Seems the same sorts of bad policies are causing out-of-control fires in both the western United States, California specifically, and also in Australia. In both places, it appears that the demands of so-called environmentalists are causing more harm than good, and bringing about more intense and widespread fires. Some articles on the subject:
Forest Fire burning in Butte County Ca as seen from Chico neighborhoods and new housing development
Getty
In the past two years, wildfires scorched 2.9 million acres in California, including five of the state’s 20 deadliest fires killing 131 people.
Former California Gov. Jerry Brown grimly warned that because of man-made climate change, these destructive wildfires are the “new abnormal” that threaten “our whole way of life.”
Newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rhetoric has been more balanced.
As with Brown before him, Newsom blames climate change for the fires, saying
during the campaign last September that, “The science is clear —
increased fire threat due to climate change is becoming a fact of life
in our state. Drier, longer summers combined with unpredictable wet
winters have created dangerous fire conditions.”
Claiming that climate change causes wildfires naturally leads to a
demand for action, with Newsom promising an aggressive progressive
pushback against the Trump Administration’s effort to cut red tape
regarding vehicle mileage standards, power plant carbon dioxide
emissions, and oil and gas extraction.
That’s politics. Governing often dictates practicality. Here Newsom
appears set to do more to combat wildfires than the tentative
half-measures signed into law by Brown. Newsom is calling for improved wildfire surveillance and warning systems, better urban planning, and helping property owners clear brush.
Regarding reducing the fuel load, in an interview
four months ago, Newsom said that there are “Hundreds of millions of
dead trees” in the state and that it cost his father $35,000 to clear “a
small little patch of dead trees” on his property.
Newsom didn’t admit it, but the outrageous cost to remove a few dead
trees from private land is a consequence of California’s Byzantine
environmental regulatory patchwork.
This is California’s big secret: it’s not climate change that’s
burning up the forests, killing people, and destroying hundreds of
homes; it’s decades of environmental mismanagement that has created a
tinderbox of unharvested timber, dead trees, and thick underbrush.
This dangerous situation attracted attention from President Donald
Trump who, during the height of California’s wildfires last year insisted
that “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest
fires in California except that forest management is so poor."
The irony is that forest management is so bad on public lands that a new report, ordered by the California legislature in 2010,
shows that the portion of California's National Forests protected from
timber harvesting is now a net contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide
due to fires and trees killed by insects and disease.
Every year about 3.8 billion board feet of new timber grows in the
Golden State, capturing almost one metric ton of CO2 per acre in the
productive timberland areas. Trees grow until they die, burn, or get
harvested. If harvesting declines, tree mortality and fires increase.
It’s the tyranny of math.
In the early 1990s, a series of restrictions were placed on logging
in the West to protect the Spotted Owl. As it turned out, nature was
more complicated than expected, with owl numbers continuing to
decline—even after the California timber harvest plummeted—due to
predation from other raptors.
In the meantime, the harvest fell below the growth rate in the 1990s,
to about 1.5 billion board feet per year over the past decade. The tree
harvest on federal lands is now one-tenth of what it was in 1988,
President Reagan’s last full year in office.
The California forest report draft
concludes by observing that the “Current flux [of CO2] may not be
sustainable without forest management!” while citing the challenge of
“Aging of forests on federal lands.”
Unlike much of the American South and East, California has a distinct
wet season, with Pacific storms rolling in by November or December and
wrapping up by March. In even the wettest years (2016-17 was the wettest
in 122 years) much of California is bone-dry by late fall. Thus, it
isn’t climate change that sets the conditions for fires—it’s
California’s natural weather pattern. Comparing acres burned in
wildfires to weather and tree harvest data, there appears to be little
link to climate—but a big connection to the growing forest fuel load,
especially on government land.
Which brings us back to policy. If federal and state environmental
policies continue to make it difficult and costly to harvest timber and
manage the fuel load, then the wildfires will continue and they will be
bigger and deadlier. This will, in due course, cause some politicians to
blame the fires on climate change.
In the meantime, the timber harvest infrastructure is less than
one-third of what it was 30 years ago, meaning that even if politicians
were sincere in wanting to manage the public forests, there few people
remaining to manage them.
