I & I Editorial Board“All these things are connected. This is a challenging time. But we’re up to this challenge.”
That was California Gov. Gavin Newsom back in 2020 when he was busy blaming “climate change” for the wildfires that erupted that year. “I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers,” he said.
Four years later, Newsom is again blaming “climate change” for the fires ravaging Los Angeles.
But wait. If climate change really is to blame, why was California so obviously, so woefully, so inexcusably unprepared?
Someone needs to ask Newsom why the state didn’t spend the last four years aggressively clearing out underbrush to minimize the chances of a catastrophic wildfire. Why didn’t it carve out large and effective buffer zones to keep fires from reaching populated areas? Why wasn’t there a Marshall Plan-scale effort to build reservoirs so firefighters could get water from hydrants?
It’s not as though the state didn’t have plenty of warning. For decades, environmentalists have been screaming about how “climate change” was going to make wildfires more frequent, more all-consuming, and more deadly.
Yet in the very state where environmentalists hold all the levers of power, they dawdled and delayed, let bureaucratic red tape and environmental groups stall efforts to prepare for the worst, and put other ridiculous and massively expensive projects (such as the “bullet” train) at the front of the line.
And in the process, California has wasted fantastic sums of money.
In 2018, former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a $1 billion bill that was supposed to “prevent catastrophic wildfires and protect Californians.” Where did that money go?
A 2019 report from Newsom’s wildfire “strike force” said that “Over the next five years, the state will commit over $1 billion for critical fuel reduction projects, to support prescribed fire crews, forest thinning, and other forest health projects.”
Early in his term, Newsom launched the California Vegetation Treatment Program, which was advertised as a plan to speed environmental reviews for forest management projects.
But as the Washington Examiner shows in a devastating account of waste and mismanagement:
Those types of projects — such as thinning out dense clusters of trees and prescribed burns to remove the conditions necessary for fires to spread rapidly — have also been stifled by climate groups that regularly challenge them in court.
A Free Beacon review of the program’s latest data found that of the 525 approved projects spanning 666,450 acres, only 231 projects spanning just 6,000 acres have been completed. There are only two projects located in the Los Angeles metro area spanning 130 acres — a fuel reduction project proposed by the Los Angeles County Fire Department and a nonprofit watershed project — but both remain incomplete.
Newsom is hardly blameless. A report three years ago found that he’d been lying about his wildfire prevention efforts.
An investigation from CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention. The investigation found Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. Newsom has claimed that 35 ‘priority projects’ carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres. But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399.
Now we learn that he’d cut funding for wildfire and forest resilience by $101 million in the budget he approved last June, and millions from other programs designed to mitigate fire damage. Is that what Newsom meant when he said in 2019 that he’d “made wildfire prevention and mitigation a top priority since taking office”?
Newsom has been just as lackadaisical when it comes to building new water reservoirs, which you’d think would Job No. 1 in a state convinced that “climate change” will cause more droughts and wildfires.
In 2014, Californians overwhelmingly approved a $7.5 billion water bond proposal, nearly $3 billion of which was set aside to build new reservoirs. More than a decade later, not a single new reservoir has been built. Where has all that money gone?
To be clear, we don’t buy the climate-change-is-to-blame nonsense. As we noted last week, there’s no evidence that wildfires have become more common or deadly, despite constant claims to the contrary. (See: “Fire, Snow And A Storm Of Climate Nonsense.”)
But Newsom and the rest of the leftist Democrats who run the state do. It’s their religion. Every time something bad happens in the state, they blame fossil fuels. They are endlessly warning that urgent responses are needed.
And yet, they’ve done next to nothing to protect their residents from what they repeatedly say is an existential crisis.
By their own words, they have convicted themselves of criminal negligence.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Climate change explains EVERYTHING that’s wrong with this earth. What it doesn’t explain is the gross incompetence and other-worldly mismanagement explanations and excuses that the elected politicians in California rely on- during these wildfires- to appease the voters.
The reason for this murderous wild-fire is: The voters utter ineptness in successfully judging who will manage their state and city.
Thus, I suppose, the total foolhardy self-inflicted incompetence of the governor, mayor and voters could also be attributed to Climate Change.
If it takes LA burning for everyone to realize that this country can’t elect Newsome then that is a price that will unfortunately need to be paid. Can you imagine how much more he could screw up?
It is so easy to avoid solving problems as a politician. And they get re-elected!
Who knows? Some sad day, Gavin Newsom might be president in spite of the bad ideas and damage he has inflicted on California.
In my city of Philadelphia, the city politicians deliberately avoid maintaining many things and then depend on state and federal gov to replace things that could have lasted another 50 years had they had simple maintanence.
One bridge never had its rain gutters and drains cleared or maintained, so rain rusted the structure of the roadbed and the steel joints below, weakening it so it had to be replaced at state and fed expense, for example.
Closed for at least a year, millions and millions of taxpayers money spent when a bit of sweeping, clearing and unclogging would have protected that bridge for decades to come.
Everyone responsible is still in office and are being praised for getting the bridge replaced!
After 36 years of following politics and global affairs, it still bewilders me how some politicians live with themselves, let alone sleep well at night and even attend religious services in good conscience — especially those faiths that teach utmost compassion and charity.
____
Politics is ‘the art of compromise’
politics at its moral peak
though this moral peak
indeed lies below a dead sea’s level,
but the compromise of ethics
and integrity is politics at
its moral natural state
—a state in which the media beast
must be fed, will feast from
the politicians’ tin can
filled with naught but the spin man
of the political animal.
Well, since Newsome ALREADY looked (and was) “criminally incompetent”, does his latest failure make him “double dog dare” incompetent???
Please stop calling Global Warming climate change. No one doubts the climate changes
The Idiots the Eco-Freaks and the Wheatgerm Inhalers and Granola Bar Munchers blame everything on Climate Change/Global Warming and all those who refuse to worship their Pagan Earth Gods
>Yet in the very state where environmentalists hold all the levers of power, they dawdled and delayed, let bureaucratic red tape and environmental groups stall efforts to prepare for the worst, and put other ridiculous and massively expensive projects (such as the “bullet” train) at the front of the line.
Environmentalists hold all the levers of power? Obviously not. If they did, as you correctly point out, the right decisions would have been made. The only reason environmentalists fight each other is because they are so weak, they keep fighting for the tiny scraps of power they get. If they had all the levers of power, as you claim, they would see people getting out of their way to please them in every possible way, and few or no fights.