Posted on 11/12/2018 5:39:44 AM PST by SJackson
How “green policies” are burning the Golden State to a crisp.
As huge wildfires continued to devour forests, homes, and businesses across California over the weekend, President Trump lashed out at the destructive, deadly policies long pushed by environmentalists that set the stage for the Golden State’s now-routine fiery catastrophes.
“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” President Trump tweeted Nov. 10 at 3:08 a.m. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”
On Nov. 11 at 4:40 a.m. he followed up with: “With proper Forest Management, we can stop the devastation constantly going on in California. Get Smart!”
In-between the two tweets, Trump used Twitter to urge people in the affected areas to “evacuate quickly,” praised the “[m]ore than 4,000” who are fighting the Camp and Woolsey Fires in California, and to express sympathy for the fire victims.
Idiot celebrities and clueless politicians weighed in across the fruited plain, eager to attack Trump.
“This is an absolutely heartless response,” singer Katy Perry naively tweeted. “There aren’t even politics involved. Just good American families losing their homes as you tweet, evacuating into shelters.”
California Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom (D), a strong supporter of the no-growth economic policies that caused the deadly fires, tweeted:
“Lives have been lost. Entire towns have been burned to the ground. Cars abandoned on the side of the road. People are being forced to flee their homes. This is not a time for partisanship. This is a time for coordinating relief and response and lifting those in need up.”
Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) sided with Democrats Sunday, saying:
“I don't think it’s appropriate to threaten funding. That’s not going to happen. Funding will be available. It always is available to our people wherever they are, whatever disaster they are facing. I do think, though, this year we came up with a strong bipartisan success in fixing the wildfire funding issue that had kind of paralyzed our ability to go out and fight fires and suppress fires and mitigate next year’s forest fires.”
But as usual Trump is right –at least in a big-picture way— and his critics are wrong.
Years ago environmentalist lobbies ideologically opposed to economic growth put the screws to California’s once-thriving wood-harvesting industry. New federal and state regulations came into effect make it increasingly difficult for the industry to operate.
“As a result, timber industry employment gradually collapsed, falling in 2017 to half of what it was 20 years earlier, with imports from Canada, China, and other nations filling domestic need,” Chuck DeVore, Vice President of National Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, writes at Forbes.
As timber harvesting permit fees rose and environmental regulations intensified, industry employees left the field and “[t]he combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared,” according to DeVore. “No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees.”
. With all that kindling piling up on forest floors, today’s devastating wildfires were not hard to foresee.
Back in 2005 experts were predicting “larger, more devastating fires—fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape,” DeVore writes. They saw the rise of “fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control.”
“Federal lands have not been managed for decades, threatening adjacent private forests, while federal funds designated for forest maintenance have been "borrowed" for fire suppression expenses,” DeVore writes. “The policies frequently reduce the economic value of the forest to zero. And, with no intrinsic worth remaining, interest in maintaining the forest declined, and with it, resources to reduce the fuel load.”
Two decades ago there used to be an orderly burning of wood waste –including brush and smaller trees cleared by thinning efforts— from timber operations, DeVore adds. That waste fed “renewable biomass powered electric generating plants across the length of the state,” but taxpayer-subsidized solar power coupled with California’s air-quality regulations and less wood waste to use forced biomass generators to shut down.
“What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires,” he writes. “Including the growing capture and use of landfill methane as a fuel, California’s biomass energy generation last year was 22% lower than it was 25 years before.”
Outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) pigheadedly blames global warming for the fires but as Cato Institute meteorologist Ryan Maue noted on Twitter back on Aug. 5:
“Blue check marks: please take a deep breath and read up on California's forest management issues that are decades in the making. Governor Brown blames climate change for wildfires and avoids any meaningful conversation on policy solutions.”
Although in his tweets President Trump seem to be blaming California authorities for the fires, arms of the federal government which have long been under the influence of the same left-wing enviro-radicals who run California, are largely to blame.
In charge of 190 million acres of land, the U.S. Forest Service can’t manage land to prevent fires or protect property after blazes begin, Robert (R.J.) Smith, a distinguished scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said previously.
“Private owners cannot afford to let their forests die of disease, insect infestations or wildfire,” Smith said. “They are on the job 24 hours a day, unlike 9-5 government bureaucrats. If private owners fail they go bankrupt. If Forest Service managers fail, at worst they are transferred to another forest.”