To sum it up, the policies of refusing to allow the trees to be harvested, or areas to be cleared, means hotter, more dangerous fires, and everyone suffers. These policies aren't helping the animals they were supposedly going to help, either. The article ws written by Chuck DeVore, who also wrote this excellent piece:
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his political allies
claim climate change is driving California’s increasingly intense and
deadly wildfires.
That’s nearly true. Climate change assumptions drive the state’s
energy and environmental policies. This has resulted in people being
killed in terrible wildfires, electrical blackouts to millions of people
causing $5 billion so far in lost economic activity, all while
diverting limited resources to a fool’s errand.
For instance,
California’s large and heavily regulated public utilities—PG&E,
SDG&E, and SCE—prioritize wind and solar power, leaving little for
powerline maintenance and upgrades. Simply put, the utilities are doing
exactly what the regulators tell them to do. They make money for their
investors on wind and solar; they don’t on powerline maintenance.
Examining California’s determined push to decarbonize its economy shows a policy unsupported by logic, and shaky on fact.
Regulations Strangle Power Sources
First is the matter of leakage. California already has among the
highest electrical prices in the nation, its gasoline prices are often
the highest, and its regulatory burden, most of which is connected to
environmental concerns and related lawsuits, have all acted to push
energy-intensive manufacturing out of state.
Some of this activity has moved to Texas and other states. Some has
moved to China and other Asian nations. As a result, goods that used to
be made in California are made elsewhere, often generating more harmful
pollution. The majority of the increase in ozone levels on the Pacific
Coast traces its origins to Asia, mostly China, where coal-fired
powerplants emit nitrous oxides that, when combined with volatile
organic compounds and sunlight, create ground-level ozone that irritates
lungs and increases rates of asthma.
As for the state’s
main concern—greenhouse gas emissions—California’s policies aren’t
helping much in that department, either. California features one of the
most efficient economies in the world, with stringent air quality
standards. But as energy-intensive manufacturing moves out of the state
and California imports back those same goods, the net effect may be
greater emissions due to the shipping increases.
This can be seen in California’s oil production. The modern fracking
revolution has passed California by as politicians yearn to wean the
state from oil and gas. In 1986, California produced 59.5 percent of its oil needs, with only 5.7 percent of oil coming from foreign suppliers, the remainder being shipped down the Pacific Coast from Alaska.
Last year, California’s oil production dropped to half of what it had
been 32 years earlier. As a result, the state was forced to import 57.5
percent of its oil from foreign countries, mostly from Saudi Arabia.
Oil tanker traffic off of California’s coast has skyrocketed. Meanwhile,
Texas oil production has quadrupled in the last dozen years.
Then there’s the issue of relative scale. The People’s Republic of
China, where a well-placed bribe to a Communist Party apparatchik can
allow a factory to belch pollution, is the world’s biggest emitter of
carbon dioxide. If you can believe China’s economic growth numbers,
seven months’ worth of emission increases from China would wipe out all the gains made by eliminating California’s carbon emissions. All of them.
Poor Forest Management to Blame for Wildfires
I was in Los Angeles
last Friday for a panel discussion of the area’s Green New Deal plans.
Smoke from a wildfire greeted me on the flight into Burbank. At the
panel, a professor of sustainability from a California university made a
claim I’d heard before: California’s wildfires have doubled due to
climate change, per the National Climate Assessment (NCA).
The NCA made the wildfire claim based on a study
that concluded, “We demonstrate that human-caused climate change caused
over half of the documented increases in fuel aridity since the 1970s
and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984.”
But they added a caveat: “Additionally, we treat the impact of
(man-caused climate change) on fire as independent from the effects of
fire management (e.g., suppression and wildland fire use policies),
ignitions, land cover (e.g., exurban development), and vegetation… These
factors have likely added to the area burned… Such confounding
influences… contribute uncertainty to our empirical attribution of
regional burned area to (climate change).”
The main evidence the study’s authors offer is the relationship
between fuel aridity and total area burned, comparing the period 1984 to
1999 to 2000 to 2015.
The same data are presented differently here.
