This fact has been on display during the wildfires in Los Angeles, where terrible policies combined with Democratic incompetence to create a situation in which blazes burned out of control for hours before firefighters could get a handle on the situation. Just a few months before these fires, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and California Democrats cut funding for forest management programs by $101 million.
This echoes California’s approach to fire management in recent years. In 2021, NPR reported that Newsom had cut $150 million from the budget for wildfire prevention and that he misled people by claiming the state had used fire prevention treatments on 90,000 acres of land when it had actually treated less than 12,000. NPR also found that “the state’s fire prevention work overall dropped by half last year, which was the worst wildfire season on record for California.”
This has been compounded by federal laws and delays, including the obstacles to controlled burns offered by the Clean Air Act and the review process for controlled burns under the National Environmental Policy Act. The latter can take from 3 1/2 years to over seven years to allow the controlled burns to begin.
Between that and California’s own lackadaisical approach to controlled burns — Newsom was mesmerized by the effectiveness of controlled burns during wildfires in northern California in 2021 — California’s forests have collected dead brush for years, turning into tinderboxes. This is a particular problem for the environment, as the California Air Resources Board estimated that the 2022 wildfires produced 9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s equivalent to a year’s worth of emissions from 1.9 million gas-powered cars. The devastating 2020 wildfires produced enough emissions to counter nearly 20 years’ worth of reductions from California’s power plants.
California’s refusal to keep forests under control by clearing brush with controlled burns and other methods under some overly strict environmental laws and regulations is actively harming the environment. Those carbon emissions we are all supposed to be so concerned about, to the point that California is banning the sale of gas cars, are being produced by fires that are far more severe than they need to be thanks to California policy.
If California has allowed itself to be a tinderbox of dry brush, does the state at least have the water resources to fight these fires? As was evident in Los Angeles, the answer is no. The 117 million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty during the fires, having been drained for repairs almost one year earlier. More damning, though, is the assertion from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power that the low fire hydrant pressure was the result of the “unprecedented and extreme water demand to fight the wildfire without aerial support.”
Los Angeles has been living through water restrictions for years now during the state’s dry seasons, thanks to California’s inadequate water storage. Los Angeles allowed billions of gallons of water to flow out to the Pacific Ocean through the Los Angeles River, Ballona Creek, and Dominguez Canal during winter storms and recent atmospheric river storms. The water capture and storage plan voted on in 2018 as Measure W is way behind schedule, as is the water purification facility billed as Hyperion 2035 which, based on its expected completion date, would be better named as Hyperion 2055. The California Coastal Commission, which will certainly rear its ugly head as Los Angeles tries to rebuild, shot down a proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach based on the usual misguided environmentalism.
In other words, in a given year, Los Angeles doesn’t have enough water to meet its normal needs without enforcing water usage restrictions, let alone enough water to deal with those needs and put out massive wildfires that grow out of control thanks to terrible state policies.
The logical conclusion, rather than relying on the rain, would be to bring water to Southern California. Unfortunately, that is a nonstarter for California Democrats. The Newsom administration decided that $20 billion was too costly to build a 45-mile tunnel that would help direct water from the Sacramento River into the State Water Project’s aqueducts. Earlier this month, Newsom proposed the state’s newest budget, totaling $322 billion, the second-largest spending spree in state history.
When California is not pretending that fiscal responsibility is a top priority, it is cutting water off to Southern and Central California based on environmental concerns. Specifically, California flushes water out to sea from rivers in Northern California rather than using pumps to direct that water south to protect fish species such as the Chinook salmon or delta smelt. Farm communities are left to shrivel up and dry, forced to rely on groundwater that is now also strictly regulated by Sacramento bureaucrats, while Los Angeles isn’t even able to capture and store rain during record-wet years.
California’s environmental policies aren’t just bad for the environment in terms of allowing forest fires to rage across the state. California’s forced transition to “clean” energy from wind and solar is supposed to be part of the state Democratic Party’s quest to save the planet from evil “dirty” forms of energy. Never mind that one of those “dirty” forms of energy is nuclear, which is clean, carbon-free, and far more efficient than the weak green energy sources on which California is relying.
This has predictably backfired. To avoid headlines about rolling blackouts, which plagued Newsom’s early tenure as governor and would hang over a future presidential run that he is so clearly pursuing, he had to reembrace the forms of energy he and California Democrats rejected. That included nuclear energy, with the state’s final nuclear plant providing around 9% of the state’s energy, but also those “dirty” forms.
Newsom went from campaigning to shut down the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility to pushing for its expansion. He used gas-powered generators to ease the strain on the grid during heat waves to avoid rolling blackouts. Newsom wants to force everyone into electric vehicles to curb carbon emissions, and California is home to the world’s largest EV charging station in Coalinga. Unfortunately, that station is powered by diesel generators.
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California even hurts the environment it claims to help on trivial issues. Case in point: the state’s decision to ban single-use plastic bags in favor of multiuse plastic bags. The production of those multiuse bags is worse for the environment, as they must be used some 7,100 times to offset their negative impacts, which include a 500% increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
Anyone who knows the California Democratic Party’s track record knows that the state is incompetent when it comes to everything from homelessness to crime to poverty to education. Every issue California Democrats touch inevitably becomes worse. That has unsurprisingly carried into the state’s environmental policy, where governmental incompetence and ill-thought-out policies erase the state’s progress on carbon emissions, destroy homes and properties, and make life worse for residents at every turn. The California Democratic Party is a bigger threat to the environment than many of the things it is fighting against, and that is proven again and again with each drought, each averted blackout, and, yes, each wildfire.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
