It's nice this morning. The snow is melting a little.
Read this from a California resident:
This is going to be a long but it needs to be said. I live near these fires. I am beyond angry. But guess what? Not at Trump. These fires are real to me. We see flames from our house almost every year. We very nearly lost our home to the Cottonwood Fire in 1994. That was a big, intense fire at the time, burning 48,000 acres over two weeks. Miraculously no homes were lost. Twenty-five years later, it wouldn't even make the news now. Now these fires are burning twice that much land in a matter of days, not weeks. People who live near these fires agree with Trump and have been saying the same thing for decades!
For years I have listened to our former president and governor blame these fires on drought and climate change. Well guess what, we have just come out of the two wettest years on record and these fires are worse than ever. Whether climate change is a factor or not, reducing emissions and making California energy independent is not going to do a a g thing to save our forests today. (And how do you like that air quality now?!) Why the left blames the right, our forests are going up in smoke and NOTHING is done to actually help the situation.
And don't blame the Forest Service either. They KNOW what needs to be done. They WANT to do it. But forest manager have essentially been neutered by environmental groups, crippling their ability to do what needs to be done by costly and time consuming lawsuits. I worked for eight years for the US Forest Service. I saw it with my own eyes. Managers spent so much time doing environmental analyses to comply with and try to avoid lawsuits, that they barely have any time to actually manage the resources. When I left, it was taking seven YEARS to get a timber sale contract through.
These environmental groups would rather see our forests go up in smoke than to see them logged or grazed. They have literally said this. And heaven forbid the management be done by private industry that actually generates money for our government rather than be done by the government itself at the expense of OUR tax dollars.
So Trump is right. These catastrophic fires ARE the result of gross mismanagement. His only mistake is not placing the blame exactly where it belongs: on the environmentalists.
Oh and good morning!
I’m sure I’ve asked but I have a bad memory. Whereabouts are you? I am missing snow, so I will live vicariously through your reports.