Something else happened in the early 1990s: environmentalists
concerned for the spotted owl prevailed upon the Clinton administration
to dramatically curtail the timber harvest in much of the western United
States. Logging activity plummeted, and employment in the forest
industry in California fell by half.
While correlation does not necessarily prove causation, it can be a
strong clue. Let’s look at that last chart again, but add the amount of
timber harvested in the West per the U.S. Forest Service.
We see that as the timber harvest plummeted, with a concurrent drop
in active forest management practices, the area burned by wildfire grew
as the fuel load increased.
Too Little Forest Attention, Too Late
With the retreat of the timber industry came an inevitable buildup of
uncleared brush as well as runaway tree density, with it becoming
common to have four times the number of trees per acre as is considered
healthy. During California’s frequent droughts—historical evidence suggests
they have been common since way before the industrial revolution—the
higher tree density leads to stressed trees that became vulnerable to
bark beetle infestations.
Between the drought and the bugs, millions of trees died—trees that
had to be left in place because regulators, environmentalists, and
politicians couldn’t muster the will to permit harvesting or clearing
before they became worthless and deadly matchsticks. In 2012, the Forest
Service estimated that 77 million acres, mostly in the West, was at risk due to insects and disease.
California’s politicians, including Newsom, are waking up to the
connection between forest management and wildfires, although it is too
little, too late. Newsom signed 22 wildfire-related bills in the closing days of this year’s legislative session, admitting
during his campaign for office that California had “Hundreds of
millions of dead trees” while noting that it cost his father $35,000 to
clear “a small little patch of dead trees” on his property.
The year before, outgoing four-term Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown
flipped on his longtime opposition to active forest management when he signed two bills into law.
Data Linking Wildfires, Climate Is Heavily Compromised
On an even more fundamental level, what if the temperature data the climate change-wildfire connection study used was inaccurate?
A study of the U.S. surface temperature record presented at the 2015
Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union indicated that the
30-year temperature trend was about two-thirds as strong as the official
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration record, due to massive
urban encroachment on weather station sites. Only 410 of 1,218 weather
stations in the continental U.S. were unperturbed by, for example, an
asphalt parking lot built next to what was once a weather station out in
a grass field.
Largely because of the urban heat island effect, weather stations in
California and Nevada were particularly affected. In California and
Nevada, the temperature increase per decade from 1979 to 2008 was 0.04
degrees centigrade when using unperturbed sites, versus the official
record increase of 0.24 degrees, a six-fold difference.
Back to the blackouts. To deflect blame from his administration,
Newsom continues to point to climate change—along with capitalism, saying last Friday,
“It’s more than just climate change. It’s about the failure of
capitalism to address climate change.” Vox’s Ezra Klein picked up on
this theme, tweeting in a pre-apocalyptic funk about the smoke and blackouts:
This is what it will be like every year, from now on. I
keep thinking of something @dwallacewells wrote in the Uninhabitable
Earth: ‘Especially those who have imbibed several centuries of Western
triumphalism tend to see the story of human civilization as an
inevitable conquest of the earth, rather than the saga of an insecure
culture, like mold, growing haphazardly and unsurely upon it.’ ‘That
fragility, which pervades now everything humans might do on this planet,
is the great existential insight of global warming.’
Meanwhile, PG&E is struggling to find the qualified crews
to do the dangerous work of clearing trees from almost 2,500 miles of
powerlines across the vast northern reaches of the state. That isn’t
surprising, given that California and federal regulators armed with
anti-logging policies put most of those people in the unemployment line,
and they’ve moved on to other jobs or even states.
Klein is right that “This is what it will be like every year, from
now on.” But it’s not because “Western triumphalism” led to an effort to
conquer the earth. Even California’s Native Americans constantly burned
its forests to foster their food supplies. No, it’s because
California’s leaders, comfortable in the civilization bequeathed to them
by their forebears, forgot that untamed nature is deadly.
Chuck DeVore is vice president of national
initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and served in the
California State Assembly from 2004 to 2010.
Yet Democrats want to force everyone to accept their ideas on climate change? No, thanks!
In Australia, seems we have a similar issue. The Aborigine people had solid methods for controlling fires, which are going to happen in arid areas, but apparently those methods aren't being used enough, and the results are devastating:
On a hot, dry day in March 2018, 20 separate wildfires ignited across the Bega Valley in New South Wales.