“In total, the U.S. government owns about 640 million acres of land, predominantly in the drought-riddled western states,” according to a Fox News summary. “Some 85 percent of Nevada; 70 percent of Alaska and roughly half of Arizona, California and Utah are federal lands.”
Smith laid some of the blame at the feet of radical environmentalists for preventing the Forest Service from managing woodlands by taking away the old or dead trees that are most likely to catch fire. The government’s refusal to open roadways in forested areas also makes fighting fires unnecessarily difficult, according to critics.
Although some may have found President Trump’s tweets about the poor quality of forest management in California jarring or ill-timed, that doesn’t change the fact that the evidence is on his side.
About a decade ago, I went home to visit my family. About a mile from my childhood home and across the street from the middle school I attended was a large environmental protest in progress. The “environmentalists” were all carrying signs and throwing fits about saving “old growth” forests. I got a big laugh out of their notion of “old growth”
Forty years earlier, the old growth forest was an old fallow field that hadn’t been touched in years because the owner was to old to manage it. Every old growth tree that they so desperately wanted to save was probably less than 30 years old.
If that field was old growth I must have been ancient in comparison.
I told a few of the protesters and they said I was “stupid”!
(LOL)
Fires in California are common.
From TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST By Richard Henry Dana published in 1840.
“The only thing which diminishes its beauty is, that the hills have no large trees upon them, they having been all burnt by a great fire which swept them off about a dozen years before, and they had not yet grown up again.
The fire was described to me by an inhabitant, as having been a very terrible and magnificent sight. The air of the whole valley was so heated that the people were obliged to leave the town and take up their quarters for several days upon the beach.”
I wish a reporter would report on not only humans not being about to escape the inferno, but what about the spotted owl, the very reason for not cutting anymore trees in fed or state land? Keeping man out of the federal and states forests has been such a living success for man and beast!
Nature will continue to do it's thing and as man overpopulates, lessons will be learned.
With 29 dead and counting from the Paradise fire that has taken no less than 6,500 homes (and quite likely double that number) and has 50,000+ evacuated - well, guess they can find solace in Governor Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown's assertion that this is the new abnormal due to global warming and probably their fault for not driving electric cars...
Glad he could be bothered to return to the state to sign the disaster declaration - oh, right, probably because the Jenner estate was burned rather than an entire town of 27k+ people in NorCal.
Didn’t Clinton/Gore ban clear cut ?
In Oregon they’ve finally opened up the forrests back to the big companies like Weyerhouser and smaller logging companies are starting to bloom again too. More logging and clearing & new roads in. All because of Trump’s easing of regulations. It’s a good thing for the forrests and the loggers/Mills.
And the fool built his house on the sinking sand...
Just Saw an article on fox news.com makes me wonder were these fires a terrorist attack?
So true.
The envirowackos are killing us.
Very well could be. There was a great deal of discussion of that a few years ago. Based on discussions in the Mideast regarding fires. All year Hamas has been launching kites, balloons, even vultures with small incendiaries. The objective, such fires. Destroying parkland and crops. And frequently the source of these fires turn out to be human. Campfire out of control, things like that. Arson, that too, but even a semi competent terrorist could handle this with a strong expectation of escape. A lone wolf wouldn't worry much about being caught either.
Have to agree with them, nature is taking care of it. But to the detriment of humans. Managing forests, even if humans are doing it, isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Might help, I think it's mostly state where this is happening, don't know what the state would let them do. And in the west, so much is Federal, including CA. Nice if any of them worked on forestry management, not for the protection of imaginary owls, but that would require a change in the mindset of the locals.
Future homeowners would be better off if this wasn't such a charged political issue.
Since the bunny isn't under a haystack in CA, I'll agree. If in CA, if the bunny chose a haystack in the forest with no regard to fires, or in the hills with no regard to mudslides, then it's a tie. Which is pretty good for a bunny, as smart as a human.
Yes, but isn't a significant part of that leases from the BLM/USFS. Better to let private companies manage the resources.
I've a few acquaintances who have "restored" the "prairie". I ask whether to after the first clear cutting or second. And where are the bison?
More accurately the call of the spotted owl. I believe the biologist later admitted he never saw one, rather heard it. After his retirement of course. As to the fate of the spotted owl, I'm sorry big owls eat little owls. Don't know what the big owls taste like, but maybe owl season is a solution. Big owls.
Forgot to ping the thread which deals with forests and wildlife.
Perfect!
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