Posted on 11/25/2018 9:00:58 AM PST by DeweyCA
n October 2016, in a coordinated act of terrorism that received fleeting attention from the press, environmentalist activists broke into remote flow stations and turned off the valves on pipelines carrying crude oil from Canada into the United States. Working simultaneously in Washington, Montana, Minnesota, and North Dakota, the eco-terrorists disrupted pipelines that together transport 2.8 million barrels of oil per day, approximately 15 percent of U.S. consumption. The pretext for this action was to protest the alleged “catastrophe” of global warming.
These are the foot soldiers of environmental extremism. These are the minions whose militancy receives nods and winks from opportunistic politicians and “green” investors who make climate alarmism the currency of their political and commercial success.
More recently, and far more tragic, are the latest round of California wildfires that have consumed nearly a quarter million acres, killed at least 87 people, and caused damages estimated in excess of $10 billion.
Opinions vary regarding how much of this disaster could have been avoided, but nobody disputes that more could have been done. Everyone agrees, for example, that overall, aggressive fire suppression has been a mistake. Most everyone agrees that good prevention measures include forest thinning (especially around power lines), selective logging, controlled burns, and power line upgrades. And everyone agrees that residents in fire prone areas need to create defensible space and fire-harden their homes.
Opinions also vary as to whether or not environmentalists stood in the way of these prevention measures. In a blistering critique published earlier this week on the California-focused Flash Report, investigative journalist Katy Grimes cataloged the negligence resulting from environmentalist overreach.
“For decades,” Grimes notes, “traditional forest management was scientific and successful—that is until ideological, preservationist zealots wormed their way into government and began the overhaul of sound federal forest management through abuse of the Endangered Species Act and the ‘re-wilding, no-use movement.’”
U.S. Representative Tom McClintock, whose Northern California district includes the Yosemite Valley and the Tahoe National Forest, told Grimes that the U.S. Forest Service 40 years ago departed from “well-established and time-tested forest management practices.”
“We replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect,” McClintock explained. “Ponderous, byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to ‘save the environment.’ The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts and our federal agencies ever since.”
Grimes goes on to outline the specific missteps at the federal level that led to America’s forests turning into tinderboxes, starting in the Clinton Administration and made worse, thanks to activist judges, by thwarting reforms attempted by the Bush Administration, and accelerating during the complicit Obama presidency.
All of this lends credence to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s fresh allegations of forest mismanagement. But what really matters is what happens next.
Institutionalized Environmental Extremism
California’s 2018 wildfires have been unusually severe, but they were not historic firsts. This year’s unprecedented level of destruction and deaths are the result of home building in fire prone areas, and not because of wildfires of unprecedented scope. And while the four-year drought that ended in 2016 left a legacy of dead trees and brush, it was forest mismanagement that left those forests overly vulnerable to droughts in the first place.
Based on these facts, smart policy responses would be first to reform forest management regulations to expedite public and privately funded projects to reduce the severity of future wildfires, and second, to streamline the permit process to allow the quick reconstruction of new, fire-hardened homes.
But neither outcome is likely, and the reason should come as no surprise—we are asked to believe that it’s not observable failures in policy and leadership that caused all this destruction and death, it’s “man-made climate change.”
Governor Jerry Brown is a convenient boogeyman for climate realists, since his climate alarmism is as unrelenting as it is hyperbolic. But Brown is just one of the stars in an out-of-control environmental movement that is institutionalized in California’s legislature, courts, mass media, schools, and corporations.
Fighting climate change is the imperative, beyond debate, that justified the Golden State passing laws and regulations such as California Environmental Quality Act, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008, and numerous others at the state and local level. They make it nearly impossible to build affordable homes, develop energy, or construct reservoirs, aqueducts, desalination plants, nuclear power plants, pipelines, freeways, or any other essential infrastructure that requires so much as a scratch in the ground.
Expect tepid progress on new preventive measures, in a state so mired in regulations and litigation that for every dollar spent paying heavy equipment operators and loggers to do real work, twice that much or more will go to pay consultants, attorneys, and public bureaucrats. Expect “climate change” to be used as a pretext for more “smart growth,” which translates into “stack and pack,” whereby people will be herded out of rural areas through punishing financial disincentives and forced into densely populated urban areas, where they can join the scores of thousands of refugees that California is welcoming from all over the world.
Ruling Class Hypocrisy
Never forget, according to the conventional wisdom as prescribed by California’s elites, if you don’t like it, you are a climate change “denier,” a “xenophobe,” and a “racist.”