One
fire that began at Reedy Swamp north of the town of Bega tore through
close to 1,000 hectares before reaching the beachside township of
Tathra.
Six months on, a forest of bare, blackened trees frames the town, where more than 100 homes were destroyed or damaged.
But on a small patch of bushland on the south-western edge of Tathra, a patch of green shows where the fire came to a halt.
The land is part of 71 hectares owned by the Bega Local Aboriginal Land Council (LALC) at Tathra West.
The
title to the land was transferred in 2016, 17 years after it was
granted to the Bega LALC under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act process.
In 2017, the Bega LALC began a cultural burning program as part of the management strategy for their landholdings.
With
training and support from the Far South Coast Rural Fire Service (RFS)
and local RFS volunteers, the cultural burn crew prepared and burnt 3.5
hectares of land at Tathra West using methods informed by traditional
knowledge.
Six months on from the 2018 wildfire, the land where
cultural burns were undertaken in 2017 is sprouting with native grasses,
in stark contrast to the scorched trees and dense bracken that mark the
surrounding landscape.
"The old
people wouldn't have allowed big bushfires destroying the landscape,
that's like burning their house down," said Indigenous fire practitioner
Victor Steffensen.
"The land is their food, their livelihood, their country, their home.
"If they'd allowed wildfires to burn the country to a cinder, they wouldn't have survived for so many thousands of years."
Mr
Steffensen is a Cape York man who shares his traditional knowledge with
Indigenous fire crews around Australia. He first visited the Bega LALC
crew in February 2018.
"Helping these young fellas to rebuild
their knowledge of their country and applying fire starts to bring out
their identity again.
"We're
not just dropping a match, we're reading country. Fire is a management
tool to get the country healthy again, and that opens the door to
cultural knowledge."
"There's a lot more care taken with a
cultural burn than with a hazard reduction burn," said George Aldridge, a
cultural burn crew member with the Bega LALC.
"We're making sure
we're not burning habitat trees and logs [and we're] keeping the fire
cool so we don't bake all the seeds and nutrients that are in the soil.
"Over time, we're going to get less leaf litter and bracken, and more grasses and bush foods and medicines come up."
Four
months after the Tathra bushfire, the Bega LALC returned to the burnt
out bushland to conduct cultural burns to help promote healthy regrowth.
"The
principle of burning these areas so early after a fire is to try to
create a bit more diversity of plants coming back," said Dan Morgan, an
Aboriginal community support officer with Local Land Services.
"When
the soil is disturbed through hot fires or land clearing, you get
invasive natives like bracken coming back that choke out the area.
"Where we've burnt after the fire, we're seeing less bracken and more native grasses, little herbs and shrubs coming through."
As
part of their ongoing land management, the LALC crew conduct flora and
fauna surveys to evaluate biodiversity outcomes from the cultural burns.
"From
the test burns that we've done in these areas, we're documenting what
has grown back that we didn't see beforehand," said cultural burn crew
member Bronwyn Luff.
"It's nice to see the regrowth of new seedlings.
"A
lot of my friends I grew up with live around Tathra. I just feel really
good that we have done this work, it makes us feel like we're helping
our surrounding community."
"The hazard reduction methods we've been
using for well over a century clearly aren't working," said Don McPhee, a
land management consultant for the Bega LALC cultural burning program.
"Whether
it's wildfire or conventional hazard reduction burns, we've got this
repeating cycle of hot fires and plants coming back that like really hot
fires, leading to extreme fuel loads building up again."
The
Bega Valley Rural Fire Service's district officer for fire mitigation,
Garry Cooper, has been directly involved with the Bega LALC cultural
burning program from the beginning.
When the program began, the
RFS delivered basic fire training and conducted the first burns with
support from the Bega LALC crew.
Now, the Bega LALC crew do their own preparation and burning on country without RFS support.
"Cultural burning is very labour intensive,
and that's challenging when you're trying to achieve a fuel reduction
objective at the same time," Mr Cooper said.
"But there's a lot of
knowledge here that we need to be looking at. It's a win for the
community, getting that fuel reduction work done, as well as bringing
life back to the land."
