I explained that the amount of flammable material (fuel loading) in many of the nation’s forests had moved beyond dangerous levels. I argued that the state needed to implement sensible forest management policies to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
Instead, California’s political leaders and activists have pushed for restrictive environmental regulations that stop forest management. The result: The state’s forests and natural areas are increasingly loaded with dead and dying trees and plants — the perfect fuel for destructive fires.
That possibly explosive situation is compounded when people build homes and businesses in vulnerable areas. The Pacific Palisades neighborhood is a case in point, with its brush-heavy natural settings surrounding expensive real estate and infrastructure. It’s especially important to effectively manage the surrounding natural environment in such places, lest inevitable fires quickly blaze out of control.
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It’s possible these commonsense policies would not have prevented all the damage and heartbreaking loss that Californians must now deal with. However, they would have saved untold billions of dollars and possible lives.
The question now is whether California’s leaders will wake up and focus public funding where it’s needed: firefighting capacity and forest and natural areas management. If the Golden State doesn’t change course soon, the next inevitable fire could be even worse.
Jason Hayes is the director of energy and environmental policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