California’s elites enjoy their gated communities, while the migrants who cut their grass and clean their floors go home to subsidized accessory dwelling units in the backyards of the so-called middle class whose taxes pay for it all. They are hypocrites.
But it is these elites who are the real deniers.
They pretend that natural disasters are “man-made,” so they can drive up the cost of living and reap the profits when the companies they invest in sell fewer products and services for more money in a rationed, anti-competitive environment.
They pretend this is sustainable; that wind farms and solar batteries can supply adequate power to teeming masses crammed into power-sipping, “smart growth” high rises. But they’re tragically wrong.
Here the militant environmentalists offer a reality check. Cutting through their predictable, authoritarian, psychotically intolerant rants that incorporate every leftist shibboleth imaginable, the “Deep Green Resistance” website offers a remarkably lucid and fact-based debunking of “green technology and renewable energy.” Their solution, is to “create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary.”
These deep green militants want to “destroy industrial civilization.” At their core, they are misanthropic nihilists—but at least they’re honest. By contrast, California’s stylish elites are driving humanity in slow motion towards this same dire future, cloaked in denial, veiled coercion, and utopian fantasies.
This is the issue that underlies the California wildfires, what causes them and what to do about them. What is a “sustainable” civilization? One that embraces human settlements, has faith in human ingenuity, and aspires to make all humans prosperous enough to care about the environment, everywhere? Or one that demands Draconian limits on human settlement, with no expectation that innovation can provide solutions we can’t currently imagine, and condemns humans to police-state rationing of everything we produce and consume?
That is the stark choice that underlies the current consensus of California’s elites, backed up by dangerous and growing cadres of fanatical militants.
Give him a hug when you see him, and let him know he is in our thoughts.
I damned near shot out my TV after seeing a guy by the name of Trumka talk about how California has “taken the lead” in acting on Climate Change.
Everyone should Publicly Thank the Sierra Club for all they have done. I will bet my last nickel that most if Not All of those affected in SoCal regularly Donate and Fully Support the Actions of the Sierra Club and the Environmental Communist Groups.
Ah, yes, I remember her well.
Leni
http://www.pushback.com/Wattenburg/articles/NowTheyHaveBurnedLosAlamos.html
For me this is the definitive writing on managing forest fires. Dr. Wattenberg had late night radio show from the bay area. He worked at Lawrence Livermore Labs and was called the smartest man you can talk to for free (on the radio).
The state of Cal ignored him on gasoline additives and clearing underbrush from forests, He died 3 months ago, but his work is on the internet.
Dr Bill rocked. I would stay up late to catch his show.
Yeah I have pattern of staying up late on sunday night. I guess to ward off the impending monday. I watched What’s My Line in the 50s
He was smarty guy on so many subjects. Not just his job. I would have voted him benign dictator for 6 years to clean up the state. People like that don’t come along too often.
Thank you for posting this. I miss Dr. Bill.
ditto
I feel California is a lot like Venezuela. They chose their path. They are living the consequences of their own choices. Maybe forest fires (or starvation, in the case of Venezuela) are an acceptable price for utopian, collectivism and socialism.
Anyway, its their own fault. How am I supposed to react?
A better title would be “The Lunacy of Luna.”
This isn’t new or even recent.
The Money Wrench Hang - authored by Edward Abbey Edward Abbey (now very much and long dead)
The novel concerns the use of sabotage to protest environmentally damaging activities in the Southwestern United States, and was so influential that the term “monkeywrench” has come to mean, besides sabotage and damage to machines, any sabotage, activism, law-making, or law-breaking to preserve wilderness, wild spaces and ecosystems.
They leave self-righteous, delusional and narcissist to describe these so-called Eco-protectors.....
These ass-hats were the bane of Nevada ranchers for years as these criminal dropped cement nto wells, shot holes in watering tanks (tho this may have ordinary drunken ass-hats for urban areas) wore up piping used to water cattle, knocked down corrals and so on.
These Eco-thugs seem to congregate in te Califlower. Must be the water.
Hang = Gang need more coffee
Going on my early surfing days and not Google, I believe that was The Chantays or maybe The Ventures.
How awful.
Bookmark.
BTW, I almost body surfed the Wedge in that video, but chickened out and you can see why. It was a nasty closed out big wave that broke in about 3 ft. of water. It was the most deadly break at the time - may still be.
Sorry to take this off the Topic.
Agenda 21 says 6 1/2 billion or so of us have to go away...
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