The cultural burning program was
primarily funded by the Aboriginal Community Support Program from South
East Local Land Services.
Additional funds were raised by the
Tathra Mountain Bike Club at its 2017 Enduro event to support future
Bega LALC cultural burning operations on the Tathra West property.
"The current funding we have allows for about
15 days of field work, which includes preparation as well as burning,"
said Glenn Willcox, CEO of the Bega LALC.
"We're looking to secure
long-term funding to allow us to do more planning and give the crew
members more certainty about our ability to keep doing this work.
"We have evidence that the work that we did in Tathra last year had a significant impact on the effect of the wildfire in March.
"If
we can keep doing this work on the Bega Land Council land that forms
the interface with townships in Merimbula, Tura Beach, Mirador, as well
as Tathra, we can reduce the risk of a repeat of what happened in Tathra
in 2018."
"What Indigenous fire represents is thousands of years of getting to know the landscape," Mr Steffensen said.
"It means connecting to the landscape, looking after the landscape and becoming part of that country again.
"When
we look at the damage caused by bushfires, tens of billions of dollars
of damage, why can't we put good money into looking after the land, and
evolving this culture to be closer to the landscape in the future?"
"It's
very homing, knowing that this cultural knowledge isn't going to be
forgotten," said cultural burn crew member Peter Dixon.
"It's sort of a calming feeling. It's our cultural obligation to do these sorts of things, has been for thousands of years."
The NSW Deputy Premier admits the government “don’t do enough hazard reduction” but is blaming the Greens for it.
As more than 140 fires continue to burn across the state, questions are being raised about why they’re so severe.
The left of politics says it’s climate change but the right says it’s down to massive fuel loads which haven’t been burnt off.
Deputy Premier John Barilaro claims it’s a result of Greens ideology.
“I think all governments have been guilty of pampering to the Greens for the last two decades.
“We’ve allowed them to stop us from hazard reduction, from burning
the fuel of the forest floors… and we haven’t done it. We just haven’t
done it.
“We’ve got to do better and I know that we don’t do enough hazard
reduction… because of the ideological position from the Greens.”
When it's not bad policies causing these issues, should we then blame global warning/climate change? Nope. Remember the devastating fires in the Southeast a fe years ago? Much of that was arson:
Many of
the fires are the result of arson, officials say, and three people have
been arrested thus far, according to the Associated Press.
Police
in eastern Kentucky say they have arrested a man described as a
"wannabe meteorologist" who deliberately set a wildfire in an attempt to
garner a larger Facebook following. Johnny Mullins, 21 of Jenkins,
Kentucky, faces a charge of second-degree arson for a blaze in Letcher
County, Jenkins Police Chief James Stephens told the AP.
A view of the Party Rock fire in North Carolina, near the town of Bat Cave.
(John Cayton/Facebook)
"(Mullins)
likes to do Facebook videos and have people follow him on his 'weather
forecast,'" Jenkins Police Chief James Stephens told the AP. "So that's
pretty much why he did what he did. He enjoyed the attention he got from
the Facebook stuff."
According to Stephens, Mullins posted selfie
videos on Facebook that were recorded in front of various fires. He
called them "Weather Outlook" segments and received 2,900 views on his
final video, which he posted Nov. 6.
Another unidentified teen was
also arrested on suspicion of arson in Harlan, Kentucky, and a man was
charged in Tennessee with setting fires and vandalism that caused more
than $250,000 in damage outside Chattanooga.
According to the Courier-Journal, at least 150 of 210 wildfires — or 76 percent — that have broken out since October in Kentucky are arson-related, the Kentucky Energy and Environmental Cabinet reported.
More to that article, but that's the key information. I've long wondered about that, why so many fires were arson, in a key election year. It's clear, though, that these are not being caused by "climate change", as the environazis define it.
Forest Fire burning in Butte County Ca as seen from Chico neighborhoods and new housing developmentGettyIn the past two years, wildfires scorched 2.9 million acres in California, including five of the state’s 20 deadliest fires killing 131 people.Former California Gov. Jerry Brown grimly warned that because of man-made climate change, these destructive wildfires are the “new abnormal” that threaten “our whole way of life.”
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